6 Paperbacks to Read This Week

At age 6, Bell’s mother bought him a green water gun instead of a realistic one, explaining that she feared for his safety as a Black child in Los Angeles. In this intimate graphic memoir, Bell recounts the ways that conversation has reverberated in his life, from the racism he’s encountered from neighbors to deciding whether his own son, now 6, is ready for “The Talk.”

“On the day he is taken from his family, Abbas is carving a peacock,” starts this novel set in early 1800s Mysore, India. It follows teenage Abbas, a gifted woodworker, as he carves a giant wooden tiger for a sultan, and then across the world as his talents gain attention. Years later, Abbas finds himself in England looking for the tiger, which has been plundered.

In this stirring novel of family and forgiveness, Lito, a Filipino chauffeur on his deathbed, writes letters to his estranged son, a journalist in the United States. To draw him in, he offers a story: a secret meeting between the former Filipino president Corazon Aquino and her bitter political rival, the Marie Antoinette-esque former first lady, Imelda Marcos.

Smith, known for her poem “Good Bones,” returns with a memoir-in-vignettes that plumbs the end of her marriage — which “was never the same after that poem” — and her recommitment to herself in its wake. “Reader, I’m trying to give you the truth here,” Smith writes. “I’m trying to show you my hands.”

On Ireland’s west coast in the early aughts, Kala Lannan was the fearless leader of a teenage friend group. One summer, she disappeared. Fifteen years later, Helen, Joe and Mush, three of the original group, reconvene at home. But when human remains are found in the woods, they must reckon with both past and present in this acute thriller.

First published in 2017 and newly reprinted with an introduction by Molly Jong-Fast, Friend’s sexual history of the 1990s delves into everything from MTV’s “The Real World” to the (accidental) discovery of Viagra, the experience of Monica Lewinsky, and the ways the internet changed sex.