From music to art to history to romance, our recommendations this week include something for everyone. Bird watchers, check out Jennifer Ackerman’s consideration of the elusive owl. Fans of dysfunctional families in fiction, we’ve got you covered with new novels by Charlotte Mendelson and Hila Blum. And for food lovers — which is to say, pretty much everyone — there’s Anya von Bremzen’s “National Dish,” an investigation of food origin stories that turns into a cultural history and a celebration of shared meals. Happy eating, and happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
In this erudite, ambitious and elegantly written book, a British poet presents Mozart as a kinetically restless, socially observant composer constantly in dialogue with his times. Mackie’s assertions about Mozart’s identification with the Enlightenment are intriguing and insightful.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30
Sachs has written well for decades about conventional classical music. This impassioned defense of Arnold Schoenberg — creator of some of the most challenging music ever — might seem surprising from him, but Schoenberg’s life was one of the 20th century’s great narratives.
Liveright | $29.95
This Uganda-set marriage-of-convenience romance works beautifully because Sheik gives her heroine something to counter the billionaire hero’s wealth and power. He might have the money — and the yachts, and the hotels — but she is the one who asserts herself.
There are some 260 species of owls spread across every continent except Antarctica, and in this fascinating book, Ackerman explains why the birds are both naturally wondrous and culturally significant.
Penguin Press | $30
Martin methodically chronicles the tumultuous events in Clinton, Tenn., in 1956, when the town became one of the first in the South to desegregate its high school. The oral histories collected here vividly describe the often violent bigotry that followed.
Simon & Schuster | $29.99
How do certain foods become symbols of their places of origin? Von Bremzen travels the world to research iconic dishes like pizza, ramen and tapas, whose reputations are often based on myth and marketing rather than fact.
Zambreno looks back on the unending togetherness of family life at the start of the pandemic (“so sweet and so awful”) through the prism of motherhood and art, showing how awe and beauty exist in the shadow of loss and isolation.
Riverhead | $28
Egotistical and frail, the artist antihero of this novel is about to show his paintings for the first time in decades, and the run-up is not going well. Meanwhile his wife and former student is secretly weighing an invitation to show her own work at the prestigious Venice Biennale.
A mother spies on her adult daughter and grandchildren in the taut, chilling opening of Blum’s novel, translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. As the circumstances of the family’s disconnection become clear, so do questions of regret, loyalty and guilt.