Set your summer reading to an orchestral swell with Harvey Sachs’s magisterial 923-page biography of the 20th-century maestro and cultural trailblazer Arturo Toscanini. Looking for more of a quick dip? Diksha Basu’s debut novel, “The Windfall,” and Barbara Gowdy’s “Little Sister” are good bets to enchant and entertain. Ann Beattie returns with stories of baby boomers flailing in a post-analog world, and an acclaimed nonfiction writer, Francis Spufford, makes his fictional debut with a spirited page-turner set in 18th-century New York.

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

THE ART OF DEATH: Writing the Final Story, by Edwidge Danticat. (Graywolf Press, $14.) Danticat’s latest book is an act of mourning and remembrance for her mother, who died from cancer a few years ago, and also an examination of how Danticat and other writers have tried to come to terms with the fact of death. Our critic Michiko Kakutani wrote: “Like John Updike, Danticat writes beautifully about fellow writers, dissecting their magic and technique with a reader’s passion and a craftsman’s appraising eye.”

GOLDEN HILL, by Francis Spufford. (Scribner, $26.) The acclaimed nonfiction writer Spufford’s first novel is not a typical first novel (mumbled quasi-memoir) but an ebullient, freewheeling historical fiction set in 18th-century New York City three decades before the Revolutionary War. Our critic Dwight Garner called the novel “a high-level entertainment, filled with so much brio that it’s as if each sentence had been dusted with Bolivian marching powder and cornstarch and gently fried. Some of this swashbuckling action goes over the top, but you will probably be turning the pages too quickly to register a complaint.”

THE WINDFALL, by Diksha Basu. (Crown, $26.) In Basu’s debut novel, set in a wealthy enclave of New Delhi, characters with old and new money feel status anxiety. Our critic Jennifer Senior wrote: “The story has its share of identity mix-ups and sitcom misunderstandings. It features a lovely midlife romance. It’s hardly a surprise that Paramount TV and Anonymous Content recently optioned the book as a TV series. There’s even a Hollywood — or Bollywood — ending.”