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These novels hinge on split-second decisions that change everything.

Vladimir Sorokin’s novel “Blue Lard” features a world largely bereft of love or moral concern, but it reminds us of our freedom.

As Katie Rogers writes in “American Woman,” Jill Biden and other recent spouses are still locked in a role unlikely to change until the presidency does.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s “The American Daughters” tells the story of a powerful resistance coming from inside the house.

An overbearing mother; a vanished sister.

In “The Washington Book,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Carlos Lozada mines a genre known for sanitized prose to revealing effect.

A brooding biologist seeks transcendence in Martin MacInnes’s richly atmospheric, patiently unfurling novel “In Ascension.”

A German-born Jew who became a French writer and activist, he devoted his life to healing the divide between two historic enemies after the trauma of World War II.

In “Ferris,” a girl and her grandmother are visited by a friendly ghost; in Erin Entrada Kelly’s “The First State of Being,” a boy is visited by a time traveler.

Dwight Garner discusses a new oral history of the venerable alt-weekly, Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write.”