Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (Knopf). This consuming and unstintingly romantic début novel begins in 1914, and centers on two teen-age boarding-school students: Ellwood, an aspiring poet, and Gaunt, a moody, half-German pacifist. The young men are taking tentative steps toward romance when Gaunt enlists in the British Army. Ellwood eventually follows, set on reunion. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Rombo, by Esther Kinsky, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt (New York Review Books). Written in the form of a travelogue, this fictional narrative records the memories of survivors of two earthquakes that devastated the Friuli region of Italy in the nineteen-seventies. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Benjamin Banneker and Us, by Rachel Jamison Webster (Holt). The central figure in this memoir-biography is Benjamin Banneker, a Black astronomer who was born in 1731 and became famous for writing almanacs and helping to design Washington, D.C. After learning that she was one of Banneker’s descendants, Webster, a white poet, retraced his and his ancestors’ lives. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Tenacious Beasts, by Christopher J. Preston (M.I.T.). The occasional resurgences of animal populations in an era of mass extinction are the subject of this lively study, by a journalist and professor of environmental philosophy. Preston focusses much of his reporting on wildlife scientists and Indigenous activists, arguing that these recoveries demonstrate that the flourishing of other species is “integral to our shared future.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. | 
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