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Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Mighty Red, a captivating multigenerational tale set amid the 2008 financial crisis, begins with a frenzied proposal. Gary Geist, a wealthy and preternaturally lucky football player, asks Kismet Poe, his rebellious Ojibwe classmate, to marry him. This is much to the chagrin of Kismet’s superstitious truck-driver mom Crystal and her nerdy, homeschooled crush Hugo, who would also like to one day make her his bride, if only he could afford a car.

In her debut memoir, best-selling cookbook author and food TV icon Ina Garten admits she has a “low threshold for boredom.” This, she writes, has made her more than willing to take wild risks “just to get out of that miserable state.” In Be Ready When the Luck Happens, Garten lays out her journey to becoming the Barefoot Contessa, and the difficult, sometimes questionable decisions she made to get there.

With his new book, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides reckons with the ambitions and intentions of Captain James Cook. In recent years, Sides writes, the enigmatic British explorer and gifted cartographer has become, in some respects, the “Columbus of the Pacific.” Cook, once seen as a swashbuckling adventurer whose exploits inspired countless books and movies, is now a divisive figure, known for stealing from Indigenous people and their land.

New Yorker staffer Emily Witt’s debut memoir Health and Safety offers a sardonic look at her journey to try as many psychedelic drugs as possible. In 2013, after spending a few years on a prescribed antidepressant that “confirmed my love of stimulants,” Witt decided to try ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive beverage, for the first time.

John Edgar Wideman’s genre-bending autobiography chronicles not only his life, but also those of African men and women who made their way to the U. S. through the trans–Atlantic slave trade. A poignant mix of memoir, autofiction, history, and poetry, Slaveroad begins by tracing the journeys of people like William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians who returned to Africa in 1890 to become one of the first African Americans to work as a missionary for the Presbyterian Church.

Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar’s third novel, My Friends, begins with a tender yet tense goodbye between two middle-aged friends, one of whom is compelled to search their past in order to understand how they got there. Decades earlier, Khaled, the book’s somber protagonist, found kinship with Hosam, an enigmatic writer and fellow Libyan dissident living in London.