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NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Ambassador J. Peter Pham, former U.S. special envoy for the Sahel region in Africa, about the next steps for Niger as a military junta holds on to power following a coup.

Explorer and activist Bell is best remembered today for helping create the modern state of Iraq. A smartly edited new collection of her writings presents a fascinating (if not always smooth) portrait.

This weekend, the NPR Books Time Machine is rewinding Scott Lynch's swashbuckling Gentleman Bastard series, a combination fantasy of manners, heist caper and heartfelt buddy comedy. With pirates.

Bradley Somer's new novel follows (literally) Ian the goldfish, who's catching glimpses of life and love in the apartments he passes as his bowl plummets from a 27th-floor balcony.

The second volume of Jo Walton's trilogy about the creation of a real-world Republic picks up 30 years after events of the first book. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says it's an expectation-shattering read.

Jeanette Winterson's retelling of The Winter's Tale includes hedge fund managers and a New Orleans setting. But critic Annalisa Quinn says the book doesn't quite stand on its own.

Patti Smith's new memoir is a dreamy, elegiac recollection of loved ones gone too soon, energized by her interests and travels. It jumps in time, from her husband's death in 1994 to Hurricane Sandy.

Ken Liu's debut is an epic saga of gods, kings and rebels, set in an invented world with echoes of pan-Asian myth. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it "beautiful, nuanced, fierce, original and diverse."

Writer Sarah Manguso has been a compulsive diarist since childhood; her new memoir documents the ways motherhood has changed her writing. Critic Heller McAlpin says it's full of lovely observations.

David Treuer's story of death and discord on an Indian reservation could have blundered into melodrama. Instead, the book dodges this fate by retracing its steps, revealing new depths each time.

Author Stewart O'Nan says that in the late '30s, Fitzgerald was at the bottom of a bad spiral. But in Hollywood, "he finds himself again: He finds his love of writing, he finds his love of the world."

Kristopher Jansma's debut novel is a hypercomplex meditation on the boundary between truth and lies. Heller McAlpin says the book "reaches a dizzying complexity that borders on the tiresome."

Poet Brian Turner's My Life as a Foreign Country is a lyrical, haunting memoir of his military family, his service in Bosnia and Iraq, and the struggle he faced to adjust to life on the home front.

In spring 2001, Desma Brooks, Michelle Fischer and Debbie Helton signed up for the National Guard expecting just a few days of drills each month. Soldier Girls tells the stories of their deployments.

Lewis Buzbee's account of his idyllic youth in the California public school system is relentlessly positive, though bracketed with criticism of current school policy and a firm call for more funding.

Edward Carey's illustrated young adult novel about the keepers of mystical trash heaps (yes, you read that right) in an alternate Victorian London combines thrills with intelligence and compassion.

Ben Yagoda uses the battle between music licensing organizations ASCAP and BMI to sketch out a broader lament about the long fade-out of the American Songbook and the segue to modern pop music.

Yes, you read that right. Nick Hornby's charming, light yet thoughtful tale of the creative team behind a fictional BBC sitcom in the 1960s takes the pejorative sting out of the word "heartwarming."

Gratuitous, gore-soaked and reveling in poor taste, Chase Novak's Brood is a true B-movie sequel — and just as fun. But despite its body count, the book still could have used a little more blood.

Richard McGuire's Here started small — as an underground magazine cartoon 25 years ago. But it's grown to an epoch-spanning narrative that captures all the bits of history happening in one room.

Irish poet Eavan Boland's latest volume meditates on the gulf between ideas of nation and individual lives of women; reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it a "beautiful kind of conversation."

Patricia Marx's comic memoir chronicles her four-month attempt to boost her brainpower. Critic Heller McAlpin says anyone clever enough to have written this book shouldn't worry about her brain.

Blume says her time in Miami Beach in the late '40s was the most important time in her childhood. Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself is a slightly fictionalized autobiography of Blume's life there.

Norman Lock's new novel takes readers on a breathlessly-paced tour of the Old West, from the point of view of a former Civil War bugle boy who tags along with some of the era's legendary characters.

Stephen Fry is a world-class wit, a learned fellow and probably a really great guy. Unfortunately, says reviewer Trey Graham, that doesn't come through in More Fool Me, the new volume of his memoirs.