If the 21st-century world order has you longing for the comparatively clear politics of the Cold War, this is your lucky week: John le Carré has just published a new novel, “A Legacy of Spies.” (You can read an excerpt here.) If, on the other hand, you’re focused on the future, try Alissa Nutting’s zeitgeist tale set in too-close-for-comfort 2019, “Made for Love,” in which a woman runs away from the husband who’s implanted a surveillance chip in her brain. Other recommended novels this week: Gabriel Tallent’s acclaimed debut, “My Absolute Darling”; David Williams’s twist on “prepper” fiction, “When the English Fall”; and Louise Penny’s latest Three Pines mystery, “Glass Houses.” And if you’re getting excited for the big fall movies, you might want to dive into some Hollywood history with David Thomson’s “Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio.”

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

A LEGACY OF SPIES, by John le Carré. (Viking, $28.) John le Carré’s 24th novel is a throwback, a coda to “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963), his best-known book. It includes a cameo appearance by his greatest creation, the Yoda-like spymaster George Smiley. “Le Carré’s prose remains brisk and lapidary,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “He is as profitably interested as ever in values, especially the places where loyalty, patriotism and affection rub together and fray.”

MY ABSOLUTE DARLING, by Gabriel Tallent. (Riverhead, $27.) The heroine of this debut novel is Turtle, a 14-year-old who grows up feral in the forests and hills of Northern California, raised by her abusive father, a widowed survivalist. “Turtle is a staunchly American type, perhaps the American type — tough, taciturn and almost pathologically self-sufficient,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “This is a book profoundly about other books, fed by the classics like tributaries.”

NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, by Suzy Hansen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In this remarkably revealing book, Hansen, who moved to Istanbul after 9/11, wrestles with her country’s violent role in the world and the ways America has failed to interrogate itself. Hansen is doing something both rare and necessary, writes our reviewer, the Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar; she is tracing the ways in which we are all born into histories, into national myths, and if we are unfortunate enough, into the fantasies of an empire.