The best new books out this week 📚
 Hello, book lovers! Each week, dozens of new releases hit the shelves. Here are our favorites. ❤️📚 –The BuzzFeed Books team
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 Credit: Grove Press, W. W. Norton Company The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine
Millions of refugees from the Middle East and Africa traverse the Aegean Sea by boat in an attempt to find asylum on the island of Lesbos. This is the setting for Alameddine's latest novel. Mina, a physician who grew up in Beirut and is the trans daughter of a Syrian mother and Lebanese father, receives an invitation from a nurse friend to come to Lesbos to offer her medical and translation services. Her brother Mezan, the only member of her family she still speaks to, will meet her there as well. Written in short chapters and addressed to an unnamed acquaintance who, like Alameddine, is a gay Lebanese writer, Mina oscillates between her own memories: meeting her wife, Francine, her decadeslong estrangement from her family, and the stories of refugees on Lesbos. She meets a Syrian family whose wife and mother, Sumaiya, has advanced cancer and doesn't want her children to know. Mina watches venal white volunteers ask for selfies and European journalists make racist assumptions about the people they interview. The refugee crisis has become the kind of slowly unfolding calamity that can invite a lot of overwrought trauma porn; Alameddine resists that temptation here, opting for nuanced and insightful reflections on ordinary people trapped in horrific circumstances often caused by the countries whose asylum they now seek. —Tomi Obaro
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
In The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Powers went big. His characters spanned decades, centuries even, as a ragtag group of ecowarriors attempt to stop the destruction of chestnut trees. In Bewilderment, Powers hones in on a father and son. Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist, is trying to care for his 9-year-old son Robin, who has a love for nature inherited from his late mother, an environmental lawyer. But Robin also has trouble controlling his anger, which is causing problems for him at school. When a new experimental neurological treatment becomes a possibility, Theo decides to have Robin enroll. But as he becomes a calmer person, political strife escalates, courtesy of a climate change–denying president who refuses to concede after an election, which threatens to end the lifesaving treatment Robin has been receiving. Powers writes wonderfully and hauntingly about the natural world, and in Bewilderment, Powers grapples with one of the most fraught aspects of living on Earth right now: What kind of planet do we want our children to inherit? —Tomi Obaro
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
 Credit: Berkley On Location by Sarah Smith
Alia Dunn has spent years working her way up at the most popular outdoor TV channel. She finally gets a chance to lead her dream project, but that dream turns into a nightmare when Drew Irons is hired as a new crew member. Drew and Alia had an amazing date two weeks ago...until he ghosted her. Now their interactions are full of awkward tension. However, as they spend time in Utah's national parks surrounded by the beauty of nature, the tension between the two evolves from awkward to sexual real quick. Alia is on the brink of having everything she wants. But when the host of the show goes rogue, jeopardizing everything Alia has worked for, she has to figure out a way to keep her dream job — and dream guy — from slipping through her fingers. —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
 Credit: Andrews McMeel Publishing, Farrar, Straus and Giroux My Greenhouse by Bella Mayo
Inspired by this poet's lost romances, Bella's collection explores love in stages: a new, exciting crush, slowly falling in love, suffering through heartbreak, and experiencing growth. These short, often on-the-nose, and raw poems capture the feelings of unsteadiness so often felt after an end of a relationship. Honest and evocative, this collection will interest anyone who has gone through heartbreak and has found the strength to mend the heart.
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan
In a 2018 essay for the London Review of Books that subsequently went viral, the Oxford professor challenges the idea that our sexual desires are innate, fixed, immutable preferences uninfluenced by the social forces around us, or that — even if they are — those desires, which deem certain minority groups "fuckable" and others not, should go unquestioned. Srinivasan has now written an essay collection, first published in the UK in August, which includes that essay as well as five other essays about sex and feminism more broadly. In "The Conspiracy Against Men," she writes about the faux apology tours of famous bad men and also the tensions inherent in a phrase like "believe women." (The women who are to be believed are overwhelmingly white and middle class or higher; this same courtesy often does not extend to people outside those descriptors). In "Talking to My Students About Porn," she revisits the arguments of anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and marvels at how her students who grew up with porn's ubiquity are apt to agree with Dworkin that there is something insidious about the male and female dynamics of most mainstream porn. She also revisits her 2018 essay in a follow-up: "Coda: The Politics of Desire." The strength of this collection lies mainly in Srinivasan's appetite for questioning comforting norms: "Feminism must be relentlessly truth-telling," she writes in the preface, "not least about itself." —Tomi Obaro
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
 Credit: Penguin Teen Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
Zetian intends to assassinate the pilot responsible for her sister's death. To do so, she offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, paired up with a boy of Huaxia to pilot giant transforming robots called Chrysalises that battle the mecha aliens beyond the Great Wall. After she murders him, and emerges from the cockpit unscathed, she is labeled an Iron Widow, a female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up a Chrysalis. To stop more girls from being sacrificed, she will leverage her might to figure out exactly why the pilot system is set up the way that it is. —Rachel Strolle
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
 Credit: Scholastic Press, Viking Books for Young Readers, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers Things We Couldn't Say by Jay Cole
Gio has just started to get his life together when his birth mom returns. She walked out of his life when he was nine, and he hasn't heard from her in eight years. Now, he's not sure he's willing to let her back into his life. On top of this, there's a new guy on the basketball team that he's been hanging out with, and Gio is not sure if he wants to be in a relationship right now. —Rachel Strolle
Get it from Bookshop or your local indie through Indiebound here.
The Other Merlin by Robyn Schenider
This Arthurian reimagining is a refreshing delight! Charming and sharply hilarious, Schneider's entrance into historical fiction is such a natural fit, proved by the strength of her storytelling and joyous voice throughout this fun, clever (and queer) tale. Within this kingdom of Camelot, Arthur does indeed pull the sword from the stone, though it was a drunken mistake. Emery Merlin is the daughter of a legendary court wizard. When her twin brother is summoned to serve as Arthur's right-hand wizard, Emery disguises as him to go in his place when he is unable to fulfill the order. With her feelings slowly building toward Arthur, and when a quest and a prophecy come into play, Emery must decide if she risks it all for the boy she loves, or give up her potential as the greatest wizard in Camelot. —Farrah Penn
As If On Cue by Melissa Kanter
In this delightful Jewish YA rom-com, Natalie and Reid have been in competition their entire lives, spurred on by the fact that as a talented musician, Reid is also her bandleader father's teacher's pet. It doesn't help that the band is the most successful club at school, which is why they get to keep their funding even while Natalie's directorial dreams are crushed. But she's already given Reid her dad; she isn't also letting them have this. When her fight for justice lands them in the compromise of writing and directing the school play together, they'll have to learn how to become a team in order to deliver a successful enough show to prove that both clubs should have funding. And they just might discover they're meant to work as a pair in more ways than one. —Dahlia Adler
Get it from Bookshop or a local bookstore through Indiebound here.
 Credit: William Morrow The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova by Ruth Hogan
What it's about: Billie's going through a mid-life crisis. She's divorced, her father just died, and she just discovered she was adopted. A letter from her father directs her to an aging tarot card reader named Madame Burova, who mysteriously knows everything about her. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, Madame Burova's tarot business was booming when she made a promise to someone...one that she intends to make good on fifty years later. Alternating between Madame Burova's colorful past and the mystery of Billie's present, this lighthearted novel reminds us that it's never too late to discover who you really are. —Kirby Beaton
Get it from Bookshop or through your local indie through Indiebound here. The Stolen Lady by Laura Morelli
What it's about: In 1939 France, Anne, a young archivist at the Louvre, is tasked with transferring some of the most precious piece — including the Mona Lisa — to safety from the quickly encroaching Nazis. Anne is also worried about her missing brother, but as the hide and seek continues, she begins to realize his role in the dangerous game. In 1479 Florence, a house servant named Bellina follows her mistress, Lisa Gheradini, to her home, where her Medici-aligned husband has collected a treasure of art and luxuries. But when a famous painter begins to paint a portrait of her mistress, Bellina finds herself hiding a huge secret. Two timelines are threaded together by one famous painting in this exhilarating historical fiction novel. —Kirby Beaton
 Credit: HarperCollins The Insiders by Mark Oshiro
Héctor is feeling alone at his new school, vastly different from his old school where being gay wasn't a big deal, and bullies make him wish he could just disappear. But when hiding one day in what he thought was a janitor's closet, he discovers a room that shouldn't be possible. Because two other queer kids, from different places in the country, are also there, and the room seems to know exactly what they need to help each other out. This is one of the most special middle grade books that has ever existed, and if you have a middle grade reader in your life, get this for them immediately. —Rachel Strolle
Get it from Bookshop or through your local indie through Indiebound here.
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