6 Paperback Books to Read This Week

THE CANDY HOUSE, by Jennifer Egan.

Egan’s novel, set in the same world as “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” riffs on memory, authenticity and the allure of new technology. Our reviewer, James Poniewozik, called it “a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes.”

VAGABONDS! by Eloghosa Osunde.

This novel in stories follows displaced, poor and queer outsiders of Lagos as they navigate life in the cracks of society. There are demons and wealthy criminals, but the book’s main antagonist is the city itself, a panopticon where 21 million people are all constantly watching one another.

THE GREAT STEWARDESS REBELLION: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet, by Nell McShane Wulfhart.

Wulfhart’s history details the sexist airline working conditions in the 1960s and ’70s, from age limits to marriage bans, and lays out how stewardesses harnessed the feminist revolution of the time to change the industry.

THE YEAR OF THE HORSES: A Memoir, by Courtney Maum.

With humor and insight, a novelist and young mother reflects on how a year of indulging in her childhood pleasure of horseback riding helped her slip out of depression and recover her lost identity, that “voice within us that is sick to death of going unused.”

LIFE BETWEEN THE TIDES, by Adam Nicolson.

Nicolson, who has written books on subjects from seabirds to the King James Bible, focuses here on shorelines, “one of the most revelatory habitats on Earth.” He introduces the scientists who have sought universality in tide pools, observes his own homemade pools in a Scottish bay and reflects on the ecosystem’s importance.

O BEAUTIFUL, by Jung Yun.

In this novel, a struggling journalist arrives in a small North Dakota town overrun by “thousands of itinerant oil workers from recession-ravaged parts of the country.” But her story of greed and competing interests gives way to a more sinister one: the 29 women who have disappeared over the previous two years.