Also of interest...in affairs to remember

The Silent Wife

by A.S.A. Harrison (Penguin, $16)

Fans of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl should give this “utterly absorbing” debut a try, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. A.S.A. Harrison, who died shortly before the book was published, has followed Flynn’s path and created a persuasive anatomy of one marriage’s catastrophic collapse. When a crisis arises for a philanderer and his seemingly complacent wife, the spell created by the slow-motion demise of that union owes less to trick plotting than to the tale’s “meticulous plausibility.”

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My Education

by Susan Choi (Viking, $27)

Susan Choi’s new tale about a complicated campus affair is “so well written it occasionally leaves you gasping,” said Marion Winik in Newsday. Its protagonist, Regina, is a naïve college student when she falls for two professors who are married to each other, and sleeps with the woman first. When Choi fast-forwards 15 years, she stumbles slightly before regaining her balance. No matter: “Once you experience Choi’s prose style, you’ll be ready to read her grocery lists.”

The Spy Who Loved

by Clare Mulley (St. Martin’s, $27)

The subject of this “admirable and overdue biography” should be a household name, said Ben Macintyre in The New York Times. Christine Granville, one of World War II’s bravest spies, inspired a principal character in the first James Bond novel. She also “picked up lovers at astonishing speed,” including one who murdered her, in 1952. Author Clare Mulley “makes excellent use” of archives and interviews. Yet because only 11 of Granville’s letters have survived, we hear little of the subject’s voice.

The Rest of Us

by Jessica Lott (Simon & Schuster, $25)

Jessica Lott’s own take on professor-student romance revolves around two “flawed yet sympathetic” characters, said Karen Campbell in The Boston Globe. A 34-year-old photographer is saddened to read the obituary of a poet she once dated, only to discover that he’s still alive and ready to furtively rekindle their connection. A story that might be “clichéd chick lit” in the hands of a lesser author blossoms here into a “resonant, richly nuanced, and sometimes heartbreaking portrait of cross-generational love.”