One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Grove Press). Reviewed by Nicole Schrag. “The book makes for such a smooth, funny, provocative reading experience that it’s easy to miss its breathtaking range. Winterson’s imaginative leaps are made possible by her Arabic source text, which is famous for its multilayered stories, twists of fate, and new beginnings. Her reading of the Nights is an argument for how storytelling — then and now — is crucial for survival and for sustaining the possibility that we might even thrive.”

The Final Score by Don Winslow (William Morrow). Reviewed by Art Taylor. “Twists are a key aspect of Winslow’s work generally. The heist in ‘The Final Score’ ends with a satisfying shift in plans. “The Sunday List” — a class-driven tale about a teenager delivering liquor on Sundays to earn college-tuition money — holds a couple of unexpected turns, one of them through a coda 50 years after the main action. And ‘The Lunch Break’ follows that lifeguard and insufferable actress toward twin layers of surprise — one plot-driven, about a shadowy stalker, and the other character-driven, featuring redemption and reward.”

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann (Simon & Schuster). Reviewed by Diane Kiesel. “Short’s circumstances were humble. She skipped out of cheap rooming houses without paying the rent, relied on the kindness of strange men for meals, and engaged in do-it-yourself dentistry, filling her rotted teeth with melted candle wax. Despite her dreams of stardom, she did nothing to facilitate a movie career other than wander the streets of Hollywood day and night, alone. In hindsight, it’s not hard to see that the Dahlia’s story might not end well.”

Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen by Alice Loxton (Macmillan). Reviewed by Anne Cassidy. “It’s no spoiler to reveal that Loxton survived to tell Eleanor’s tale, despite the fact that she hiked most of the way in new boots. The book she wrote about her journey, Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, is as energetic as the expedition itself. It mixes history, travelogue, and trail memoir into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes (Pantheon). Reviewed by Raima Larter. “As the author demonstrates, these were difficult years indeed. Tennyson’s father, Dr. George Tennyson, grew depressed and violent, descending into alcoholism before eventually dying. Alfred, a student at Trinity by then, had to leave school and try to make his way. There were many problems to contend with, including the mental illness of his younger brothers, the loss of the family home when a new rector was installed at Somersby, the death of Alfred’s best friend, and on and on. Through it all, he wrote.”

Kin: A Novel by Tayari Jones (Knopf). Reviewed by Tara Campbell. “Not all of it is humorous, but even when things get heavy, a sense of comfort pervades because of the strength of the relationships Annie and Niecy have cultivated between themselves and the other people in their lives. Family is more than blood in Kin, and it’s stronger than all the pain and heartbreak life serves up. Ultimately, Jones has served up an enjoyable and engrossing novel with love at its core.”

The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress by James Cheshire (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi. “With color, gloss, and boldly drawn borders, maps were used by delegations to sell their version of the way the world ought to be. In the interwar period, led primarily by Karl Haushofer — a German professor and cartographer who gave the jailed Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess their own personal university seminar on geopolitics, complete with reading assignments — Nazis learned the essential messaging capabilities of Motherland-centric maps. Thus, a generation of German schoolchildren was taught about their country’s borders from maps that reflected what the Reichstag wanted to see.”

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