A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation. In this conclusion to her Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering.

Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in THE SOUL OF AMERICA, Jon Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history.

For more than 50 years, Paul Simon has spoken to us in songs about alienation, doubt, resilience and empathy in ways that have established him as one of the most beloved artists in American pop music history. But Simon is a deeply private person who has resisted speaking to us outside of his music. He has said he will not write an autobiography or memoir, and he has refused to talk to previous biographers. Finally, Simon has opened up --- for more than 100 hours of interviews --- to Robert Hilburn. The result is a deeply human account of the challenges and sacrifices of a life in music at the highest level.

Intermingling settings in America and Britain, Lionel Shriver’s first collection explores property in both senses of the word: real estate and stuff. These 10 short stories and two novellas illustrate how our possessions act as proxies for ourselves, and how tussles over ownership articulate the power dynamics of our relationships. In Shriver’s world, we may possess people and objects and places, but in turn they possess us.

One summer in the ’60s, 19-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he is partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who is married with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers. Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory --- and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another.

Conceived while his father, Bear, cavorted around Rome in the 1950s, Pinch learns quickly that Bear's genius trumps all. After Bear abandons his family, Pinch strives to make himself worthy of his father's attention --- first trying to be a painter himself; then resolving to write his father's biography; eventually settling, disillusioned, into a job as an Italian teacher in London. But when Bear dies, Pinch hatches a scheme to secure his father's legacy --- and make his own mark on the world.

Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, John Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived. And though, when he came of age and took up residence there, and the city became a frequent backdrop for his dissatisfactions, it remained in some part of his memory as fascinating as it had been to his seven-year-old self. And as he guides us around the city, delighting in its cultural, architectural, political and social history, he interweaves the memories that are attached to particular places and moments.

Arranged into five sections --- In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free --- Zadie Smith’s new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network --- and Facebook itself --- really about? Why do we love libraries? What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays such as "Joy" and "Find Your Beach," FEEL FREE offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life.

In WINTER, we rejoin Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. He writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays --- to name just a handful of his subjects. He fills these oh-so-familiar objects and ideas with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze.

Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art’s mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art is seeing things himself. When four people, strangers and family, converge on a 15-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone? Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting WINTER casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.