New books this week: Yoko, Elphaba and lost connections

Don’t let the crowd of one-word titles fool you: Those looking for their next book will have quite the potpourri to pick from this week.

The new releases range from a debut novel to a new installment in a venerable series, from a memoir of wrongful imprisonment to a celebrated novelist's tale of deep-sea intrigue — and then there's a biography of Yoko Ono, who defies any comparison, really.

‘Elphie,’ by Gregory Maguire

Something “Wicked” this way comes … again. Long before the big-screen blockbuster, before even its Broadway source material, it was Maguire who three decades ago introduced the popular rebranding of the Wicked Witch of the West.

“Elphie” marks his fourth follow-up to that 1995 origin story, and the first prequel to explore the earliest years of Dorothy's biggest bully — aka Elphaba, as she’s known in Maguire's revisionist account of Oz.

‘Free,’ by Amanda Knox

Long a fixture in tabloid headlines around the world, Knox’s story was as terrible as it was tortuous: an American student, found guilty of brutally murdering her British roommate in Italy — only to have that conviction overturned on appeal, then reinstated, then overturned again, this time for good.

Now, a decade after her final exoneration, Knox reflects on the years she spent in prison and under the media microscope.

‘Tilt,’ by Emma Pattee

This much-hyped debut novel follows one very pregnant Ikea shopper on what was supposed to be a mundane day of errands. But after an earthquake demolishes those plans, along with much of Portland, Oregon, Pattee’s protagonist finds she must make her way home on foot.

That path will be neither safe nor simple, though, strewn as it is with her own doubts and desperate neighbors just struggling to survive.

‘Twist,’ by Colum McCann

If information is the lifeblood of our era, the veins that circulate it can be difficult to find — and even harder to fix. The fiber-optic cables that carry the internet from continent to continent across the ocean floor have an alarming tendency to break down, just like everything else.

In this thriller, the repair job connects and complicates the lives of two Irishmen, a journalist and a mysterious free diver, off the coast of Africa. Expect echoes of Joseph Conrad, as well as the Irish-born National Book Award winner’s own enduring fascination with the complexities of empathy.

‘Yoko,’ by David Sheff

Yoko Ono has lived so many different lives — multi-hyphenate artist, peace activist, maligned scapegoat and iconoclast hero, often simultaneously — that untangling and rendering them legible on the page presents no easy task for a biographer. Sheff approaches this challenge not only as a reporter and historian, but as a close friend too.

He interweaves this account of her life with observations from source material no other historian would have access to: a friendship that dates back decades, to the months just preceding her husband John Lennon’s death.

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