Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  In the Orchard, by Eliza Minot (Knopf). This novel, an examination of motherhood, unfolds in the course of a night and a day. Maisie, weeks after having her fourth child, lies awake breastfeeding and fretting about money. Her contemplation of life as “a series of languishments and flourishes, of withering and blooming,” aptly describes this rhapsodic, plotless book, which nevertheless carries a stinging twist at its end. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, by Jai Chakrabarti (Knopf). The fifteen stories in this collection, set variously in America and India, are propelled by familial anxieties. Chakrabarti’s characters—diverse in race, class, sexuality, and religion—reveal themselves through longings: a closeted man dreams of conceiving a child with his lover’s wife; a lonely married woman secretly builds an airplane in her garage. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Go Back and Get It, by Dionne Ford (Bold Type). On her thirty-eighth birthday, the author of this memoir found a century-old photograph of an enslaved ancestor and embarked on a pilgrimage to uncover hidden branches of her family tree. The book’s title is derived from the West African practice of sankofa, which is “symbolized by a bird in flight with its head craned backward and an egg in its beak.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. We the Scientists, by Amy Dockser Marcus (Riverhead). Niemann-Pick disease type C is a rare genetic disorder whose sufferers face almost certain death by the age of twenty. In a selection of case histories, this book illuminates the painful tension between the extended time frames of medical research and the life spans of those hoping for a cure. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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