We take the weekend to highlight some of the recent books coverage in The Times:

A tour of the Book Review:

Our cover review this week is of Nell Freudenberger’s novel “Lost and Wanted,” about a quantum physicist in mourning. Our reviewer, Louisa Hall, sung its praises: “Freudenberger navigates complicated concepts from physics with admirable clarity, and those concepts — entanglement, uncertainty, gravitational waves — help us feel in new ways the ongoing influence of dormant friendships, the difficulties involved with believing in attachments that can’t be observed, the enduring pull of discarded hopes.”

It’s hard to narrow down the list of worthy books this week, but a few nonfiction titles stand out: Leo Damrosch’s “The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age”; “Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster,” by Adam Higginbotham; “Solitary,” by Albert Woodfox; and “Horizon,” by Barry Lopez.

Higginbotham joins us on the podcast this week to talk about his sweeping new history of the nuclear accident and its aftermath, and later, Nellie Bowles discusses Clive Thompson’s new book, “Coders,” a study of Silicon Valley’s “brogrammer” culture.

Reviews from the staff critics

Susan Choi’s fifth novel, “Trust Exercise,” is about theater students at a performing arts high school. It’s about misplaced trust in adults, and about female friendships gone dangerously awry. Dwight Garner says that the novel “burns more brightly than anything she’s yet written.”