‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls. Our critic Jennifer Szalai writes: “What Martin describes in this book isn’t so much a search for meaning as an acceptance of its undoing.”Įditors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. This haunting, genre-defying memoir is about the physical and philosophical fallout of the year that followed. (New York Review Books, $14.95.) In 2015, the anthropologist Nastassja Martin barely survived a bear attack in the mountains of eastern Siberia. IN THE EYE OF THE WILD, by Nastassja Martin. It includes a landslide of corporate history in addition to details about shows like “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” “Girls” and “Game of Thrones.” “There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip” in the book, “to fill an Elizabethan drama,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. (Henry Holt & Company, $50.) This mountainous new oral history of HBO follows the channel from its start in 1972 through its transformative “Sopranos” years and up to the present day. Gregory Cowles Senior Editor, Books Twitter: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, by James Andrew Miller. French makes a convincing case that Africa played a crucial and underestimated role in the rise of the Western powers, the crime writer Stephen Spotswood continues a quirky private eye series, the Times columnist Ross Douthat looks back on his experience with a debilitating illness and the Canadian writer Miriam Toews has a bittersweet new novel about a young girl forced to grow up too fast. 
(This is the channel that brought us “The Sopranos” and “Game of Thrones,” after all.)Įlsewhere: Howard W. There’s art here, too, whether it’s the highbrow milieu of Edith Schloss’s “The Loft Generation” or the pop-culture vitality of comic books in Douglas Wolk’s “All of the Marvels” and Jeremy Dauber’s “American Comics.” And, in “Tinderbox,” James Andrew Miller offers an oral history of HBO that provides plenty of chaotic violence and uncertainty of its own. From a bear attack in Siberia (Nastassja Martin’s “In the Eye of the Wild”) to a coup in Guatemala (Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Harsh Times”) to a genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Mondiant Dogon’s “Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds”), this week’s recommended books show writers confronting a world of chaotic violence and uncertainty with varying degrees of grit and poise.
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