Our recommendations this week include fare for readers of all ages and stages, starting with “Welcome: A Mo Willems Guide for New Arrivals,” a witty life manual for savvy infants and their attendant grown-ups. “Questions Asked” taps the philosophical tendencies of 5-year-olds and up — all the way up — by venturing playfully into unanswerable territory: “Can anyone do real magic tricks? Do miracles happen sometimes?” A debut Y.A. novel by Andrew McCarthy delves into a 15-year-old girl’s discovery of a family secret. And two books on Jane Austen explore her work, her stuff, her suitors and her legacy.

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

AMERICAN FIRE: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, by Monica Hesse. (Liveright, $26.95.) Hesse tells the story of 67 fires set in Virginia during a five-month arson spree, beginning in November 2012, and the mystery of why a local auto mechanic was behind them. “‘American Fire’ is an excellent summer vacation companion,” our critic Jennifer Senior wrote. “It has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex. It also happens to be a very good portrait of a region in economic decline.”

THE GENIUS OF JANE AUSTEN: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood, by Paula Byrne. (Harper Perennial, paper, $16.99.) Playwrights and actors who questioned and mocked social norms helped Austen learn to focus her material, make it amusing and give it critical punch, this insightful study shows. Byrne’s book helps explain why, 200 years after her death, Austen is alive and well in contemporary culture.

THE WIDOW NASH, by Jamie Harrison. (Counterpoint, $26.) Sweeping and richly hued, this debut novel by Jim Harrison’s daughter features a clever and adventurous protagonist who must determine what happened to her father’s fortune after his suicide. On the run from her brutal ex-fiancé, his business partner, she leaves a cross-country train in Montana to remake herself as the widow Nash.