Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This cerebral thriller follows an investigative journalist as he attempts to expose a secret government program developing a lifelike virtual reality. His reporting raises profound questions: Are artificial beings alive? How do ambition and idealism transform each other? And “how, when you’re inside one story, can you see around it?” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. A Volga Tale, by Guzel Yakhina, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon (Europa). The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was a state located along the Volga River, populated by ethnic Germans whose ancestors had been lured to the region by Catherine the Great. This rich epic depicts its rise and fall through the story of a principled and awkward schoolteacher, whose life intersects with twenty years of social tragedy. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Omega Farm, by Martha McPhee (Scribner). In this expansive memoir, a novelist recounts her return to the place where she grew up—a compound in New Jersey, known to her family as “the Farm,” where she was raised by her mother and stepfather in a combined family of ten children. As she revisits the scene of her tumultuous childhood, McPhee writes, memories begin to emerge from “every patch-job and jerry-rigged ‘solution’ from the broken, yet widening, spell of the past.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Crossings, Ben Goldfarb (Norton). Roads are the subject of this perceptive book by an environmental journalist. Roads kill more creatures than any other “environmental ill”; they also bisect migration routes, pollute with noise, and help to facilitate deforestation. Road ecology—a specialty that Goldfarb lauds as “a field whose radical premise asserted that it was possible to perceive our built world through nonhuman eyes”—seeks to understand these dynamics and to propose solutions that actively consider animal lives. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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