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The Waitress Was New

by Dominique Fabre (Archipelago, $15)

The “hugely likable” bartender who narrates this novella “doesn’t miss a thing,” said John Freeman in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. He “directs our eyes, camera-like,” around the rundown Parisian cafe at which he’s worked for 35 years, and his “keen but easily worn observations” bring each customer to life. As the cafe goes under, the story becomes a “mesmerizing” portrait of urban loneliness, told briskly enough not to evoke pity.

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Gentleman Jigger

by Richard Bruce Nugent (Da Capo, $18)

This previously unpublished novel, from one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissance, is an intoxicating “cocktail of glamour and dirt,” said Alice Randall in the Los Angeles Times. Nugent’s “highly autobiographical” tale about Jazz Age America has plenty to teach today’s readers about passing as white, passing as straight, and “how to capture the uncapturable man.” The author’s fictional alter ego is “as unforgettable as he is improbable.”

The Diving Pool

by Yoko Ogawa (Picador, $13)

Yoko Ogawa “succeeds in making the reader squirm” in the three novellas collected here, said Danica Coto in the Associated Press. This is the Japanese author’s first book to appear in English, and her spare prose “creates delicious suspense” as we wonder how far her “twisted, obsessive” female narrators will go in exploring their darker impulses.

A Father’s Law

by Richard Wright (Harper Perennial, $15)

The posthumous release of this unfinished detective novel does the great Richard Wright a disservice, said Ron Powers in The New York Times. The story of a black suburban police chief who suspects that his son is a serial killer, it was drafted hurriedly by Wright shortly before his 1960 death. “The dialogue, put kindly, is hopeless,” and that’s just one of innumerable flaws. A reader can only push on, trying to discern the “novel of ideas” that Wright’s rough draft might have become.

We Disappear

by Scott Heim (Harper Perennial, $14)

Scott Heim’s creepy and suspenseful third novel carries a “whiff of autobiography,” said Sarah Weinman in the Los Angeles Times. Like his narrator, the author of Mysterious Skin recently returned to Kansas to care for his dying mother. In the book, the mother is obsessed by stories of missing children, which sheds light on her past and turns the narrator into a part-time sleuth. Heim “treads a gossamer-thin line between profundity and disbelief.” Only the ending truly disappoints.