CANTORAS, by Carolina De Robertis. (Knopf, $26.95.) In her fourth novel, the author follows a group of Uruguayan women who dare to love one another, although seen as criminals by the military junta that rules their country. In the process she offers an ode to their will to survive and rebuild. “The great success of this novel,” writes our reviewer, Dina Nayeri (who calls the book “brazenly hopeful”), “is that it shows how tyranny, even if you can hide from it by living a quiet life, is a thief of joy and love — and not just love that’s been deemed subversive.”

A STATE AT ANY COST: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, by Tom Segev. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) As Israel’s citizens become increasingly interested in the ideals that first guided it and the roots of problems that still confound it, a controversial historian offers a timely look at the education and career of the country’s first prime minister, who embodied his nation’s complicated beginnings. Our reviewer, Francine Klagsbrun, calls it a “deeply researched, engrossing” biography that especially shines “when probing the human side of the complex leader. … As Segev’s title suggests, the price of creating the state was steep — taking a personal toll on Ben-Gurion while costing thousands of people their lives and homes.”

WHAT WAS LIBERALISM? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea, by James Traub. (Basic, $30.) This muscular political history contends that liberalism, which has evolved over the years, must change once again to incorporate a new, positive nationalism as a counter to Donald Trump’s restrictive and divisive illiberalism. “The liberalism whose decline worries him most isn’t the big-D Democrat kind that wants rich people to pay more in taxes, corporations to clean up the environment and the courts to keep abortion legal,” Timothy Noah writes in his review. “Rather, Traub’s biggest worry is the threat Trump poses to the American Republic’s classically liberal pillars, cherished by Republican and Democrat alike: free speech, the rule of law and so on. … The most richly reported part of Traub’s book documents the harrowing rise of ‘illiberal and increasingly authoritarian leaders’ in Hungary, Poland and Italy, which predates Trump’s election, and recent worrisome trends in countries like the Netherlands, Austria and the United Kingdom.”

THE ACCUSATION: Blood Libel in an American Town, by Edward Berenson. (Norton, $26.95.) The myth that Jews killed Christian children for their blood is an 800-year-old European slander that, as Berenson reports, appeared in upstate New York in 1928, a time when anti-immigrant feelings ran high and the Ku Klux Klan was a political force. “Berenson, a historian at New York University, sets out to explain why the medieval calumny rematerialized at that moment and in that place,” Judith Shulevitz writes in her review, noting that the slander persists even today. “Over the past two decades, the classic elements of the gruesome myth have been reported as fact in the Egyptian press, on Hamas television and in Iran. So far in this century, the blood libel has unleashed no pogroms. But Berenson’s book reminds us that what seems inconceivable is nonetheless possible.”

SUPER PUMPED: The Battle for Uber, by Mike Isaac. (Norton, $27.95.) Travis Kalanick was a bro-genius bent on world domination through ride-sharing. But what really happened when Uber’s C.E.O. flew too close to the sun? And what propelled him there in the first place? A Times reporter examines Kalanick’s rise and fall and the culture that made them possible. “Isaac is great at the ticktock of events as they unfold, but his best work comes when he steps back to examine the bigger picture,” our reviewer, Leslie Berlin, writes. “One of the most upsetting parts of the Uber story is that the subterfuge — the lying, spying, bribery, lawbreaking and threats against reporters and competitors — worked.” Today, she adds, “Uber’s market capitalization hovers around $70 billion.”