5 new books this week spotlight Joe Biden, the WNBA, rivers, migrants and autofiction

Strap in, folks: This week the publishing calendar is putting some difficult questions on the table, which range from pressing political concerns to perspective-altering riddles about life itself.

For instance, what did former President Joe Biden’s team know — and choose to do — about the octogenarian’s alleged mental and physical decline during his ill-fated reelection campaign? For those reluctant to wade into presidential politics, don’t worry, there are other doozies on offer: Does a body of water deserve the same legal rights as living beings? Where is home for all the migrants suspended between lands and eras? And how exactly did Dawn Staley become such a basketball powerhouse?

OK, these questions are not all painfully complicated. But each book offers a slew of answers — and edifying reads — that are quite unlike the others on this list.

The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien

It has been a decade since Thien released her last novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which earned the Canadian writer international recognition from prize committees. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants, Thien has demonstrated a fascination with betweenness – that double-edged sense of possibility and dislocation experienced by travelers, migrants and voyagers of every dimension. Here, those dimensions are not just limited to three: The protagonists, a young girl and her ailing father, find themselves at a surreal staging area for migrants who are traveling through time as well as space.

Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane

Few nature writers working today produce work with the unassuming elegance and undisguised wonder that are evident on Macfarlane’s every page. The British naturalist has previously cast his attention far and wide – and close to home, and high above and below us, too – but wherever he goes, he brings a keen interest in how landscapes are shaped by the words we use to describe them. His latest directs this characteristic linguistic-tinged lens toward the waterways that course through human imagination – taking readers along on far-flung trips and historical deep dives, with the book’s mind-altering title question never far behind.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

The “original sin,” in this case, refers to former President Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection at 81. Here Tapper, the CNN anchor – and surprisingly prolific thriller novelist – has teamed with Axios reporter Alex Thompson to pull together this expose on what lay behind Biden’s ultimately short-lived reelection bid, as well as what they deem to be “aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment” by his political allies. The book’s publication comes at an unexpectedly relevant moment, just days after the former president revealed his prostate cancer diagnosis.

Spent, by Alison Bechdel

You may know Bechdel from Fun Home, her celebrated – and occasionally banned – graphic memoir, which became a Tony-winning musical. You may know her from the “Bechdel Test,” a perennially relevant rubric for assessing women’s representation in movies. Or her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, where that test was first proposed. But do you, you know, know her? That question gets a bit complicated in Bechdel’s latest, in which she shelves her usual mode of memoir in favor of fiction … about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, whose personal story sounds awfully familiar. Prepare for things to get a bit meta.

Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother, and the Life Lessons I Learned from All Three, by Dawn Staley

Few in hoops history can boast a resume to rival Staley’s. Frankly it reads like a Mad Libs made from the sport’s highest honors; assemble any combination of “champion,” “Olympic” or “record,” among many other plaudits and you’re likely to describe at least one phase of her four decades as a player and now coach. Less familiar to fans of women’s basketball is Staley’s life off the court, from her North Philadelphia upbringing to the key moments that have shaped her as a competitor — a blind spot that this memoir promises to fill, for fans of women’s basketball.