Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Cobalt Red, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s). Much of the world’s cobalt—vital to the batteries that power cell phones, laptops, and much else—comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mined in conditions that this intrepid exposé characterizes as “predation for profit,” carried out at “minimum cost and maximum suffering.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Three Roads Back, by Robert D. Richardson (Princeton). This posthumous treatise on grief, by a biographer of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James, takes these three thinkers as case studies, examining the formative role that loss played in their intellectual development. Using diaries and letters, Richardson details his subjects’ experiences in the wake of loved ones’ untimely deaths, and shows how each, debilitated by sorrow, sought solace and found liberation in nature’s universalities and in the particularities of human experience. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Evil Flowers, by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Seemingly mundane occurrences grow increasingly surreal in these razor-sharp stories, none longer than a few pages. An ornithologist dispels the part of her brain that recognizes birds; a visitor to a Tripadvisor forum dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s country house strikes up two Internet friendships; an institution is branded the “Mational Nuseum.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Western Lane, by Chetna Maroo (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). When three adolescent sisters in an Indian immigrant family in England lose their mother unexpectedly, in this début novel, their father, unable to process his grief, hopes that playing squash will provide his daughters with structure. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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