This week’s recommended books are full of characters finding their place in the world, from the swashbuckling fortune hunters of “Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West” to the Ph.D.-track heroine of Weike Wang’s debut novel, “Chemistry,” to the young David Sedaris, working odd jobs to pay the bills as he developed the voice that would make him a best-selling author. Teju Cole pairs photographs with text in a lyrical, globe-trotting homage to ordinary life, and Emil Ferris uses blue-lined notebook paper and a portraitist’s fine hand to tell the story of a 10-year-old coping with family illness and other adult crises. Otis Redding lived only 26 years, but that was long enough to secure his place in the soul pantheon; a new biography tells his story.

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

ANATOMY OF TERROR: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State, by Ali Soufan. (W.W. Norton & Company, $27.95.) In his revealing and timely new book, Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent, focuses on how Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have evolved in recent years — their philosophies, trajectories and how the personalities of their leaders have shaped the organizations. The book “not only tells a gripping story,” our critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “but is filled with insights that put today’s terror attacks . . . in perspective with the history and complicated geopolitics of the region.”

THE ANSWERS, by Catherine Lacey. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26.) Lacey’s second novel, about a young woman in New York City facing down debt and a raft of unexplained medical symptoms, borders on science fiction. It comes to be a meditation on fame and art as well as love. Our critic Dwight Garner wrote: “This is a novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward, until you feel prickling awe at how much mental territory unfolds.”

THE LONG HAUL: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road, by Finn Murphy. (W.W. Norton & Company, $26.95.) Murphy has spent 30 years driving a truck across the country, helping people move. This memoir about his time on the road can be “almost shamefully enjoyable,” our critic Jennifer Senior wrote, and will “prove catnip for lovers of professional slang,” with its bobtailing, deadheading and lollipops. Senior notes that the author doesn’t always seem fully open enough about his own history, but writes: “What redeems this book, time and time again, are the stories Murphy tells. My goodness, how astonishing they are, and how moving, and how funny, and how just plain weird.”