Rural life anchors a number of our recommended titles this week, from Charlotte Wood’s lovely novel set at a remote Australian convent to Bob Johnson’s Indiana short stories, and from Lyndal Roper’s history of peasant revolution to Callan Wink’s novel of brothers scratching for sustenance in rural Montana. Elsewhere, we also recommend a biography of the “Saturday Night Live” impresario Lorne Michaels, a history of the Catholic Church since World War II and a timely examination of presidential pardon power. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Wood’s somber, exquisite novel, her seventh, centers on a 60-something atheist who leaves her husband and her career as a wildlife conservationist in Sydney to live in a convent near her rural hometown. Though her reasons remain largely inscrutable even to the narrator herself, the decision gives her time and space to ruminate on forgiveness and regret, on how to live and die, if not virtuously, then as harmlessly as possible.
The taut, disturbing stories in Johnson’s debut collection share the setting of a rural hamlet in Indiana, and transcend it. There’s an entertaining cinematic quality to the narratives, many of them united by conflicts between parents and children; these stories open already wound tight, demanding release.
Cornerstone | Paperback, $24.95
In Wink’s new novel, two brothers struggling to make ends meet in rural Montana are forced to turn to shady ventures. As opposed to a melodramatic narrative like the TV show “Yellowstone,” Wink offers a rawer version of the contemporary West in which the main challenge is not to conserve power and perpetuate a dynasty but to put new tires on the old truck, fill the propane tank for winter and fix the leaking roof.
The German Peasants’ War (1524-25) was the greatest social explosion in Europe before the French Revolution. In her nimble history of the conflict, Roper navigates the competing interests and alliances at play to tell the story of the serfs who fought for a better life and the elites who co-opted and ultimately doomed their movement.
Basic Books | $35
“Saturday Night Live” turns 50 this year, and this monumental biography of its creator, Lorne Michaels — written by a former editor of The New York Observer who now works at The New Yorker — offers the kind of high-minded treatment usually consecrated to founding fathers, attesting to Michaels’s enduring role as America’s impresario of funny.
Random House | $36
This consideration of presidential pardons arrives with impeccable timing on the heels of President Joe Biden’s pardoning of family members and President Trump’s pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters — but Toobin, a legal journalist, focuses on an earlier controversy: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon after Watergate. The book explores the history and consequences of executive clemency, and argues that as much as presidents like to cast pardons as unequivocal gestures of mercy, they are better understood as political acts.
Simon & Schuster | $29.99
Through sharp portrayals of the last seven men who have served as pope, Shenon’s history of modern Catholicism looks at the church since World War II, with particular focus on the clerical abuse crisis and the ideological battles that followed the Second Vatican Council.
