Also of interest ... in cities as characters

Exiles in the Garden

by Ward Just

(Houghton Mifflin, $25)

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Ward Just’s 16th novel “deftly and sharply” portrays “the quiet Southern city” that was 1960s Washington, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. His main concern, though, is a decision that the book’s protagonist made at that time, preferring to stay on the sidelines rather than become a man “in the arena,” like his senator father. A “deceptively quiet” book, told largely in flashbacks, Exiles lets us feel the narrator’s regrets, and also to see past them. It’s one of the very best novels Just has written.

Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

(Penguin, $26)

You don’t expect to find a farm in “one of the scuzzier neighborhoods in Oakland, Calif.,” said Mary Pols in Time. While creating her own, Novella Carpenter learns how to find feed for her pigs by leaping into Dumpsters and discovers how not to feel terrible about slaughtering her own ducks. But even as she obsesses over crop yields, she “never loses sight of the junkie shooting up across the street.” You’ll miss her “deft, compassionate, and funny” voice “as soon as you turn that last page.”

Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

(Random House, $25)

Colum McCann’s grand new novel about 1974 New York “is, at times, excessive,” said Margaret Sullivan in The Buffalo News. Opening on the August afternoon when a French tightrope walker slings a wire between the twin towers and transfixes the city, it touches down into the lives of 10 narrators, each “lost in the web of his or her own troubles and joys.” But complaining about the detail of the mosaic’s separate pieces is “like complaining about a feast. If it’s too much, walk away.”

A Bright and Guilty Place

by Richard Rayner

(Doubleday, $25)

Author Richard Rayner “has given us, finally and definitely, the nonfiction equivalent” of the greatest Raymond Chandler novels, said Rich Cohen in the Los Angeles Times. Dialing back to the period in the late 1920s and early ’30s when Los Angeles’ “personality was fixed,” Rayner strings together a series of murders, investigations, and trials to show how noir was born. This is an L.A. “crowded horizon to horizon” with corruption, alibis, and back stories, a place where only the “wised-up” survive.