We’re thinking big this week: big business, big bureaucracy, big social structures and the place of the individual therein. It’s not always a pretty picture: In T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong’s riveting book “A False Report,” an overburdened criminal justice system pressures a rape victim into recanting her story, while in “We the Corporations,” Adam Winkler pulls the curtain on two centuries of corporate efforts to benefit from political and legal maneuverings. Other books are more hopeful: Jesse Ball’s novel “Census” may tell the story of a functionary volunteering to carry out a mysterious government project, but at heart it remains a tender exploration of a poignant father-son relationship. And while Dara Horn’s novel “Eternal Life” takes organized religion as one theme— it unfolds against the backdrop of 2,000 years of Jewish history — it also features a heroine who comes to understand, through love, why everyone around her clings so hard to life.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

CENSUS, by Jesse Ball. (Ecco, $25.99.) In Jesse Ball’s new novel, full of the author’s signature surreal flourishes, a father learns he has a fatal disease and decides to travel across the country with his young son, who has Down syndrome. The book was inspired by Ball’s relationship with his brother, Abram, who had Down syndrome and died at 24 in 1998. “As a boy, Ball expected that he would grow up to look after his brother, a possibility that brought him anxiety but also quiet contentment. He never had that opportunity,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, “but in ‘Census,’ they are reunited, in a way, as father and son.”

BEHEMOTH: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua B. Freeman. (Norton, $27.95.) In this rich and ambitious history, Joshua B. Freeman depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination. He traces the rise of the factory and how it became entwined with Enlightenment ideas of progress. “Now that factory work and stable, blue-collar jobs are such potent sources of nostalgia,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “it can be hard to recall how truly disruptive the manufacturing age was. Freeman does a superb job of reminding us.”

A FALSE REPORT: A True Story of Rape in America, by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong. (Crown, $28.) This is the “John Grisham-worthy” true-life account of a rape investigation in which the victim was bullied into recanting her story before evidence surfaced, years later, to prove she was telling the truth all along. “Miller and Armstrong tell their story plainly, expertly and well,” Emily Bazelon writes in her review. “It’s gripping and needs no dressing up.” Bazelon adds that the case’s resolution helped the victim get on with an interrupted life. “That’s the larger lesson of a nonfiction narrative like this one,” she writes: “It continues, beyond a book’s pages.”