Cherry, by Nico Walker (Knopf, August 14)

Writing from prison, where the former Iraq War medic was sent for a robbery he committed to feed his heroin habit, Walker connects the dots of Macy’s social disasters through fiction, complementing the work of reporters with a ground-level sense of how life can seem to fall apart by accident. One of the story’s many heartbreaks is the sense that the narrator, like Walker, was a man of great potential whose weaknesses overwhelmed him in a country where institutions — the armed forces, the VA, the education system — enabled or even accelerated his decline.