Two old friends debate the issues that accompany aging; an old friend of thriller readers (Jack Reacher) shows a softer side; a new story about Humpty Dumpty gets told with a twist. There is something for everyone this week, from difficult, essential history to fiction set in the 18th century to several new books for young readers.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

AGING THOUGHTFULLY: Conversations About Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, & Regret, by Martha C. Nussbaum and Saul Levmore. (Oxford, $24.95.) This book is framed as a conversation between the law professor Saul Levmore and the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, colleagues at the University of Chicago. They debate mandatory retirement ages, cosmetic surgery and other subjects. “Nussbaum and Levmore are as interested in asking the right questions as they are with notching the right answers,” our critic Dwight Garner writes.

KEEPING ON KEEPING ON, by Alan Bennett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) Life’s small dramas, unappeasable longings and sorrows, and political outrage are all on display in this collection of diaries by Bennett, the British playwright of stage-to-screen hits like “The History Boys” and “The Lady in the Van.” “His book is a string of wry asides to the audience — pensées, jokes and anecdotes with the compression and tang of a Lydia Davis short story,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes.

THE MIDNIGHT LINE: A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child. (Delacorte Press, $28.99.) A more compassionate Jack Reacher emerges in Lee Child’s latest novel about the lonely drifter with knuckles the size of walnuts. The plot is driven by Reacher’s desire to learn how a West Point class ring ended up in a pawnshop. The novel “adds its share of classic moments to the Reacher canon,” our reviewer Janet Maslin writes, and “the last chapters have more emotional heft than anything Child has written before.”