Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

UNWORTHY REPUBLIC: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, by Claudio Saunt. (Norton, $26.95.) The historian Claudio Saunt’s book traces the expulsion of 80,000 Native Americans over the course of the 1830s, from their homes in the eastern United States to territories west of the Mississippi River. It’s a “powerful and lucid account,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy.”

MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman, by Ben Hubbard. (Tim Duggan, $28.) Many of the sources for this disturbing portrait of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince by Hubbard, The New York Times’s Beirut bureau chief, insisted on anonymity, fearing reprisals from the kingdom’s 34-year-old de facto ruler, a man whose ambition and ruthlessness are here on alarming display. Christopher Dickey, reviewing it, says that Hubbard “puts the story of Mohammed bin Salman’s ascent in a context that extends well beyond the region,” and adds that “the book’s strength is the thoroughness of its reporting.”

REAL LIFE, by Brandon Taylor. (Riverhead, $26.) In this stunning debut novel, a gay black graduate student from the South mines hope for some better or different life while he studies biochemistry in the haunted halls of a white academic space. As in the modernist novels of Woolf and Tolstoy cited throughout, the true action of Taylor’s novel exists beneath the surface. Jeremy O. Harris’s review calls it “a novel that probes — painstakingly, with the same microscopic precision its protagonist uses in the lab — the ways that an anxious queer black brain is mutated by the legacies of growing up in a society (in Wallace’s case, rural Alabama) where the body that houses it is not welcome.”

GOLDEN GATES: Fighting for Housing in America, by Conor Dougherty. (Penguin Press, $28.) California’s homelessness problem, Dougherty shows, involves a complicated combination of economic and political issues, but there’s only one answer to it: more housing. “It’s hard to overstate how dire California’s housing crisis is,” Francesca Mari writes in her review. “‘Golden Gates’ is both an empathetic portrait of all sides — legislators, developers, pro-housing and anti-gentrification activists — as well as a masterly primer on the fight for new construction in California.”

THE GLASS HOTEL, by Emily St. John Mandel. (Knopf, $26.95.) The author of “Station Eleven” returns with her fifth novel, a literary page-turner about a Ponzi scheme with close resemblance to Bernie Madoff’s. Mandel’s story moves around in time but her message remains a fixed point: Greed isn’t good. “There are quite a few overarching metaphors — about things like seeing and invisibility, visions and corporeal being — lurking around the book,” Boris Fishman writes in his review. “These moments call out to one another in a well-constructed matrix of nominal associations.”