Mothers, sisters, wives, citizens: With Mother’s Day around the corner, our recommended titles this week tilt toward books that explore the role — or roles — of women in society. There’s Sheila Heti’s novel “Motherhood,” about a character approaching 40 who can’t decide whether to have a child. There’s Asne Seierstad’s “Two Sisters,” the nonfiction account of girls from a Muslim family in Norway who ran off to join ISIS. There’s Charles Frazier’s novel “Varina,” about the wife of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis. And there’s “The Woman’s Hour,” Elaine Weiss’s rich history of the fight for the 19th Amendment. Of course, in these books and in life itself women are also artists and academics and anthropologists and more, on and limitlessly on: As Annie Oakley tells Frank Butler in “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

That particular lyric is by Irving Berlin — but if it whets your appetite for Broadway, you could do worse than another book we recommend this week: Todd S. Purdum’s “Something Wonderful” revisits the musical heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Throw some wrapping paper on that one, and bring it with you to brunch on Sunday. Maybe Mom will let you read it when she’s done.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

MOTHERHOOD, by Sheila Heti. (Holt, $27.) Heti’s philosophical and essential new novel floats somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. Its unnamed narrator, a writer in her late 30s, is nearly certain that she doesn’t want to have children. She cogitates on questions like: What if she is making a choice she will always regret? What if you decline motherhood in favor of your art, and your art turns out to be mediocre? “This book is endlessly quotable, and a perfect review would be nothing but quotations,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “She makes a banquet of her objections to parenthood. If you are an underliner, as I am, your pen may go dry.”

SLAVE OLD MAN, by Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale. (The New Press, $19.99.) This novel by Chamoiseau, whose “Texaco” was awarded the 1992 Prix Goncourt, is the story of an unnamed old slave, his master and a monster — the plantation mastiff trained to hunt down runaways. The book unfurls as an extended chase sequence. One day, the old man flees for the forest, the mastiff in pursuit. As he goes further into the woods, he moves deeper into his own past. “‘Slave Old Man’ is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed — but every page pulses, blood-warm,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief.”