Briefly Noted

, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Riverhead). This tense and devilishly well-paced thriller is narrated by Estela, the housemaid of a wealthy couple in Santiago, Chile. Estela's duties include cleaning, cooking, and—most important—taking care of the couple's daughter; the novel consists of her recollection, delivered in an interrogation room, of the events leading up to the daughter's untimely death. With increasing agitation, Estela relates the family's dark dramas and her own mounting feelings of detachment, creating an outsider's portrait of bourgeois unravelling, deftly entwined with reflections on class and oppression.

, by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Two linked story lines drive this loosely plotted but finely etched début novel, which centers on two women who lived in the same apartment at different times. In contemporary Paris, Anna, a married psychoanalyst on leave after a miscarriage, befriends Clémentine, a young woman who unwittingly opens a door onto Anna's past. In 1972, Florence, a feminist studying psychoanalysis and living in what will eventually become Anna's apartment, wants a child; her husband doesn't. As Anna and Florence separately puzzle over fidelity, desire, and Jacques Lacan, the novel hints that greater rewards come from intellectual quandaries than from the kind of certitude that defines the thinking of Clémentine, who, at one point, reduces fidelity to "a container for sex, to keep it from being too threatening."

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, by Richard Beck (Crown). The focus of this history of the war on terror is the war's lingering cultural and political influence, which, its author argues, includes the deluge of Hollywood superhero films, a boom in S.U.V. sales, and the election of Donald Trump. Beck, a journalist, contends that the campaign was undertaken partly in an attempt to rescue "America's declining power"—which it failed to do—and that "anti-Muslim bigotry had been baked into the war from the beginning." Among the war's legacies, he writes, are two failed states, increased surveillance within the U.S., a rise in police brutality, and the war in Gaza.

Do Something, by Guy Trebay (Knopf). This coming-of-age memoir is a love letter to nineteen-seventies New York, celebrating the creative tumult of the city "at a time when it was not at all unusual for people to shop around for the reality best suited to whatever story they happened to be telling." Trebay, a longtime style reporter for the Times, peppers his story with reminiscences of his vibrant but troubled family, especially his huckster father and outlaw sister. The fondest passages concern his first steps as an eager but untrained journalist at Interview and the Village Voice, and his friendships with countercultural and literary figures, from Candy Darling to Jamaica Kincaid. Throughout, he testifies to an unbridled romance with "a city where the inexplicable is an everyday occurrence."