6 Paperbacks to Read This Week

This science fiction novel, which won the Nebula Award when it was published in 2014, takes place in Area X, a part of Earth that humans have avoided for years, save 11 failed expeditions. Now in a 10th-anniversary edition, the first book in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy follows four researchers, all women, as they embark on a 12th survey of the toxic ecosystem.

Sinclair puts forth what our reviewer called a “breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young poets,” reckoning with her fundamentalist childhood’s impact on her life.

On April 5, 2019, Isabel and Dan, married and raising kids in a Brooklyn brownstone, tell Robbie, their kids’ beloved gay uncle, that he needs to move out of their attic. Over the course of three days three years apart and the onset of a never-named pandemic, this novel delves into the intricacies and fallout of their decision.

Conover decided to buy his own plot of land in Colorado’s rural San Luis Valley, where five acres go for $5,000 or less, after interviewing many of its working-class, off-grid residents. His approach to describing them, our critic Jennifer Szalai wrote in her review, “isn’t so much about pinning people down as letting them reveal themselves.”

“Careful what you look for,” Tess, this thriller’s narrator, thinks as she digs around a grave at the novel’s start. It’s not just graves: Ever since she’s had to rent out her late sister’s room, she hasn’t been able to stop digging through its occupants’ things, a compulsive prying that goes unnoticed until Arran, her newest tenant, seems just as curious about her.

A longtime climate reporter takes stock of the heat waves, hurricanes, wildlife deaths, immigration patterns and more that stem from rising global temperatures. It’s “a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning, and we are running out of time,” our reviewer wrote.