New in Paperback: ‘Savage Feast’ and ‘The Bird King’

SAVAGE FEAST: Three Generations, Two Continents and a Dinner Table (A Memoir With Recipes), by Boris Fishman. (Harper Perennial/HarperCollins, 368 pp. , $17. 99.

) Fishman, who immigrated to America from Minsk when he was 9, unspools his family’s story through the foods they prepared and ate. Meals, Max Watman wrote in his review in these pages, “are the language of this book, the waypoints and transitions, the narrative beats and instigative sparks that drive the storytelling. ” THE BIRD KING, by G. Willow Wilson.

(Grove, 416 pp. , $16. ) Part historical fiction, part fantasy, this novel of the Spanish Inquisition centers on Fatima, a favorite concubine of the last sultan of Granada. Wilson “relies less on period detail than on vivid, multisensory description,” our reviewer, Emily Barton, wrote here.

AMERICAN SPY, by Lauren Wilkinson. (Random House, 320 pp. , $17. ) This slick, thrilling debut spy novel about a black female intelligence agent posted to an operation in Burkina Faso during the 1980s is “remarkably assured, earning its genre stripes with panache, and addressing thought-provoking issues along the way,” Mick Herron wrote in the Book Review.

“Challenging boundaries is what brave fiction does, and Wilkinson proves confident enough to carry it off. ” THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells. (Tim Duggan, 384 pp. , $18.

) A lucid, deeply terrifying examination of how climate change will affect people in different parts of the globe. “At the heart of Wallace-Wells’s book is a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet,” John Lanchester wrote in his review. THE PROMISE OF ELSEWHERE, by Brad Leithauser. (Vintage, 352 pp.

, $17. ) Mired in a middle-age crisis — his marriage is cratering, his health declining — Louie, a college professor, embarks on a tour of great architectural sites. In these pages, Erica Wagner called Leithauser’s fiction “giddy and lustrous: from his descriptions of the microscopic diamonds Louie perceives in his toothpaste to the disturbing erotic drawings he finds hidden in the pages of a book. ” SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story, by Jacob Tobia.