6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week

“When the unit intercom buzzed and the cell door rattled open on its old metal track that morning, Tara breathed a heavy sigh of relief,” starts Lange’s warm novel of family redemption, which follows the 30-year-old woman as she attempts to rebuild her life after prison.

In 1969, two men — “one a flamboyant, attention-seeking playboy, the other a quiet and determined paratrooper,” as our reviewer described them — vied to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic.

This book, one of The Times’s Best Books of 2023, examines national security via the life of an ex-N.S.A. contractor who was arrested for leaking classified information. It is “about privacy and its absence,” our critic Jennifer Szalai wrote, but also “about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified.”

The nine stories in Lahiri’s newest collection, six of which she translated from Italian herself, explore the city of Rome through encounters between Italians and Romans who hail from other places.

A journalist from Ohio traces the roots of the drug’s peak in the 1980s and 1990s to the white backlash against the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and more.

In this novel, the first by the prolific South Korean author to be translated into English, a Korean conglomerate and an armed resistance group clash on a Southeast Asian island where the company has built a space exploration hub.