Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith by Jamie Fisher (Dutton). Reviewed by Daniel de Visé. “In the end, however, Fisher and her book won me over. At some point, I stopped thinking of Nobody Broke Your Heart as biography and embraced it as memoir, the kind that reads as a detective story, like Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. This book’s subtitle could read, In Search of Elliott Smith. Fisher’s quest to reconstruct his life — his homes, haunts, friends, vices — becomes part of the story. Smith’s losing battle with depression and addiction fuels its central narrative. The author’s moral dilemma over how to tell the story becomes a counternarrative. Once I recognized Fisher as a character, all the handwringing and confessionals made sense.”

Medea: A Life by Edith Hall (Yale University Press). Reviewed by Stuart Kay. “It’s a story of love, exile, jealousy, despair, scheming, and death chockful of drama, from Medea’s birth in a terrifying thunderstorm to Glauce’s spectacular flame-engulfed death and Medea’s machinations in asylum in Athens. Medea is in turns playful, serious, furious, and callous but always resourceful, charismatic, and fiercely intelligent. She commits terrible crimes — but she is also, crucially, a victim.”

Everything That Is Beautiful: A Novel by Louise Nealon (Harper). Reviewed by Anne Eliot Feldman. “After decades of relative harmony between the families, Niamh, Helen, and Kate have grappled over the last few years with an unresolved secret that has created awkward emotional silence between the Foleys and the Ryans. Now, a wedding looms for one of the Foley siblings, and the women must be in each other’s presence again. As they prepare for the big day, each reflects on the newly fractured state of the relationships that once meant everything.”

The Shanghai Agents: The Soviet Plot to Start a Revolution in Interwar China by Heather Salter (Cambridge University Press). Reviewed by William Rice. “Part of the problem is that there is really no one to root for in the story. The author clearly wants us to sympathize with the Soviet-agent couple nabbed by the Western powers and turned over to Chiang Kai-Shek’s brutal nationalist government for trial. She ably relates their careers in service to the Soviet Union, especially impressed by what the wife was able to accomplish as a woman. But given that they were promoting the interests of a totalitarian government that would kill millions of its own people, it’s hard to cheer.”

The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn by Dave Zirin (Dutton). Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski. “When his focus on taking direct action conflicted with administrators’ philosophies on a professor’s duties, Zinn was fired by Spelman, which prompted one of his students to write a letter of protest. Her name? Alice Walker. Zirin quotes from Walker’s letter and explores the admiring relationship she shared with ‘Howie and Roz.’ He seasons The People’s Historian with numerous such stories that personalize Zinn, as well as with his own praise for the man he calls ‘an unafraid, joyful champion of the unheard.’”

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