Also of interest...in famous figures fictionalized

Fever

by Mary Beth Keane (Scribner, $26)

The immigrant cook who became known as Typhoid Mary emerges in Mary Beth Keane’s new novel as “a woman of fierce intelligence and wrongheaded conviction,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. Keane’s Mary Mallon resents her fate when she’s pulled from the kitchens of New York City’s Gilded Age elite and imprisoned to help arrest an epidemic. Though her story is unique, this “wholly absorbing” fictionalized account makes her blind spots “feel utterly familiar.”

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The Aviator’s Wife

by Melanie Benjamin (Delacorte, $26)

In their day, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh captivated the nation, said Robin Vidimos in The Denver Post. Their diaries provide “the factual skeleton” Melanie Benjamin has used for an account more concerned with emotional truths than straight history. The book does a “remarkable” job of illuminating Anne’s contradictions: Though an accomplished, well-educated pilot herself, she seemed the weaker half of the couple for decades—until she proved the more resilient.

Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout (Putnam, $27)

Tanis Rideout’s novel takes readers on a “physically and emotionally brutal journey,” said Cindy Wolfe Boynton in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The first-time author imagines the life of mountaineer George Mallory, who died, along with a climbing partner, during a 1924 attempt to scale Mount Everest. Rideout not only creates “a vivid picture” of the mountain’s harsh conditions. She also explores how Mallory’s fanatical drive may have damaged his relationships with his wife and family.

Farewell, Dorothy Parker

by Ellen Meister (Putnam, $27)

A shy movie critic finds an unusual muse in Ellen Meister’s “imperfect but enjoyable” fifth novel, said Hannah Sampson in The Miami Herald. In a Midnight in Paris–like conceit, Violet Epps, whose sharp tongue on paper belies a weak will, receives a visit from the acerbic yet eventually helpful spirit of Dorothy Parker. “As the story moves forward, the pleasure lies less in the unfolding plot” than in the evolving relationship and repartee between Violet and the rapier-witted ghost of Parker.