Also of interest ... in new memoirs

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill; Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi; The Mercy Papers by Robin Rom; A Journal for Jordan by Dana Ca

Somewhere Towards the End

by Diana Athill (Norton, $25)

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Things I’ve Been Silent About

The Mercy Papers

by Robin Romm (Scribner, $22)

Fiction writer Robin Romm was 28 when she was summoned home to see her mother for the last time, said Leah Hager Cohen in The New York Times. Unlike most memoirs about grief, her chronicle of the painful three weeks that followed is a “righteous, concentrated stream of anger.” By allowing her “inner 2-year-old” to stamp and wail over the death’s unfairness, Romm has achieved something rare: a “furious” blaze of a book about loss that ultimately offers solace in spite of itself.

A Journal for Jordan

by Dana Canedy (Crown, $26)

When the man who’d won her heart died in Iraq in 2006, said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times’ Dana Canedy “channeled her grief” into this memoir for their 7-month-old son. Though Canedy’s “often workmanlike prose somewhat mutes the book’s power,” it’s impossible not to be affected by the story of a steady, self-assured soldier who left behind 279 pages of his own life advice to the infant son he had met only once.