Never Anyone But You is strongest once the two women retreat from Paris for Jersey and set up house away from the war.

German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, which goes easy on academic jargon but contains extensive notes and a lengthy bibliography, offers a full look at a writer and thinker who successfully lived in and moved among different worlds. It should bring attention to a long-neglected figure and his writings.

Memorial has a lot going for it. Composed as a non-chronological patchwork of short paragraphs and chapters, the novel is less punchy and more downbeat than the short story collection. Washington has described his approach to fiction as “traumedy.”

THE ILLICIT LOVE AFFAIR of world-famous piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz and the less successful pianist Nico Kaufmann is recreated vividly in Lea Singer’s The Piano Student. Over the course of their relationship, Horowitz and Kaufmann exchanged love letters, some with highly erotic content—which they both agreed to burn after reading them.

            The author shows her keen ear for Canadian speech in various registers, and the structuring of the plot as a series of scenes gives this novel a steady momentum. Polar Vortex is a cautionary tale for adults.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967), one of the best-known writers of the Harlem Renais-sance, remains an endlessly fascinating, charismatic figure. He was born into a chaotic but well-educated and politically connected family, sometimes living with his mother or grandmother or family friends.

             Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography, which Gill rightly credits with the Virginia Woolf revival of the past half-century, contained other revelations that she seizes upon. The most infamous is the fact that Vanessa and Virginia were both molested as pre-teens by their half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, who were a decade older.