HITLER’S FIRST HUNDRED DAYS: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche. (Basic Books, $32.) The historian Peter Fritzsche shows how Hitler and the National Socialists wasted little time after he was appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, transforming Germany into a place unrecognizable from the republic it had been just a few months before. “There’s something particularly clarifying about the hundred-days framing, especially as it’s presented in this elegant and sobering book, which shows how an unimaginable political transformation can happen astonishingly quickly,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes.

THE RED LOTUS, by Chris Bohjalian. (Doubleday, $27.95.) In Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, a young man disappears and his girlfriend, an emergency room doctor, falls into a new world of uncertainty and danger when she tries to figure out what happened. “Bohjalian strikes a fine balance between disclosure and secrecy” in deciding what to reveal and when, our reviewer Sarah Lyall writes. And “as suspenseful as it is, ‘The Red Lotus’ is also unexpectedly moving — about friendship, about the connections between people and, most of all, about the love of parents for children and of children for parents.”

BEHELD, by TaraShea Nesbit. (Bloomsbury, $26.) In this plain-spoken and lovingly detailed historical novel, the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony is refracted through the prism of female characters. Despite the book’s quietness of telling, its currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much everyone by pretty much everyone. “At the novel’s core,” Samantha Harvey writes in her review, lies “a critique of Englishness itself. There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly. On the one hand, the English pilgrims regard themselves as epitomizing civility, manners and thus superiority. On the other hand, they deploy barbaric cruelty in order to defend that superiority.”

THE EXHIBITION OF PERSEPHONE Q, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This debut novel centers on a young pregnant newlywed in post-9/11 New York City, who unexpectedly finds herself the subject of an ex-boyfriend’s photography exhibit. Implicitly, the book poses the question: How do affections alter appearances? “Stevens’s writing proves that both time and technology are best understood in retrospect, sequences made logical long after each moment has passed,” Haley Mlotek writes in her review. “The novel has a romantic slowness, unfurling gracefully, little by little, to show how quickly the present gives way to the future, or concedes to the past.”

THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson. (Crown, $32.) Larson’s account of Winston Churchill’s leadership during the 12 turbulent months from May 1940 to May 1941, when Britain stood alone and on the brink of defeat, is fresh, fast and deeply moving. “Through the remarkably skillful use of intimate diaries as well as public documents, some newly released, Larson has transformed the well-known record,” Candice Millard writes in her review. “The Blitz — its tense, terror-filled days, the horrors it inflicted — is palpable throughout this book, often by way of the kind of wrenching, carefully chosen facts that not only bring a story to life but also make a reader stop, look up and say to whoever happens to be nearby, ‘Listen to this.’”