THE FLIGHT PORTFOLIO, by Julie Orringer. (Knopf, $28.95.) Orringer dramatizes the story of Varian Fry, the real-life journalist who in World War II rescued more than 2,000 European dissidents and artists. In addition to recounting his daring work, the novel also delves into Fry’s inner life, giving him a back story that likewise involves chasing and elusion. Our reviewer, Cynthia Ozick, calls it a “sympathetic and prodigiously ambitious novel” and applauds Orringer’s feel for the period: “Her landscapes regularly rise to a Keatsian sensuousness. Her Marseille breathes as a city breathes.”

THE SPECTATORS, by Jennifer duBois. (Random House, $27.) This satirical novel, set in the heyday of afternoon talk shows, charts the woes of a confrontational TV host who may have inspired a mass shooting. Filled with small accumulating pleasures, the book offers readers a peek at television’s grimier specifics. “What a good surprise it is,” Ken Tucker writes in his review, to “read a novel about a TV star that feels just right. … DuBois’s mastery of such details earns our trust as she expands “The Spectators” into a billowing meditation on the responsibility of public figures to contribute something worthwhile to the culture. Although her book takes place decades ago, duBois’s message has a contemporary urgency as well.”

HENRY, HIMSELF, by Stewart O’Nan. (Viking, $27.) A novel that uses short vignettes to capture a year in the life of the Pittsburgh man whose shadow loomed over two of O’Nan’s earlier novels. Most of us know people like Henry from the outside; the gift of O’Nan’s fiction is to immerse us deeply in his essence. “This is a novel that charms not through the complexities of its plot but through its subtle revelations of character and the human condition,” Dominic Smith writes in his review.

FIREFIGHTING: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner and Henry M. Paulson Jr. (Penguin, paper, $16.) Three of the officials most responsible for dealing with the 2008 financial crisis explain what they got right, what they got wrong and the reforms they believe are still needed. “Most of the book is concerned with the increasingly desperate efforts … to prop up financial dominoes before they could topple and collapse the whole system,” our reviewer (and Op-Ed columnist) Paul Krugman writes. One of its scarier conclusions, he says, is that “we seem to have learned the wrong lessons from our brush with disaster. As a result, when the next crisis comes, it’s likely to play out even worse than the last one.”

THE OTHER AMERICANS, by Laila Lalami. (Pantheon, $25.95.) The violent death of a Moroccan immigrant in a California desert town entangles a diverse cast of characters — his widow, his daughters, a detective, an Iraq war vet and an undocumented worker — in this timely and eloquent novel, Lalami’s fourth. The title “perfectly sums up a unified disunity: an America suspicious of its own body politic,” Madeleine Thien writes in her review. “With each chapter narrated by a different character, the novel feels fascinatingly encased in a superstructure made of glass. Much can be seen, but the world is crucially divided.”