Deep history echoes through this week’s list of recommended books. Téa Obreht sets her second novel, “Inland” — which follows the widely acclaimed “The Tiger’s Wife” (2011) — in the American West of the 19th century. Rudyard Kipling first visited the United States in 1889, and Christopher Benfey’s “If” argues that his engagement with this country made him the writer he became. Julia Blackburn’s “Time Song” goes way, way back to envision a part of the world as it was 8,000 years ago. The latest book by the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich translated into English captures the memories of Russian children who lived through World War II, and Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel “Jacob’s Ladder” unfurls against more than a century of Russian history. And in “Bagehot,” we’re given the portrait of a multitalented British Victorian who deserves to be better known.

If more recent history is your preference, we also have a corporate history of Koch Industries, an up-close look at the war in Syria, a memoir by the fashion designer Daniel R. Day (or “Dapper Dan”) and Jia Tolentino’s essays about life in the age of the internet.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

KOCHLAND: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, by Christopher Leonard. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) This is a corporate history, lucidly told, about the enormous energy conglomerate that has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of daily life, raking in billions along the way. “Telling this story as well as ‘Kochland’ does is harder than it looks,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes.

INLAND, by Téa Obreht. (Random House, $27.) Téa Obreht burst onto the literary scene in 2011 with her dazzling debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife.” Her second novel, “Inland” — a rich reimagining of the classic western that also mixes in elements of the supernatural — introduces a farmer’s wife and an unrepentant outlaw, who navigate the dangers of the frontier in narratives that eventually collide. The novel “has the stoic heroic characters and the requisite brutal violence of the Western genre, but the decision to place an immigrant and a middle-aged mother at its center is a welcome deviation,” Chanelle Benz writes in her review.