Music Against the Night, by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The first in a planned trilogy, this richly imagined novel reanimates two historical figures: John Field, the Irish-born pianoforte prodigy and inventor of the nocturne, and Adelaide Percheron, a mixed-race woman born in French India in 1790, whom Field would marry, then discard. The novel begins with Percheron contemplating news of Field’s death, and proceeds to trace their youths, including their meeting, in 1807, when Field is humbled by Percheron’s virtuosity on the piano. The two, Li shows, might have done well to consider the opinion of a minor character: “All this talk of being a prodigy or a genius—these things often lead to misery.”
Her Kind, by Sophie Lefens (HarperCollins). This début novel centers on Ada, a young mother marked by abandonments: when she was sixteen, her mother left her, and, at the book’s outset, her husband has just done the same. The split prompts Ada to move, with her eighteen-month-old son, to an aunt’s ramshackle house near Lake Michigan. While there, she is racked with visions of mortal danger, and invites three women friends—a violinist, a struggling painter, and a costume designer—to visit, in order to assess which of them she should ask to care for her son in the event of her death. As Lefens mixes spiritual elements with the quotidian, the novel examines the paradoxes of safety, responsibility, and trust.
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A World We Share, by Roger Berkowitz (Yale). Hannah Arendt never developed a general theory of friendship, yet the concept, as this study shows, anchors much of her political thought. Combining Arendt’s written reflections with portraits of her relationships, Berkowitz offers a model of mutual understanding for our era of epidemic loneliness and polarization. For Arendt, friendship required only respect, duration, and ongoing conversation; ideological agreement wasn’t necessary, as her own friendships bore out. Her correspondence records heated debates on contentious issues, including Zionism, and it’s these encounters that give the book its force, revealing the effort needed to maintain intimacy across profound differences.
The Flying Death, by Matt O’Hara (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This unsettling pharmacological history is propelled by the story of two men: Richard Gill, an American with multiple sclerosis who became convinced, while living in Ecuador in the nineteen-thirties, that Kichwa plant medicine could heal him and make him rich; and Boris Krukoff, a Russian plant hunter who worked for Big Pharma. Gill and Krukoff separately pushed their way into Indigenous communities, bribing or cajoling elders to forage vines and process toxic plant compounds known as curare. By 1939, American companies discovered that a curare derivative could relax patients’ muscles; they also erroneously believed that the drug could anesthetize. This innovation eventually contributed to a Nobel Prize win. It was also, O’Hara shows, founded on the drugs’ use during operations by doctors who wrongly assumed that their patients could not feel pain.
