Otherworldly high school romances anchor two of our recommended books this week, both of which feature lonely boys who are besotted with and mystified by the objects of their affection. In Haruki Murakami’s “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” the beloved is a girl from a walled-in dream city, where she works at the library; in Charles Burns’s graphic novel “Final Cut,” she is the alien-generated replica of the narrator’s fetching friend. Young love!
Elsewhere, we recommend a Christmas novel set in 1960s Ireland and, in nonfiction, Volume 1 of Cher’s memoir, Emmanuel Carrère’s account of the search for justice after Paris’s 2015 terror attacks, and biographies of the philosopher Henri Bergson and the painter John Singer Sargent. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS
Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s new novel, translated by Philip Gabriel, works variations on a theme he has visited before: A high school loner falls catastrophically in love with a girl who claims to come from an alternate shadow world. When she later vanishes, he spends decades searching for her and her mysterious realm.
CHER:
Cher
In this first volume of a frank, no-nonsense memoir, Cher traces her path to stardom, with and without Sonny Bono. The result is a confident testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and relationships with controlling men.
TIME OF THE CHILD
Niall Williams
Set during the lead-up to Christmas in 1962 in the fictional Irish town of Faha, where Williams has set two other novels, this moving father-daughter story follows a widower and his 29-year-old daughter as they go through the motions of daily life while concealing core truths about themselves — until a foundling child upends their comfortable routine.
V13:
Emmanuel Carrère
The title of Carrère’s new book stands for vendredi, or Friday, the 13th — the day in November 2015 when terrorists unleashed attacks across Paris, including a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall. Twenty men were eventually arrested, and in this book (translated by John Lambert) Carrère reflects on the grueling and intensely immersive experience of attending their 10-month trial.
FINAL CUT
Charles Burns
In Burns’s imaginative new graphic novel, a high school boy harbors a crush on a beautiful and magnetic classmate. But rather than recognizing her complex inner life, he fantasizes about a weird alien monster that generates a perfect likeness of the object of his desire.
FAMILY ROMANCE:
John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
Jean Strouse
The American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted presidents, magnates and eminent writers. But he also painted numerous portraits of the Wertheimer family, a socially ascendant clan of London Jews who are at the center of Strouse’s new book, a brisk, wise and admiring survey of an unusually long client relationship that signaled a tenuous shift in British society.
HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD:
How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People
Emily Herring
In the early 20th century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson enjoyed a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic as a result of his romantic theory of time and his arguments in favor of intuition over intellect. Herring’s vivid, graceful biography tries to explain what all the fuss was about, and why Bergson’s fame vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared.
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