In “Vida,” Patricia Engel’s world is caught between Colombia and the United States, and truly at home in neither.

The British novelist Colin Cotterill, who lives on a Thai beach, stands apart from his books’ setting, the Communist Laos of the 1970s.

Publishing’s fall schedule includes books by Bob Woodward, Keith Richards, George W. Bush and Jon Stewart.

Talk of an “Obama bump” for authors comes at a moment when the flavor of public conversation around books has gone from genteel Earl Grey to Tea Party red.

Existential concepts like authenticity and selfhood, and people’s ability or inability to apprehend reality, lie at the heart of Tom McCarthy’s disappointing and highly self-conscious new novel.

Isabel Wilkerson’s masterly account of the Great Migration tells the story of the six million African-Americans who moved away from the South between 1915 and 1970.

The literature of Hans Keilson, a doctor who escaped to the Netherlands from Nazi Germany, is getting new attention in America.

Mystery novels by Sara Paretsky, Charles Todd, Jeff Lindsay and Susan Hill.

Charles Yu wraps his lonely story of a time machine repairman in glittering layers of gorgeous meta-science-fiction.

This novel’s protagonist is a World War II meteorologist.

A New Yorker travels to Israel to make amends with her settler sister in this novel about American Jews in the Holy Land.

Recently reviewed books of particular interest.

A history of the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C., where Hannibal obliterated the Roman army.

The historian Sean Wilentz situates Bob Dylan in a long continuum of American music, literature, religion and politics.

No one medium can contain Ander Monson. Luckily, we live in an age when no one medium needs to.

A Brahmin astrophysicist and his Dalit assistant are the interdependent poles of Manu Joseph’s novel.

A history of the beloved matinee detective Charlie Chan.

Science fiction by Karen Lord, Ian McDonald, Karin Lowachee and Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud.

Guy Deutscher’s argument about the basis of language is informed by the way we perceive and name colors.

Paul Murray’s smart comic novel, set in a Dublin boys’ school, is an elegy to lost youth.