3 books to read, from Marlon James to Emma Cline

NEW YORK (AP):

Book lovers can look forward to a wealth of fiction, biographies, memoirs, poetry collections and topical non-fiction this season. Here are five upcoming works you’ll likely be hearing about.

The Disappearers, Marlon James

Marlon James’ fantasy series Dark Star was a showcase for his extraordinary and boundless imagination. In The Disappearers, he returns to his native Jamaica and to the murderous reality of his Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. The new novel, longlisted for the Booker, is framed around the horrifying beating in 1988 of eight gay men who had been rehearsing for a play. James weaves together humour, popular culture, compassion and some very hard experience. “I refuse to believe there is any lesson to be learned from suffering an atrocity,” James writes, “other than always be on guard for the ways people turn on you.”

American Scoundrel, Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark

Kai Bird is best known as the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of American Prometheus, the biography of nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer that became the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. In American Scoundrel, he and Susan Goldmark (his wife) trace the influence of the late political operator Roy Cohn, from his early years as the top aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy to his mentorship of a young Donald Trump. American Scoundrel draws upon government documents, archival material and dozens of interviews, including, to the authors’ surprise, Trump, who “answered our cold calls on his personal cell on several occasions,” Bird writes in the acknowledgements section. Trump was “gracious, if not exactly forthcoming about his memories” and declined to meet in person, because, he told them, “I’m the president. I’m very busy. I have China calling. I have Russia calling. I cannot do it.”

Switzy, Emma Cline

Emma Cline has well established her mastery of inhabiting the alienated mind, of dramatising youthful transience, aspiration and deception, most famously in her celebrated debut, The Girls. In Switzy, longlisted for the Booker Prize, Cline gives us a retired businessman with failing mental capacity, en route to an assisted dying facility in Zurich. Cline breaks up the story into brief, affectless passages as a once-”valuable person” reckons with his memories and concludes that “He had always stayed on the surface. His whole life.”