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New in Paperback: ‘Supreme Ambition’ and ‘Homewreckers’
SUPREME AMBITION: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover, by Ruth Marcus. (Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $18.) How Kavanaugh overcame Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and won confirmation to the Supreme Court is the subject of Marcus’s book, which our reviewer, Adam Cohen, said is “impressively reported, highly insightful and a rollicking good read.”
ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG: Notes on Wonder, by Brian Doyle. (Little, Brown, 272 pp., $17.99.) “This book,” Margaret Renkl wrote in our pages last year, “is made up almost entirely of praise songs, often for the people Doyle loved ... but just as often for the natural world of shrews and hummingbirds and hawks and sturgeon and fishers and great blue herons and pretty much every other creature he happened to encounter.”
LONG BRIGHT RIVER, by Liz Moore. (Riverhead, 496 pp., $17.) Part literary thriller, part family saga, part police procedural, this novel follows two sisters who live in a neighborhood battered by opioids. One is a cop; the other is an addict who’s gone missing.
HOMEWRECKERS: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, by Aaron Glantz. (Custom House, 448 pp., $17.99.) In 2008 a group of billionaire speculators profited off the housing market crash by foreclosing on homes and converting them to rentals. The Times critic Jennifer Szalai described this book about the episode as “a bigger story about American housing that’s tortuous, confounding and ultimately enraging.”
AGAAT, by Marlene van Niekirk. (Tin House, 592 pp., $18.95.) The history of apartheid unfolds in this tale of a wealthy white woman and the Black maid who has worked for her for decades. Liesl Schillinger, who reviewed it for The Times, wrote that “books like ‘Agaat’ are the reason people read novels, and the reasons authors write them.” This 10th-anniversary reissue features a new introduction by Mary Gaitskill.
A SMALL TOWN, by Thomas Perry. (Mysterious Press, 352 pp., $16.) Our crime fiction columnist, Marilyn Stasio, delighted in the “old switcheroo” that Perry pulls in this novel: “Instead of sending a single endangered innocent on a desperate race to escape some nefarious villain, he lets a group of villains loose on a defenseless town and sends a lone avenger to chase them down.”
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