Queen Bee of Tuscany
by Ben Downing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
What “a great, sunny garden-party of a book,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Ostensibly a biography of Janet Ross, a well-born Englishwoman who long served as the grande dame of a flourishing expatriate community in Florence, it ushers readers into Ross’s heady world and brims with anecdotes about the likes of Twain, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Ben Downing writes prose of “enviable suavity”; his first work of nonfiction is “quite simply one of the best books of the year.”
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The Light in the Ruins
by Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday, $26)
“This story is a doozy,” said Amanda St. Amand in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Chris Bohjalian’s 16th novel and first mystery opens with the murder of a young woman in 1955 Florence, then cuts “seamlessly” back and forth in time to show how World War II divided her noble family in ways that unleashed the serial killer who tore out her heart. “Not every author” could mix together such potboiler ingredients. But Bohjalian hits “only a few false notes” from the first page to the last.
Italian Ways
by Tim Parks (Norton, $26)
It seems unlikely that a country’s entire culture could be understood by studying its trains, said Marjorie Kehe in CSMonitor.com. But author Tim Parks, an Englishman who’s been living in and writing about Italy for decades, here pulls readers into a passenger car and creates a fresh portrait of a nation that proves both dependably frustrating and “endlessly fascinating.” For every moment that Parks becomes annoyed by Italy as he tours it by rail, “there are at least two in which it delights him.”
Blood & Beauty
by Sarah Dunant (Random House, $27)
The Borgias couldn’t ask for a better publicist, said Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times. Sarah Dunant’s latest historical novel casts a family insider as narrator, and her compelling voice turns her famously conniving kinsmen into “fully rounded characters, brimming with life and lust.” When Rodrigo Borgia schemes his way to the papacy in 1492 and his teenage mistress rejoices, you might not empathize with either character, but you finally see their behavior in the context of a brutal time.
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SpaceX breaks Starship losing streak in 10th testspeed read The Starship rocket's test flight was largely successful, deploying eight dummy satellites during its hour in space
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Sudoku medium: August 27, 2025The Week's daily medium sudoku puzzle
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Sudoku hard: August 27, 2025
The Week's daily hard sudoku puzzle
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”