Two of the year’s most highly anticipated books are on this week’s list of recommendations: Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010); and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “We Were Eight Years in Power,” his first book since “Between the World and Me” made him as close to a household name as public intellectuals get. The rest of the list offers a wide range of subjects, from the poet Eileen Myles’s memoir about life with a beloved dog to Attica Locke’s murder mystery set in Texas to N. K. Jemisin’s conclusion of her award-winning Broken Earth fantasy trilogy.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

MANHATTAN BEACH, by Jennifer Egan. (Scribner, $28.) Egan’s latest novel tells overlapping stories, but is most fundamentally about Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during World War II. “It’s a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel,” our critic Dwight Garner writes, “bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone. It’s an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer so that you sometimes feel she has retrofitted sleek new engines inside a craft owned for too long by James Jones and Herman Wouk.”

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.) “We Were Eight Years in Power” is a selection of Coates’s most influential pieces about race in America from The Atlantic, with subjects including Barack and Michelle Obama, Donald J. Trump, reparations and mass incarceration. Newly written brief essays introduce each one. “Most of these pieces force a reckoning with ideas that people, mainly whites, avoid contemplating or reject or insist (sometimes rightly) are more complicated,” our critic Jennifer Senior writes. “Taking in Coates’s essays from start to finish” is “a bracing thing, like drinking a triple scotch, neat.”

DIFFICULT WOMEN: A Memoir of Three, by David Plante. (New York Review Books, $16.95.) Plante’s memoir, first published in 1983 and now reissued, is a portrait of three of his friends (or so they believed): the novelist Jean Rhys; the feminist writer Germaine Greer; and Sonia Orwell, George’s widow. “Few writers have betrayed confidences with such uninhibited malice,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “‘Difficult Women’ is creepy, it is cruel, it is morally indefensible — and it is exhilarating. As Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.’”