A thriller, a dystopia, a Gothic novel about a family curse: Genre lovers have options in this week’s recommended books, including Megan Collins’s playful crossbreeding of a rom-com and a domestic thriller, Samrat Upadhyay’s dystopian novel about authoritarianism in the Himalayas and Sara Sligar’s updated version of a classic American Gothic. In nonfiction, we recommend an elegy for Black Twitter and a true-crime history of the 19th-century murder trial that may have inspired “The Scarlet Letter.” Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Clark, a professor of race and political communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, chronicles the heyday of Black Twitter — the sprawling online community that flourished for a time among Black users of Twitter who used the social media platform to create and nurture a thriving cultural conversation. Refreshingly, Clark’s book is more interested in memorializing Black Twitter than in explaining or legitimizing it.
Oxford University Press | Paperback, $24.99
Sligar’s novel — a modern retelling of Charles Brockden Brown’s early American Gothic “Wieland; or The Transformation” (1798) — features an unthinkably rich brother and sister, heirs to a steel fortune, who are haunted by a family curse and by compromising video tapes (possibly faked) that upend the brother’s Senate campaign.
MCDxFSG | $29
Set in a dystopian version of Nepal, Upadhyay’s epic novel begins in the aftermath of the “Big Two,” an earthquake that has devastated the Himalayan mountain nation. As refugees try to salvage what remains of their lives in tent cities, an authoritarian leader known as P.M. Papa rises to rule over the ravaged nation with an iron fist.
Did Nathaniel Hawthorne base “The Scarlet Letter” on the real-life story of the Rev. Ephraim Avery and his young congregant Sarah Maria Cornell, whose gruesome death in 1832 Massachusetts shocked all of New England? So argues Dawson, a prolific podcaster and author, in this true-crime history dissecting the case that led to Avery’s trial and acquittal.
Putnam | $29
Following a heart transplant, the possibly unhinged main character of Collins’s thriller falls for the widower whose dead wife’s heart now beats in her chest. But there’s a possible hitch in her fantasy of him as her perfect future husband. “His wife’s death wasn’t an accident,” someone has written in the comments to one of his Instagram posts.