New books this week: War, murder, and Lionel Richie

Now that we’re past the equinox, makes sense that darkness is gathering — not just outside our windows, with the lengthening nights, but also on the printed page. This week’s notable book releases promise a veritable potpourri of death: murder, war, ritual interment, even the dreadful undeath of avenging spirits.

Luckily though, to start us off, the heavy load is at least leavened by a celebration of life from one of our most defiantly sentimental artists, in Lionel Richie’s new memoir.

Truly: A Memoir, by Lionel Ritchie

Few voices on the radio are as easy to recognize as Richie’s, partly because few voices have proven as ubiquitous over the past half-century. Find just one person who says they can’t belt at least part of the chorus to “All Night Long (All Night),” and it’s likely you’ve found yourself a brazen liar. In Truly, the musical icon tries a new medium on for size. Across nearly 500 pages, the smooth-singing septuagenarian offers a perspective as intimate as it is panoramic, covering just about every major plot point in an arc that takes him from his youth in Tuskegee, Ala., to his later work on American Idol.

Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories, by Bora Chung and translated by Anton Hur

In the pantheon of awful jobs, surely few could compete with the one held by Chung’s beleaguered narrator: night shift employee at a house of cursed objects. We perambulate from haunting to haunting, as each of the interlinked stories in this slender volume betrays the kind of allegory and dread you’d find in some of the darker fairy tales. Hur returns as translator from the original Korean; he previously worked on Chung’s Cursed Bunny, which earned a spot on the shortlists for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award

The Impossible Fortune: A Thursday Murder Club Novel by Richard Osman

Welcome, new members! The Thursday Murder Club reconvenes with impeccable timing, just a month after its film adaptation hit Netflix. Now, it’s likely that only the most ambitious — and/or flexibly employed — newbies managed to get caught up on all the books in time for The Impossible Fortune; the novel dropping this week represents the fifth adventure in as many years for its foursome of retiree gumshoes. But don’t worry if you’re still just filling out your name tag; this cozy, exceedingly British romp of friendship, murder and creative aging is happy to wait here for you when you’re ready.

The Hunger We Pass Down, by Jen Sookfong Lee

Perhaps the title gives it away, but it’s worth emphasizing: This story of intergenerational trauma is not exactly a light-hearted romp. Readers who are sensitive to mentions of rape and child abuse may want to think seriously before cracking open this work of horror. The uncanny menace that stalks our present-day protagonist, a single mom, may have something to do with the more earthly cruelties visited upon her ancestor, a World War II “comfort woman” whose desperate story also darkens these pages.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, by Mariana Enriquez and translated by Megan McDowell

Horrors prowl the pages of the Argentine author’s fiction, which tends to be woven from the supernatural and the barbed threads of her own country’s recent history. So perhaps it’s no surprise that cemeteries hold a special personal fascination for the writer. The surprise, rather, may be that this collection of essays about her visits to graveyards all over the world is less about death than life, and the varieties — and the emotional imperative — of somehow marking its passing.

The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides — new translation by Robin Waterfield

It’s not often that, on a list of new releases, you get to include something roughly two and a half millennia old. The “new” descriptor, of course, does not pertain to Thucydides, whose account of the cataclysmic war between Athens and Sparta is considered one of the very first — and still most important — works of history as we know the field today. What’s new is Waterfield’s translation, which updates the Ancient Greek scholar’s text for the modern ear, with idiomatic English that reads less like an ornate museum showpiece and more the way it would have sounded to Thucydides’ contemporaries: clear, simple and almost as urgently relevant as it was when he wrote it.