Leaving Guantanamo, by Eric L. Lewis (Cambridge). With procedural exactitude and mounting anger, this book recounts how Kuwait extracted twelve of its citizens from the “forever prison.” Lewis, a lawyer who helped shepherd those cases through the State Department, the Pentagon, interagency task forces, and federal habeas litigation, makes clear that Guantánamo is part of an offshore detention regime built to evade ordinary adjudication, nourished by unverified intelligence, and maintained as a result of politics. As he shows how a small Middle Eastern state learned to negotiate with America’s security bureaucracy, the limits of litigation become painfully apparent; releases arrive only through diplomacy and assurances that the detainees will be subject to travel bans and surveillance. The book’s bleak contemporary lesson is that stranding people in a quasi-legal black site is easier than releasing them.

The Wall Dancers, by Yi-Ling Liu (Knopf). China’s first private internet provider launched in 1995. Today, more than one billion people in the country use the web. This sensitive début depicts the Chinese internet as a kind of “walled garden,” closed off from the outside world, pruned by government censors, yet filled with life. Liu, a Hong Kong-born journalist, profiles people on the fringes of Chinese society—a feminist activist, a gay entrepreneur, a sci-fi writer, a rapper—who find purpose and community online even as the space for free expression narrows. Foreign observers, Liu argues, tend to portray Chinese people as either the enablers or the victims of their government’s excesses. But reality, her book suggests, is messier, as the state and its citizens participate in a “dynamic push and pull.”

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Henri Campeã

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Eating Ashes, by Brenda Navarro, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Liveright). In this grief-ridden novel, a nameless narrator mourns the loss of her younger brother Diego. When they are children, their mother leaves the two of them in Mexico City, where they live in poverty, to go to Madrid, in hopes of improving their circumstances. Nine years later, the siblings finally go to join their mother, but find themselves marginalized and still poor. Avoiding melodrama, Navarro writes in a matter-of-fact tone, using short, clipped sentences suited to the wretchedness of her subject. This is a book that treats its characters and incidents seriously and—at its best—ruthlessly.

The Infamous Gilberts, by Angela Tomaski (Scribner). This droll yet mournful début novel, set in 2002, is constructed as a tour of a grand English manor on the occasion of its surrender to “hotel people.” At every stop, the narrator, Max, relates events—marriage, death, banishment—that precipitated the downfall of its last owners, the Gilbert family. Mysteries emerge: Why are there bloodstains all over one room’s floor? And what is Max’s connection to the family? He teases these questions while encouraging the reader to submit to the story’s melancholy. As he says in the estate’s pet cemetery, “Linger awhile. Linger, linger. Absorb a little pain.”