Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Escape Artist, by Jonathan Freedland (Harper). In 1944, the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, intent on piercing the “veil of ignorance” surrounding the Nazis’ crimes, related his and others’ experiences of the camp in the Vrba-Wetzler Report. With the propulsion of a historical thriller, Freedland, a journalist, tracks Vrba’s work collecting the “data of the dead” even while imprisoned, driven by his conviction that facts could perhaps derail the Nazi extermination plan. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Shirley Hazzard, by Brigitta Olubas (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This biography of an acclaimed novelist follows Hazzard from her early years in Australia and postwar Hong Kong through her adulthood among storied literary circles in New York City and Italy. Olubas traces the development of Hazzard’s longtime preoccupations with “mobile protagonists and their shifting worlds,” and with questions of truth, goodness, knowledge, and perspective. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka (Norton). In this magic-realist satire, the title character—a self-described “photographer, gambler, slut”—wakes up in the afterworld and has a week to discover who killed him. Set during the civil war in Sri Lanka in 1989, the novel follows Almeida as he attempts to find his murderer and help two friends obtain a cache of photographs incriminating those on all sides of the conflict. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Seven Empty Houses, by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Riverhead). The seven stories that make up this haunting book, by an Argentinean novelist, feature characters confronting their own estrangement—from their families, their neighborhoods, and themselves. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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