In the 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein,” her monster has turned up in countless variations — but few of them have been as wild or politically pointed as the monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” which leads our list of recommended titles this week. It’s not the only fiction with politics on its mind: You’ll find a pair of satirical Chinese novellas, a symphonic look at Germany’s fraught history and, in Leni Zumas’s “Red Clocks,” a dystopian vision of American patriarchy. In nonfiction, we have Thomas Jefferson’s daughters and Donald Trump’s erosion of democratic norms, along with the battle for civil rights, the experience of immigrant high schoolers, and memoirs about bird-watching and bipolar disorder. And yes, we know that Frankenstein was actually the name of the doctor.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD, by Ahmed Saadawi. (Penguin, paper, $16.) In Saadawi’s intense and surreal novel, an Iraqi junk peddler named Hadi starts to bring home the body parts of bomb victims, stitching them together in the hope that if he can create a whole corpse someone will give it a proper burial. The ensuing hallucinatory story is “funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. Saadawi has “written a complex allegory for the tribal cruelties in Iraq in the wake of the American invasion.”
WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) Khan-Cullors, an activist and a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, wrote this memoir with the journalist Bandele. Khan-Cullors grew up poor in Los Angeles, and attended a gifted program in a middle school in Sherman Oaks, a nearby affluent neighborhood. “There’s a persistent longing that threads through this book,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “not so much for the consumerist dream represented by Sherman Oaks, but for the secure relationships she saw her wealthy, white classmates taking for granted.”
A MORE BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE HISTORY: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, by Jeanne Theoharis. (Beacon, $27.95.) This history revisits the hostile reception that greeted civil rights activists half a century ago. It’s particularly attuned to how the legacies of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. have been co-opted into a narrative of uplift, with civil rights history sanitized for public consumption. “At bewildering moments like this one,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “it’s clarifying to read a history that shows us how little we remember, and how much more there is to understand.”
RED CLOCKS, by Leni Zumas. (Little, Brown, $26.) This highly absorbing novel imagines a near future of America in which abortion is illegal in all 50 states. Zumas has a perfectly tuned ear for the way society relies on a moralizing sentimentalism to restrict women’s lives and enforce conformity. “I doubt any reader will need to suspend disbelief for even a moment,” Naomi Alderman writes in her review.
HERE IN BERLIN, by Cristina García. (Counterpoint, $26.) In a series of short quasi-fictional encounters, the Cuban-American novelist uses a chorus of voices to explore the long, ghostly reach of Germany’s history, in which the remembered or purposefully forgotten past seems as alive as the present. “We can none of us ever get entirely free of our ghosts, either personal or national,” our reviewer Wendy Lesser writes, “and Berlin, with its peculiar history of destruction and division, seems designed to bring that realization to the fore.”
THE NEWCOMERS: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom, by Helen Thorpe. (Scribner, $28.) Thorpe spent a year with teenage refugees in a Denver school’s “newcomer class,” documenting their lives as the presidential campaign stirred up nativist resentment. Partly a story of assimilation, it also details the author’s own growing awareness of other cultures. Reviewing it, Nina Burleigh describes the book as “a delicate and heartbreaking mystery story, as Thorpe slowly uncovers the secret catastrophes in the lives of young immigrants” who “arrive mute, and … gradually gain the words and confidence to describe the journeys that led to the classroom.”
TRUMPOCRACY: The Corruption of the American Republic, by David Frum. (HarperCollins, $25.99.) Frum argues that the Trump presidency is not only about Donald Trump but also about the deeper structural problems of America in general, and conservative America in particular. He thinks that what the country faces is nothing less than a threat to the democratic order. “The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution,” Frum writes, “but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.”
THE YEARS, MONTHS, DAYS, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Black Cat, paper, $16.) A pair of novellas in which the noted Chinese novelist (and frequent target of government censorship) paints a darkly satirical portrait of characters adrift in a depraved society. “His books read like the brutal folklore history couldn’t bear to remember,” Jamie Fisher writes in her review, “and his characters feel stranded, forgotten by time.”
BIRDING WITHOUT BORDERS: An Obsession, a Quest and the Biggest Year in the World, by Noah Strycker. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) Follow one young birder as he spends an entire year traveling the world to see as many species of birds as he can — a number that ends up being a record-breaking 6,042. Our reviewer, the ornithologist Richard O. Prum, says Strycker’s memoir is “lighthearted and filled with stories of exotic birds, risky adventures and colorful birding companions. You don’t get deep insights into why Strycker did this, but you get the sense that he would be fun to bird with.”
JEFFERSON’S DAUGHTERS: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America, by Catherine Kerrison. (Ballantine, $28.) Kerrison follows the lives of the third president’s three daughters, including Harriet Hemings, born to his slave Sally Hemings. Our reviewer Mary Beth Norton calls the result “a stunning if unavoidably imbalanced book, combining detailed treatments of Martha’s and Maria’s experiences with imaginative attempts to … reconstruct, from scattered fragments, Harriet’s life in slavery and freedom.”
GORILLA AND THE BIRD: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love, by Zack McDermott. (Little, Brown, $27.) McDermott spent years battling bipolar disorder with the support of his Midwestern mother, who didn’t quit even when he was in a psych ward. As powerful as that story is, though, the real appeal of his memoir lies in “the sheer, sharp pleasure of his prose,” as Marya Hornbacher writes in her review, and in the book’s generous range: “a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita, Kan.”