Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski

Jenny Diski (1947-2016) contributed more than 200 pieces to The London Review of Books over 25 years, beginning in 1992. This book collects a few dozen of the best. “Amid the book reviews in the LRB by critics determined to sound sober and certain, as if they were museum docents, her reviews and essays admitted doubt,” critic Dwight Garner writes. “They were marvellously shrewd but approachable and witty.” The wide range of subjects in this collection includes Jeffrey Dahmer, a cruise to Antarctica, the dedicated wives of famous intellectuals and arachnophobia.

Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro

Juan Villoro, an accomplished novelist, recounts his remarkable engagement with Mexico City with a mix of irony and empathy. He is exquisitely attuned to the capital’s contradictions, nuances and people. “There are deeply moving moments in this book,” Ruben Gallo writes in his review. “Despite his unwavering upbeat tone, Villoro offers some glimpses of the recent transformations that have turned the city into a much darker and less humane place.”

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez

The narrator of this Chilean novel is haunted by a dark episode in her country’s past: In 1984, a torturer for the secret police exposed the sordid workings of the Pinochet regime. Shifting between genres, Nona Fernandez imagines the lives both of victims and of perpetrators. Our reviewer, Ariel Dorfman, calls the novel “wildly innovative, a major contribution to literature, in Chile and beyond, that deals with trauma and its aftermath. … The author starts from the certainty of uncertainty: that the deepest truth of what happened to her damaged nation is buried in the unknowable, hidden by lies and fear.”

Every Day Is A Gift: A Memoir by Tammy Duckworth

Tammy Duckworth recalls being her family’s main breadwinner as a teenager, surviving the rocket-propelled grenade that almost killed her and becoming a US senator from Illinois. She spares no detail in recounting her courageous life. “Duckworth, a soldier in her soul, makes no real effort at poetry or ornate excavations of the self,” Susan Dominus writes in her review. “Yet she has collected enough feats worthy of record to fill at least one strong memoir, a book whose contents are far more gripping, gritty and original than its bromide of a title… might suggest.”