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

A tour of the Book Review

Julie Orringer’s new novel, “Flight Portfolio,” is, according to the critic and author Cynthia Ozick, a “prodigiously ambitious” one. It is historical fiction and a kind of fictionalized biography, the study of the real-life World War II figure Varian Fry. It is also a Holocaust novel and a tale of suspense. There’s a lot to dig into, and Ozick does just that with characteristic insight and flair. One of our greatest living critics, Ozick last wrote for the Book Review about the role of gossip in storytelling. Zoë Heller reviewed her most recent collected work here.

We’ve also got reviews of fiction from Jennifer duBois, Stewart O’Nan and Laila Lalami, who joins us on the podcast this week.

Don’t miss one nonfiction review of note from The Times’s own Paul Krugman, who reviews “Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons,” written by Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson Jr. They were all there, and in addition to turning out a primer on the crisis and a tick-tock of what happened, they offer, as Krugman puts it, “a very scary warning about the future.”

Reviews from our critics

Dwight Garner reviews Ali Smith’s new novel, “Spring,” the latest in a projected seasonal cycle. Its among her more political novels, dealing with Brexit, immigration, climate change and a host of other Garner writes that it “taps deeply into our contemporary unease. It’s always alive.”