Our list this week starts off with two very different debut novels. Hermione Hoby’s “Neon in Daylight” borrows its title from the poet Frank O’Hara, and recalls prior novels about ambivalent women by writers like Joan Didion and Zadie Smith. A. J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window,” already a best seller, is packed with Hitchcock references and plot twists. Other suggestions include a sweeping history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an account of how Istanbul has evolved through the centuries and James Lee Burke’s latest Dave Robicheaux mystery.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

NEON IN DAYLIGHT, by Hermione Hoby. (Catapult, $16.95.) In Hoby’s radiant first novel, Kate, a British Ph.D. student, is visiting New York in 2012, in the waning days of summer. Hurricane Sandy is about to unleash itself on the city. Our critic Parul Sehgal says the book’s characters are “propelled less by desire than by a desire for desire; for any kind of strong feeling, really,” and that “precision — of observation, of language — is Hoby’s gift. Her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought.”

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, by A. J. Finn. (William Morrow, $26.99.) Finn is actually Dan Mallory, a longtime editor of mystery fiction who is well versed in the tricks of the trade. His first novel starts out with a setup reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” An agoraphobic woman thinks she has witnessed a crime in a neighboring building. But has she? Our reviewer Janet Maslin writes: “Dear other books with unreliable narrators: This one will see you and raise you.”

ENEMIES AND NEIGHBORS: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, by Ian Black. (Atlantic Monthly, $30.) Black, a veteran correspondent for The Guardian, argues in this sweeping history that Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were irreconcilable from the start, and that peace is as remote as ever.