With diplomacy and world affairs dominating the front page lately (or the home page, as we are gradually learning to think of it), this week’s list of recommended titles has a decidedly international cast. East meets West to unhappy effect in Stephen R. Platt’s “Imperial Twilight,” about Britain’s humiliation of China during the Opium War, and again in Michael McFaul’s memoir “From Cold War to Hot Peace,” about the author’s career as an American ambassador in Putin’s Russia. Masih Alinejad’s memoir, “The Wind in My Hair,” details her political struggles in Iran and her support for Muslim women after she ended up in the United States. And Akil Kumarasamy’s debut story collection, “Half Gods,” traces the aftershocks of the Sri Lankan civil war through her characters’ lives. Closer to home, we have a look at the continuing water crisis in Flint, Mich., as well as poetry, fashion, and new fiction from Ottessa Moshfegh and A. M. Homes.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, by Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin Press, $26.) In Moshfegh’s latest novel, a wealthy, well-educated and chic 24-year-old woman evading grief decides to renew her spirit by sleeping all the time for several consecutive months. “Like its narrator, this is a remorseless little machine,” Dwight Garner writes of the book. “Moshfegh’s sentences are piercing and vixenish, each one a kind of orphan. She plays interestingly with substance and illusion, with dread and solace on the installment plan.”

WHAT THE EYES DON’T SEE: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City, by Mona Hanna-Attisha. (One World, $28.) This stirring account of the water crisis in Flint, Mich., is by the pediatrician who first presented unequivocal proof that children were being poisoned. “For all her doggedness, Hanna-Attisha is a goofy, appealing, very human narrator,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “The crisis becomes personalized through the stories of her patients and their parents, and through her horrified recollections of her initial passivity.”

DAYS OF AWE, by A. M. Homes. (Viking, $25.) The author’s latest collection of stories confronts the beauty and violence of daily life with mordant wit and a focus on the flesh. Hanging over it all are questions, sliced through with Homes’s dark humor, about how we metabolize strangeness, danger, horror. The characters seem to be looking around at their lives and asking: Is this even real? “Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies,” Ramona Ausubel writes in her review.