“The Circle,” by Dave Eggers. (Vintage, $15.95.) Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is transformed into a powerful tech company in Eggers’ dystopian satire. In a not-too-distant future, human existence flows through the Circle, a Google-like, Facebook-like behemoth that aspires to record and quantify everything that happens to everybody, everywhere in the world. Into this digital wonderland steps Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire eager to comply with the Circle’s demands for transparency.
“Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution,” by Nathaniel Philbrick. (Penguin, $18.) With the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill as his story’s gripping climax, Philbrick guides us through Revolutionary Boston and brings a fresh perspective to the rebellious colonists — Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Joseph Warren — who were determined to preserve their autonomy from the British Empire.
“Country Girl: A Memoir,” by Edna O’Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.) O’Brien beautifully renders the “many me’s” of her remarkably rich life: from the restraints of her Irish childhood to love affairs, motherhood, literary stardom and encounters with luminaries like Norman Mailer and Jackie Onassis.
“The End of the Point,” by Elizabeth Graver. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Graver’s past fiction has been enriched by its roots in the landscapes of upstate New York and New England. In her eloquent fourth novel, a summer house on the Massachusetts coast both shelters and isolates several generations of the privileged Porter family. As 1942 gives way to 1961, then 1970 and finally 1999, social barriers erode and priorities are altered, and the beloved retreat becomes a place out of time.
“A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story,” by Qais Akbar Omar. (Picador, $17.) In 1992, when the mujahedeen arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan, young Qais Akbar Omar “expected to see heroes in uniforms and shiny boots.” Instead, the country erupted in civil war. A desperate attempt to escape these horrors becomes an odyssey of cultural discovery in this extraordinary memoir. (The book takes its title from the once-idyllic house on the outskirts of Kabul where Omar’s family finds refuge.)
“The Color Master: Stories,” by Aimee Bender. (Anchor, $15.) In electrifying detail, Bender holds a fun-house mirror up to reality: The heroine of “The Devourings” is married to an ogre who mistakenly eats their children; in “The Red Ribbon,” a bored wife can’t enjoy sex with her husband unless he pays her; and in “Tiger Mending,” a seamstress in Malaysia learns to repair animals that have been ripped to shreds.
“A Delicate Truth,” by John le Carré. (Penguin, $16.) State-sanctioned duplicity drives le Carré’s 23rd novel, in which a counterterrorism operation against a jihadist kingpin leads to a cover-up involving the British Foreign Office, a U.S. security firm and a CIA operative.
