Also of interest…in living in danger zones

Buck

by MK Asante (Spiegel & Grau, $25)

The city that MK Asante’s childhood friends dubbed “Killadelphia” comes across as the star of this “frequently brilliant” memoir, said Héctor Tobar in the Los Angeles Times. “Philly’s skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers, and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here,” as the 30-year-old filmmaker and writing professor recounts a chaotic upbringing touched by both crime and lofty family ambitions. The ending feels “too conventionally uplifting,” but this book “contains multitudes.”

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The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally (Atria, $28)

The otherwise complex heroines of Thomas Keneally’s “bludgeoningly powerful” novel face the horrors of World War I with uncomplicated valor, said Steve Donoghue in The Washington Post. “In a series of meaty, masterfully orchestrated chapters,” Keneally follows two Australian nurses who venture into the conflict and end up on the front lines. All the while, the author deftly leavens the tale’s grimmest moments with “pitch-perfect” dark humor and “glimmers of stubborn hope.”

The Love-charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury, $35)

When German bombs fell on London, the city’s literati “made love with reckless abandon, and not only with their spouses,” said Miranda Seymour in The New York Times. This “lovingly researched” book focuses on the escapades of Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and three other literary figures of the time to give us a portrait of a city that appeared to have been seized in its moment of crisis by a “febrile, impulsive, and mildly crazy spirit.” It’s an “enterprising, lively, and original” work.

Brief Encounters With the Enemy

by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (Dial, $25)

This unusual collection of eight interlinked stories is “as fulfilling as any novel you’re likely to read,” said Alex Gilvarry in The Boston Globe. Each tale is set in the same Rust Belt city during a near future dominated by a foreign war, and each features a “cynical, perhaps emotionally stunted” male narrator. Some of these men join the fight, but most simply commute, work at unsatisfying jobs, and try to chat up their crushes. Their voices “bleed into each other,” effectively so.