Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century, and William Taubman’s new biography of him is essential reading for the 21st, as we trace the arc from the fall of the Soviet Union to the rise of Putin’s Russia. Kurt Andersen digs up the roots of alternative facts in American culture (hint: it starts with the Pilgrims) in “Fantasyland”; and Ben Blum investigates a cousin’s inexplicable crime in “Ranger Games.” In fiction, new works by the acclaimed novelists Jesmyn Ward and Claire Messud encompass themes of childhood and loss. And Margaret Wilkerson Sexton makes a luminous debut with her novel set in New Orleans, “A Kind of Freedom.”

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

RANGER GAMES: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime, by Ben Blum. (Doubleday, $28.95.) On Aug. 7, 2006, Ben Blum’s cousin Alex, an Army Ranger, drove four fellow soldiers to a bank, which they robbed by gunpoint. When Alex was arrested, he insisted the robbery was simply an elaborate Ranger training exercise. Was it? Our critic Jennifer Senior says “Ranger Games” is “a memorable, novelistic account” about the unlikely bond between two very different cousins, as well as a “fascinating tutorial on the psychology of modern warfare and social coercion.”

SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $26.) Our critic Parul Sehgal writes that Jesmyn Ward’s books “reach for the sweep, force and sense of inevitability of the Greek myths, but as translated to the small, mostly poor, mostly black town in Mississippi where she grew up and where she still lives.” Ward’s latest novel, which carries echoes of Faulkner and of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” is both timeless and perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with an exploration of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America.

FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen. (Random House, $30.) This romp through American history, from Anne Hutchinson to Donald Trump, contains a powerful message: For centuries the country has nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.” Andersen, a host of public radio’s Studio 360, a best-selling novelist and a cultural omnivore, explores the deep roots of American unreason in all its seductive forms.