Somehow, Thanksgiving is suddenly around the corner our fridge is already stocked with cranberries and brussels sprouts so this is a good time for our recommended books to remind you: Family is complicated. Thats equally true whether youre talking about abolitionist sisters who turn out to have come from a slaveholding family that included Black members, as Kerri K. Greenidge delves into with her history The Grimkes, or exploring a dynasty of merchants who shaped modern capitalism and sat among the ruling class for generations, as Joseph Sassoon writes about in his family history, The Sassoons. Its true in Andrew Millers novel The Slowworms Song, about a (complicated) father trying to make amends with his daughter, and in Jenny Xies poetry collection The Rupture Tense, which grapples with her familys experiences in the Cultural Revolution and her own (complicated) feelings about the Asian diaspora. Its also true of found family, as Kit Heyam demonstrates in a wide-ranging history of transgender identities around the world and throughout time, proving that the concept of gender is itself yes complicated.

Also up this week: a history of North America from an Indigenous perspective, a story collection from a great young Argentine writer, a shipboard romance and a cleareyed book of philosophy that rejects our impulse for platitudes. Happy reading.

Gregory Cowles

Combining narrative flair with a skillful deployment of archival sources, Greenidges penetrating study underscores the moral contradictions and racial trauma in a slaveholding family best known for two white female abolitionists.

The author, an Oxford historian, recasts the history of North America from a Native American perspective, making clear that Native tribes controlled the continent for millenniums: On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck. One of the best books ever written on Native American history.

Liveright | $40

In the authors sweeping saga of his familys rise and fall, we learn about figures who shaped not only modern capitalism but our entire world even if theirs is lost. Sassoons book isnt just a marvelous yarn, its an Ottoman Our Crowd that gives his family its due.

Pantheon | $35

Aristocracy, magic and murder overlap on pretty nearly every page of this Sapphic shipboard romance, which is a sequel of sorts to A Marvellous Light. Marskes world-building skills dazzle, and her prose does, too; the book offers a breathtaking romp of a plot and a sense of wondrous possibility.

Tordotcom | $27.99

Darker and more tinged with terror than Schweblins breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, the stories in this collection first published in Spanish in 2015 and now, in Megan McDowells translation, a finalist for the National Book Award in translated literature take aim at the place we feel safest: home.

In this wide-ranging and generous-spirited treatise, a philosophy professor from M.I.T. pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture and presents an approach for dealing with lifes harsh realities.

Riverhead | $27

In Millers ninth novel, a former British soldier and recovering alcoholic details what happened when he was serving in Belfast during the Troubles. He does so in a letter to his daughter, trying both to reconnect with her and to redeem himself before he testifies in an inquiry.

Xies second collection, a finalist for this years National Book Award in poetry, considers the upheavals of the global Asian diaspora, especially the silence surrounding the Cultural Revolution and its lasting impact on Xies own family.

Graywolf | Paperback, $17

In this astute, self-aware and riveting study, the nonbinary British academic demonstrates that the history of gender nonconformity around the world is so vast that no single book can begin to contain its reaches.

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9 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times