Daylight Come, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Penguin Press). This biography of Harry Belafonte, who died in 2023, paints the singer and civil-rights activist as \u201cour first post-racial pop star.\u201d In his music, Belafonte sought to honor his Caribbean heritage\u2014he was born in Harlem to Jamaican parents in 1927\u2014without being reduced to a mere exotic persona. Throughout his career, he merged his work as an entertainer with his political convictions (he refused to perform in segregated venues, for instance), a pursuit that required him to square his fame \u201cwith his anger at the society that gave it to him.\u201d Jelly-Schapiro draws on a range of sources, including conversations with Belafonte, presenting a portrait of a formidable figure who, as Belafonte\u2019s son puts it, \u201cwas serving two families: us and the family of Man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scavenging Beauty, by Angelica Glass (Riverhead). Memories of a childhood marked by economic hardship and abuse intertwine with the natural world in this graceful d\u00e9but memoir, which is structured around the author\u2019s seven-year project of walking every street in Santa Cruz County, in California. Glass, a former child-welfare social worker, writes with quiet precision about growing up as one of eight children with a mother whose love often turned into violence, and a father whose failures cast an equally enduring shadow. Encounters with shifting coastlines, towering redwoods, and mycelial networks spark meditations on inheritance, resilience, and the work of remaking a life.<\/p>\n
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Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway (New Directions). This strange, ambitious novel is set in a version of Dublin where cars have been banned and people enter the country by teleportation. Bartholomew Port, an Irish writer living in London, returns to his homeland to participate in a literary festival, and arrives on the eve of a populist uprising. Dublin, he observes, has become a machine \u201cfor enriching the rich\u201d and \u201cimpoverishing the poor,\u201d a place where \u201clife is not as important as money.\u201d As Port falls in with a group of conspirators preparing for the insurrection, the book takes on a hallucinatory, digressive quality, blurring the lines between life and death, reality and illusion. Ultimately, Ridgway asks what responsibility bystanders must take for the injustices around them.<\/p>\n
Queen Mab, by Emily McBride (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Madeleine is a \u201cpromising\u201d twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (\u201cThey all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,\u201d one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.<\/p>\n