5 new books to check out this week — including Isabel Allende’s latest

A true titan of world letters returns to the page this week.

Granted, it’s not as if Isabel Allende ever really left. The prodigious Chilean expat, now in her 80s, continues to publish as quickly as ever. My Name Is Emilia Del Valle, due out this week, is Allende’s seventh novel in the past decade. And it bears some of her unmistakable hallmarks: a turbulent Latin American setting woven from history and fantasy, a bold female protagonist — even a surname familiar to longtime readers, who may well recall the del Valle family from previous books such as her seminal The House of the Spirits.

Still, don’t let the marquee name blot out the rest of this week’s offerings, which also feature natural history, modern anxiety and Josephine Baker, a real-life heroine whose wartime feats would have made for a good Allende novel, if they weren’t so outlandish already.

Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange, by Katie Goh

It’s best to check your expectations at the cover page with this one. Foreign Fruit is a history book, sure — but one that defies the genre’s tendency toward cold, neutral analysis. The book certainly goes deep on the popular citrus and its central role in international trade, from its origins in the ancient world to its present ubiquity. But the journalist, like the orange, has ancestral roots that span the globe, and here the juicy fruit reveals still another valence — as a lens on the world, and a layered metaphor for Goh’s past and our collective future.

The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, by Shokoofeh Azar

The Gowkaran Tree is Azar’s second book to be translated into English. The Iranian refugee, now settled in Australia, earned a spot on the shortlist for the 2020 International Booker Prize with her first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree. Azar’s newest novel, like her first, is an ambitious saga that interweaves a close-up focus on family drama with the panoramic fallout of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Fans of Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie and, yes, Allende too, can expect a similarly tangled skein of politics, religion and magic stretched across decades.

Josephine Baker’s Secret War, by Hanna Diamond

Say you’re compiling a shortlist of the most interesting lives of the 20th century — are there many stories that could top Baker’s? American by birth, French by choice, the trailblazing performer became the first Black woman to star in a feature film and a sensation on the Parisian stage. During World War II she parlayed that fame into a swashbuckling side gig as a secret agent for the French Resistance. Diamond, a scholar of French history, gives Baker’s wartime heroics their due here, offering a deeply researched account of their centrality to the Allied war effort. 

My Name Is Emilia Del Valle, by Isabel Allende

“I started with the event — the Civil War in Chile in 1891 — and I wanted to tell it from a sort of outsider’s point of view, a narrator that was not in either side of the civil war,” Allende told WBUR’s Here and Now. Enter Emilia del Valle, an American journalist with Chilean roots, who convinces her editors to send her to report on the war. There, Allende’s heroine finds romance, violence and all the stories so often obscured in textbooks. “I research a lot for a historical novel[s], but that’s the official story,” the writer explained. “I need to find the other voices — the voices of the women, the poor, the defeated, the children, the animals.”

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, by Amanda Hess

Deciding whether to have a kid these days can be fraught. Besides the staggering costs of birthing and raising a child in the U.S., not to mention the perennial (and alarmingly prevalent) specter of pregnancy-related death, prospective mothers now must contend with the double-edged promise of prenatal screenings — as Hess herself can attest. In her memoir, the New York Times critic recounts the rocky story of her own pregnancy and reflects on a modern medical landscape littered with arcane technologies, emotionally fraught genetic tests and, as always, a heaping helping of guilt and judgment reserved for the moms alone.