The venerable Spanish novelist Javier Marías, answering our By the Book questions this week, disavows the concept of a “national literature.” Readers who agree with him may take heart from the example of David Szalay, whose novel “Turbulence” tops our latest list of recommended titles: Szalay was born in Montreal, raised in Beirut and London, and now lives in Budapest, and his novel (set largely in airports and on airplanes) is just as global and deracinated as that background might lead you to expect. On the other hand there’s Campbell McGrath, a poet who is every bit an American writer, and whose substantial volume of new and selected work, “Nouns & Verbs,” closes out this week’s recommendations. In between we have a novel set in a small English village; an intellectual biography of the French mathematician André Weil and his sister, the philosopher Simone Weil; a close look at Greenland and its journey to the center of climate science; and a history of Theodore Roosevelt’s rise that’s also about the rise of American dominance in the 20th century.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

TURBULENCE, by David Szalay. (Scribner, $25.) David Szalay’s new novel is told through connected flights. In one chapter, a German pilot flies to Brazil and has a brief sexual encounter with a journalist. That journalist then flies to Toronto to interview a famous writer. And so on. The book’s 12 short chapters — each around 10 pages — were originally commissioned by the BBC as radio pieces. “‘Turbulence’ is a sleek machine with a cool tone,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “Each chapter picks up from the last, but presents a new protagonist, as if a moral baton were being passed.”

THE WEIL CONJECTURES: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, by Karen Olsson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) The great mathematician André Weil and his sister Simone, the philosopher and secular saint, were not like other siblings. Their precocity is the stuff of legend. In “The Weil Conjectures,” Karen Olsson combines their fascinating story with her own renewed interest in math. The book “arrives as a corrective,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, “describing mathematics — its focus, abstraction, odd hunches, blazing epiphanies — as a powerful intoxicant, a door to euphoria.”

THE CROWDED HOUR: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, by Clay Risen. (Scribner, $30.) This fast-paced narrative traces the rise of Roosevelt into a national figure and something of a legend against the backdrop of the emergence of the United States as a world power. Candice Millard, reviewing it, applauds the book’s scope: “The future president may be in the thick of the action, but he does not monopolize the story, quietly stepping aside for long stretches of time. In his place appears an irresistible cast of characters, from a unit of fearless black soldiers to the swashbuckling artist Frederic Remington,” she writes. “It quickly becomes clear, however, that the book’s central character is neither Roosevelt nor any of these men. It is the brash young country they dared the world to dismiss.”