Let fiction transport you to other worlds this week, from Arundhati Roy’s cinematic contemporary India to Sarah Perry’s fantastical Victorian England to Courtney Maum’s near future of rampant techie consumerism. In nonfiction, Jack Ewing gets under the hood of the Volkswagen scandal, and Thomas E. Ricks explores the common causes of two very different Englishmen: Winston Churchill and George Orwell. Speaking of politics and the English language, Senator Al Franken has a book out. If he’s lucky, it’ll be the funniest political memoir you read this year.

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, by Arundhati Roy. (Knopf, $28.95.) Twenty years after “The God of Small Things,” Roy returns with this novel about social and political outcasts in present-day India who come together in response to state-sponsored violence. Our critic Michiko Kakutani called it “an ambitious but highly discursive novel that eventually builds to a moving conclusion,” even if it gets bogged down in generalizations about the plight of India. Roy’s depiction of the book’s central romance has “a cinematic quality . . . as well as a genuine poignancy and depth of emotion.”

THE ESSEX SERPENT, by Sarah Perry. (Custom House/William Morrow, $26.99.) Perry’s novel, which took top prize at this year’s British Book Awards, is set in the Victorian era. The densely woven plot involves an independent-minded widow, her relationship with a reverend, and the possible haunting presence of a giant serpent. It’s part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. Our critic Jennifer Senior called it “lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate.”

BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES, by Tessa Hadley. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) A spellbinding and witty writer, Hadley serves up the bitter along with the delicious. In these 10 stories, set in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s as well as the present, the uncanny is almost precisely counterbalanced with the commonplace — picture insects falling on books and rabbit droppings in dolls’ tea-cups — and apparently minor trespasses turn out to reverberate.