5 notable new books that are all over the map (in a good way)

Woe betide the poor soul looking for a snappy unifying theme in this week’s notable new reads. These books confront readers with the recent past and distant future, bring them to southeastern Africa and an alternative Japan, and bedeck their pages with subversive cartoons and lush, fantastical landscapes. There are no easy throughlines here, in other words.

Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t overthink this one. Although they differ in style, genre and tone, all of these have a couple of important commonalities: They grace the shelves at a library or bookstore near you this week, and they’re well worth a look.

‘Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life,’ by Dan Nadel

Offbeat, provocative and often downright psychedelic, the comics of Robert Crumb certainly scorned the trappings of the respectable mainstream of the 1960s and ‘70s. But characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and projects like “Zap Comix,” were also underground in the same sense a seed is: indispensable to the growth and flowering of a whole generation of cartoonists and graphic novelists behind him.

Nadel, a comics historian and museum curator, lovingly crafts a biography of a life that was often just as complex and eccentric as the influential art it spawned.

‘Hyo the Hellmaker,’ by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

There is another artist at work on these pages with a very different style. Ghosh’s sumptuously illustrated young-adult debut introduces readers to a world where gods live among ordinary mortals and crafting bespoke hells can be a legitimate family enterprise.

The British-Japanese author gilds her plot — a twisty tale that blends murder mystery, mythology and fantasy — with art that draws on a wealth of influences, from manga and watercolor to traditional Japanese wood engravings.

‘The Jew Who Would Be King,’by Adam Rovner

Nathaniel Isaacs’ life would strain credulity if it were fiction. Born to British-Jewish merchants in the early 19th century, the real-life figure was variously a globe-trotting trader, courtier to a powerful African king, alleged slaveholder and vicious warlord.

Skeptics have also called him a big fat liar. In Rovner's deeply researched biography, the adventurer’s swashbuckling memoirs are not just an entertaining tale worthy of a wary retelling. They’re also a crowbar of sorts, used to pry open a window onto an era of possibility, prejudice and burgeoning colonial avarice.

‘Notes from a Regicide,’ by Isaac Fellman

The Lambda Literary Award winner’s latest novel is both intimate and far-flung.

Set in a distant future that bears unmistakable traces of today’s world, the narrative is split between two soul-searching voices: Griffon Keming, a trans man reflecting on his tumultuous coming of age, and a journal left by one of his adoptive parents, a pair of transgender political revolutionaries now dead. It is a complicated inheritance, to say the least.

‘Vanishing World,’ by Sayaka Murata

Sometimes, in Murata’s fiction, it can be tricky to disentangle the familiar from the bizarre. Weird concepts are treated casually, even as what we perceive as natural is unmasked as utterly alien if viewed from the right angle.

That’s true of the Japanese author’s latest novel, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, which presents a speculative Japan where artificial insemination is the norm and physical sex is considered taboo, frowned upon in favor of romantic relationships with TV characters.

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