GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Vintage, $16.95.) Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime resident of the state, explores Texas’ foibles, ironies and contradictions with affection. Given the state’s booming population and economic growth, Wright’s book seems to say, America’s future runs through Texas — whether the rest of the country likes it or not.
HOW IT HAPPENED, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In this murder mystery, Rob Barrett, an interrogation specialist with the FBI, is sent to investigate a double homicide that’s rattled the town of Port Hope, Maine. He believes the confession by a young addict, who directs him to where she says the bodies can be found. But when the details don’t seem to pan out, he’s kicked off the case.
UNEASY PEACE: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, by Patrick Sharkey. (Norton, $16.95.) What’s the downside to falling crime rates nationwide? In Sharkey’s analysis, what was done to make those rates plunge included increased incarceration rates and violent policing tactics. This book admirably connects the story of how the country became safer with why many communities are wary of the police.
A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Peter Carey. (Vintage, $16.95.) A married couple and their bachelor neighbor set out on a 10,000-mile endurance contest around Australia in the hopes of eventually opening their own auto dealership. Times reviewer Craig Taylor praised this shape-shifting, propulsive novel, writing: “With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt.”
THE MAKING OF A DREAM: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What It Means to Be American, by Laura Wides-Muñoz. (Harper, $17.99.) Wides-Muñoz chronicles the battle for immigration reform through the stories of young activists. A centerpiece of the story is the arrival in 2012 of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and how it grew out of close to two decades of grass-roots efforts and political activity.
CALL ME ZEBRA, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. (Mariner, $14.99.) In this crackling novel, a bookish Iranian in exile retraces the journey she took with her father and finds love along the way. As Times reviewer Liesl Schillinger wrote, the author “relays Zebra’s brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.