Also of interest...in fish-out-of-water tales

Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf, $27)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “funny and heartfelt” third novel excels at “making clear just how isolating it can be to live far away from home,” said Eugenia Williamson in The Boston Globe. The book’s protagonist, a Nigerian writer who creates a snarky, anonymous blog about American life while she’s ensconced at Princeton, never does quite solve all the puzzles of her new turf. But Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, turns the character’s life story into an “utterly transfixing epic.”

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Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy

by Peter Carlson (PublicAffairs, $27)

Peter Carlson’s true tale about a pair of Yankee reporters who became Confederate prisoners “unspools like a buddy flick,” said Tony Horwitz in The Washington Post. Close friends and “insouciant thrill-seekers,” the two men risked their lives to get close to the action before being tested by a long imprisonment. All ends happily for both journalists, yet Carlson’s account also exposes a dark corner of the Civil War that few readers will know.

Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt (Algonquin, $15)

Caroline Leavitt’s latest succeeds as both a mystery novel and “an arresting portrait of a bygone America,” said Skip Horack in the San Francisco Chronicle. Red Scare–era tension suffuses the 1956 Boston suburb where an outgoing Jewish divorcée finds few friends beyond a neighbor whose young son soon disappears. Leavitt builds tremendous suspense while remaining “as concerned with character as she is with plot.” She’s created an insightful parable about a “complicated and uncertain era.”

The Golem and the Jinni

by Helene Wecker (Harper, $27)

When two mythic creatures from Jewish and Arabic folklore arrive separately at Ellis Island in this “inventive” debut novel, they’re “only slightly more bewildered” than their fellow immigrants, said Patricia Cohen in The New York Times. “Not-quite-convincing contrivances” eventually bring the Polish-born Golem and Syrian-born Jinni together, but author Helene Wecker makes you care enough about each of these magical spirits that you’ll regret reaching the final page.