Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Palo Alto, by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown). A useful counter to Silicon Valley’s self-mythologizing, this history of Palo Alto begins in the late nineteenth century, with the state-funded genocide of Alta Indians by settlers and the coming of the railroad, which led, via the fortune of Leland Stanford, to the establishment of Stanford University (“the pseudostate governing Palo Alto”). Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Life on Delay, by John Hendrickson (Knopf). “Nearly every decision in my life has been shaped by my struggle to speak,” Hendrickson writes in this moving exploration of stuttering. A stutterer since childhood, he spent years in therapy, waiting in vain “for this strange thing to exit my body.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Sun Walks Down, by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Set in rural Australia in the late nineteenth century, this ambitious novel assembles a band of characters—including a white farmer, an Aboriginal farmhand, and a Swedish painter—who are drawn together by the disappearance, in a dust storm, of a six-year-old boy. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, translated from the Swedish by Agnes Broomé (Astra). Poised at the intersection of life and art, reality and imagination, this novel blends the thrill of mystery with the curiosity and depth of philosophical inquiry. Fifteen years after Cecilia Berg goes missing, her husband, Martin, is haunted by memories of their shared youthful intellectual ambitions, by the artistic struggles of their friend Gustav, and by professional and family worries. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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