Some books immerse you in the world as it is, or as it has recently been: John Kerry’s memoir of public service, for example, or Yuval Noah Harari’s latest survey of the global forces that shape contemporary life. Others just want to regale you with unicorns and stamp-collecting werewolves: Reader, meet the Icelandic novelist Sjon.

Escapist pleasure is on the menu with many of this week’s recommended titles, from Randy Kennedy’s noirish debut, “Presidio,” about a car thief with baggage, to Lisa Locascio’s novel of erotic awakening, “Open Me,” about an American exchange student in Denmark, to Valerie Trueblood’s “Terrarium,” a story collection filled with bad people and good dogs. We round things out with a vibrant history of Oklahoma City, a childhood memoir by Steve Jobs’s daughter, and Nico Walker’s darkly comic “Cherry,” a tale of romantic obsession set against a backdrop of addiction and PTSD.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

EVERY DAY IS EXTRA, by John Kerry. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) The five-term senator’s memoir covers his privileged upbringing, his service in Vietnam and his long life in politics. Our critic Dwight Garner writes that the book, “like its author, is reserved and idealistic and reassuringly dull, for long stretches, in its statesmanlike carriage. ‘Every Day Is Extra’ is a booster shot of old school, small-l liberal values. It is bland the way upper-class food used to be bland. It reminds you why Kerry would probably have made a very good president. It also reminds you why he lost.”

CODEX 1962, by Sjon. Translated by Victoria Cribb. (MCD/FSG, $30.) The three parts of this newly translated work by the Icelandic fabulist Sjon, 20 years in the making, were published as individual books in the author’s home country — a romance, a crime novel and a science fiction story. But “CoDex 1962” toys with every genre under the sun. “This book is a Norse Arabian Nights,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Each section is a honeycomb. Stories are nested in stories and crack open to reveal rumor and anecdote, prose poems, tendrils of myth.”