NINETY-NINE GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET, by Craig Brown. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In this unconventional look at the life of Princess Margaret — the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth and one of the 20th century’s great malcontents — Brown swoops at his subject from unexpected angles. It’s a Cubist portrait of the lady. The book is “gloriously truant,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Brown ignores all the starchy obligations of biography and adopts a form of his own to trap the past and ensnare the reader — even this reader, so determinedly indifferent to the royals. I ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice.”

DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, by Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) In her latest book, Macy, the author of “Factory Man” and “Truevine,” offers portraits of opioid users and a corporate and medical history of the epidemic from the mid-1990s to the current day. “Macy’s strengths as a reporter are on full display when she talks to people, gaining the trust of chastened users, grieving families, exhausted medical workers and even a convicted heroin dealer,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Macy captures an Appalachian landscape in a state of emergency and in the grip of disillusionment, but there’s little here that’s new. Indeed, that’s part of her point — not enough has changed.”

THE DEATH OF TRUTH: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, by Michiko Kakutani. (Tim Duggan Books, $22.) The former Times book critic draws on her extensive reading to portray an America that is creeping toward authoritarianism by way of the current administration’s distortions and manipulations. President Trump, she writes, is “emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years, creating the perfect ecosystem in which Veritas, the goddess of truth … could fall mortally ill.”

EARLY WORK, by Andrew Martin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This marvelous debut novel, about a male writer’s romantic entanglements, is partly about the age-old drama of ethics getting steamrollered by desire. But it’s more than a tale of adultery, because its heart is never far from the world of literature. “It’s like one of those restaurant dishes that take a vegetable and do it in multiple preparations on the same plate — ‘beets, three ways’ — in an effort to surround and capture that vegetable’s essence,” Molly Young writes in her review. “‘Early Work’ is books, three ways.”

MILK! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas, by Mark Kurlansky. (Bloomsbury, $29.) Kurlansky, chronicler of food and its history, from “Salt” to “Cod,” now turns to milk and how it has wended its way through many civilizations and cultures, exploring everything from breast-feeding to the qualities of camel milk. According to our reviewer, Rich Cohen, the book is a history of the world through bodily fluid but also “a kind of stealth memoir — between the lines, it’s all Kurlansky, memory, taste. … It’s the sort of book that Proust might have written had Proust become distracted by the madeleine.”