THE LAST MILLION: Europe’s Displaced Persons From World War to Cold War, by David Nasaw. “The tone and dialogue are cool, almost jaded, gesturing obliquely at the emotions roiling beneath the surface.” “In plain, confident prose, Washington deftly records the way the forces of loyalty pull the heartstrings in different directions,” Ryu Spaeth writes in his review. One of the great themes of “Memorial” is the immense power parents wield over their children, even well into adulthood. (Riverhead, $27.) A sense of estrangement pervades this assured debut novel, which opens as a man flies to Osaka to care for his terminally ill father, leaving his visiting mother and his Black boyfriend to keep each other company. Keeping things quick gives him the freedom to move he can alight on a truth without pinning it into place.” “The brevity suits not just Walker’s style but his worldview, too. (Mad Creek Books, $19.95.) In this collection of searching personal essays, a finalist for a National Book Award, Jerald Walker writes that racism “is part and parcel of our culture, the great American disease with which we are all afflicted,” and that “there will be no cure until we accept this diagnosis.” The essays are “restless, brilliant and short,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. HOW TO MAKE A SLAVE: And Other Essays, by Jerald Walker.

You drop into one as if you were a wet cell phone and it were a jar of uncooked rice.” “One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them. “Hazzard’s stories are shrewd, formal and epigrammatic,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In addition to her acclaimed novels, the Australian-American writer Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) wrote short stories filled with intelligence and irony, and they are gathered here in a single important and elegant volume. Gregory Cowles Senior Editor, Books Twitter: STORIES, by Shirley Hazzard. Where to begin? Probably in the same place I did as a student, with the fiction: Take your pick between Shirley Hazzard’s sparkling short stories or Bryan Washington’s debut novel about the vagaries of families and love. This week’s list of recommended titles offers something of that experience, with a poetry collection nestled up to a history of World War II refugees, a consideration of tomboys next to an account of the science behind gene editing. I used to spend long hours after school at my town’s small public library, losing myself among stacks of books that felt as capacious and as mysteriously assembled as the universe itself.

How to make a slave by jerald walker