My parents recently sent me a copy of a book they’d both read and loved: Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis. The title alludes to the battle of Salamis, a key turning point in the Greco-Persian war, while the book itself focuses on a rather less decisive moment in Spanish history on its way to grappling with the peculiarly mixed legacy of Franco and his dictatorship in contemporary Spain.

In case you don’t remember, the usual narrative of the Spanish Civil War is that the good and idealistic Republican forces lost out to the brutalities of the Falange, but fortunately after Franco’s death Spain returned to being a more free society. However, the more we learn about what actually went down, the more it seems that there was no side of angels. The Republicans probably had better arts and literature, but there were plenty of poets, even good ones, on the fascist side. The Republican forces slaughtered priests and suspected collaborators just as readily as the Nationalists slaughtered communists and dissidents. (To be clear, the fascist dictatorship was definitely bad. It’s just that the alternative would likely have been a similar stretch of terrible communist-affiliated dictatorship rather than a beacon of freedom and democracy).

Nothing is simple, in other words, especially with the civil war and the dictatorship still in the very recent past. That’s why we get a novel like this one.

The narrator is a moderately successful journalist and failed novelist, who winds up researching and writing a nonfiction book about a single odd incident toward the end of the Civil War. One of the intellectual forbears of the Falange is in a prisoner of war camp; as his captors evacuate and flee, they plan to kill all the prisoners. By chance, this one escapes. A soldier finds him hiding in a ditch, but lets him go anyway. Post-war, the escaped prisoner is lauded as a hero by Franco, gets a ministry position, pulls strings to help dissidents go free, and then lives out his years as an increasingly irrelevant figure in the national political discourse. The Republican executioner who found him and let him go remains anonymous.

The narrator despises fascists reflexively but finds himself drawn to this particular character and the people who surrounded him, some of whom are still alive. Each interview and archival visit clarifies some parts of the story and obscures others, and the reader is left to untangle layer upon layer of historical confusion.

It’s a striking contrast with the historical novels of Hillary Mantel. She also covers confused and contentious historical territory, but she does it in a single frame: She picks a narrative and carries the reader along. Her prefaces acknowledge that historical interpretations are imprecise, and that in the interest of the tale she’s chosen the ones that she feels best.

Cercas doesn’t do that at all. With Soldiers of Salamis he has written a novel about the writing of a nonfiction book about historical incidents, in which nobody is quite as noble or as evil or as anything as anyone wants or thinks. So we have a temporal, emotional, and political muddle of frequently terrible ideals mediated mostly by their incompetent or inconsistent application. That muddle is framed and reframed and reframed again inside different stories and perspectives. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a pretty good reflection of the way the world works.

I talked with my parents about it over email and their comments are pretty insightful, so I’ll just quote them here. My father says he “found the multiple layers of narrator (novelist, journalist, horny loser, historical novel, history) somewhat frustrating while I was reading it, but in retrospect it added a lot of depth.” My mother says she really appreciated “the way Cercas allows us to see the aleatory nature of goodness and evil and even heroism.”

If you’re a student of 20th century history or of Spain, or want a clearer look at the unclear currents of war, Javier Cercas is definitely worth checking out.

(And no, there’s really no better word than “aleatory” in this context, is there?)

I can’t remember when I first read Ian Rankin, or if I’ve even read all of the Rebus series for that matter. I just know that I can always pick up one of his books and find a great plot matched with interesting characters. The implication in Exit Music, the last Rebus novel, was that the detective was about to retire. Rankin moved to another great series that involves Malcolm Fox of the The Complaints department (the UK’s version of IAB).

To my surprise, Rebus is appearing in another book, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, out now. John Rebus now works as a civilian in the cold case department. Nina Hazlitt asks him to investigate the disappearance of her daughter ten years ago, as well as two other women who disappeared along the same highway, the A9, in the last decade. He’s reunited with his former partner Siobahn Clarke, and Malcolm Fox makes a cameo, investigating Rebus as he applies to be let back on the force. The ending leaves us to believe that this is not the last we’re seeing of John Rebus, and I for one am glad.

I always wonder how women get sucked into cults. What’s can lure a woman to do things they normally might never consider, say marrying fifty other women in a polygamous relationship with one man? Amity & Sorrow, Peggy Riley’s debut novel addresses this very question as Amaranth flees the cult she had been a part of since the beginning. Charismatic cult leader Zacariah had sought to take their daughter Sorrow as a new wife, and Amaranth made the decision to flee with her two daughters. She drives for four days straight before crashing the car in Oklahoma. There she tries to figure out how to navigate the outside world. Her daughters, raised their whole lives in a small enclave, have an even harder time. Sorrow believes she’s the Oracle, meant to bring a new messiah into the world. She longs to be back with her father and embarks on a self-destructive mission to return to the cult. Amity, younger and more naive, tries to watch out for her sister and figure out her role in the new family structure. The whole book is disturbing, claustrophobic almost with a creepy ending. Peggy Riley has written a memorable first novel.

I don’t often reread things. There are so many good books out there waiting for me, I never feel like I have time to go back to something read once already. There are exceptions of course, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Peter Hessler, with his newest book of essays, has become another.

The other day I spotted an ARC in the office of Peter Hessler’s Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West. When I realized it was a compilation of essays previously published in The New Yorker, I was briefly disappointed. Still, I flipped through and started reading an essay I hadn’t caught the first time around. Then I kept on reading, even the ones I had read in the magazine. I found that it made me appreciate what a fine writer Hessler is. His profile of Yao Ming brought him off the court and turned him into a flesh and blood person for me. ‘Wild Flavor’ reviews two restaurants that specialize in rats. He doesn’t go the route many travel writers go, with the ‘look how different our cultures are, I’m eating something weird” route. He tries to understand why rat is considered a delicacy and makes an effort to eat and enjoy it.

I ended up reading the entire collection, enjoying it the entire time. Hessler’s book has reminded me that there are reasons people go back to books they love; for me, it was to enjoy the essays in a completely new way.

When you first begin reading John Kenney’s debut novel Truth in Advertising, you might mistake the narrator for yet another one of those twentysomething lost-in-the world voices. Finbar Dolan might be lost, but he’s almost forty. A copywriter at an ad agency, he finds himself on the sets of commercials discussing baby diapers while trying to navigate the minefield of his family life. We learn in bits and pieces that his entire family is unraveling, that his abusive father is dying in a hospital, that his mother committed suicide when he was twelve, that no one in the family talks about it, that they don’t even talk to each other all that much.

The first thing most people asked me upon learning I was in culinary school was what restaurant I aspired to work in when I was done. I spent the whole year telling people that I had no desire to work in a kitchen professionally. Okay, almost no desire. Who doesn’t dream of running their own kitchen one day? After spending a lot of time doing stages (fancy name for an unpaid internship also called a trail) at various restaurants around town, I know it’s not for me for a variety of reasons.

If you want to understand how demanding a kitchen can be, read Scott Haas’s new book Back of the House: The Secret Life of a Restaurant. The food writer and clinical psychologist spent eighteen months in the kitchen of James Beard Award-winner Tony Maws of Craigie on Main, here in Cambridge. Maws began with a smaller restaurant called Craigie Street Bistrot on a side street in Cambridge with a constantly changing menu. Both a neighborhood restaurant and a place for real invention, it and Maws gained a reputation for imaginative and creative food. In 2008, Maws moved into a larger space in Central Square, Cambridge with a bar, more seats, and an open kitchen, renaming it Craigie on Main. Its reputation has only gotten better.

I’ve been lucky enough to eat there several times, both at the older location and the new. Mr. Bookdwarf and I treated ourselves to the ten course tasting menu once for a birthday. I’ll never forget the chef himself coming out with a stuffed pig trotter served on a bed of grains. Mind blowing. We were just starting to explore food and though the check set us back a bit, we regretted nothing. This was before the days when food-bloggers were photographing each plate, but I remember most of those dishes with startling clarity. In 2009, we got engaged at the bar in Craigie on Main, and held the rehearsal dinner there the night before the wedding. Another indelible image: Mr. Bookdwarf and his grandmother sharing an entree for two that consisted of a half a roasted pig’s head.

So Haas’ book holds both professional and personal interest for me. Maws gave Haas unlimited access to himself and his crew. Maws has a reputation around town for what I’ll call his intensity in the kitchen. We witnessed it once: We were eating at sat  at seats overlooking the open kitchen, which was bustling quietly until someone made a mistake. Maws sounded like he was trying not to scream. We heard only “Don’t … you… EVER….” before he stormed into the back. The line cook and the ring-side diners all seemed shaken, but the quiet bustle returned and the meal went on.

Haas gets to the roots of this intensity: For Maws, perfect execution every time is an absolute necessity and obsession. He has only the one restaurant, no cookbook, no brand-diffusion line. Chef, after all, is French for chief. Being the boss means having your name on the door and your reputation on the line when something goes wrong. Maws trusts no-one else to get things done right every single time, and so he spends his entire life in the restaurant. Over the course of the book, Haas sees Maws try to step back and delegate slightly more, trust his lieutenants to do the work, and allow them to make and recover from and learn from mistakes. Still, the entire Craigie ethos is one of absolute lack of compromise  from ingredient to table. This is, after all, a man who refuses to serve tomatoes out of season. In New England, that means that there are tomatoes on the menu only during August and September. Craigie is a rarity in the restaurant world: Innovative, completely its own animal, and still formal and restrained.

Haas shows us the kind of fanatical person, and the kind of intense work, it takes to make a restaurant like that happen, and keep happening, every day for decades.

When someone asks me if I want to be a line cook, I’m going to tell them to read Haas. I love food, I love cooking, and I love the restaurant world. But it takes a special kind of insanity to make it into your living.

Michael Moss, the New York Times reporter Pulitzer prize winner reporter, has written an eye opening book, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How Food Giants Hooked Us, which continues his investigations into the processed food industry. From the creation of Lunchables to the pushback from industry giants against regulations on salt and sugar, Moss covers it all and more. You’ll learn about the bliss point of sugar, the rise of cheese in the American diet, and that Cargill turns out 1.7 billion pounds of salt a year for use in food. 1.7 billion! This book is comprehensive and I can’t stop quoting bits of it to Mr. Bookdwarf. You’ll never grocery shop the same way again, I promise. Consider this news report that came out today.

What do you know about the French Revolution? Last month, I knew precious little. I remembered a few details: There was Bastille day, and then Robespierre was the bad guy, and some guy got murdered in a bathtub, and the Queen got her head cut off, right? But which happened first? And what’s the difference between a sans-culotte and a Jacobin?

If you liked Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (and you should, they’re amazing), then go back and read A Place of Greater Safety, Hillary Mantel’s similarly excellent treatment of the French Revolution.

(Don’t go thinking history is all Mantel does, though. Her output is wildly diverse. I’m trying to read all of it, and so far, it’s all fantastic. Beyond Black, about a fortune-teller in post-Thatcher Britain, still stays with me).

So, the Revolution: If it confuses us today, it’s because it was confusing then, too. And it was long – the Bastille fell several years before Louis and Antoinette were forced from the throne. All that time, there were shifting and uncertain alliances: Some wanted a constitutional monarchy. Some wanted riots so they could suppress them and become heroes. Some wanted Louis gone and replaced with a different king. Some wanted a republic. Others anarchy. We think about it as good and evil, but of course it’s not that simple, ever. We remember Robespierre as a villain but up until the end, his friends regarded him as the most ethical of revolutionaries.

Even after reading this book, I can’t quite keep all the factions and intrigues straight – but I’m pretty sure that even the participants didn’t, either. I wonder how similar this story is to those of other revolutions, not just the American Revolution but also the current unrest in the Middle East today: All of these noble causes and common enemies come to a boil, and then the realization that the fight is now a struggle to govern.

Fall creeps up on me each year, like a soft kitten stalking prey. All of a sudden there’s a nip in the air, the leaves change colors to a brightly hued spectrum. And suddenly they’re gone. The naked trees, elegantly bare, wave their branches in the Fall wind reminding me that Winter will soon  be here and to get my sweaters ready.

Fall also brings the regional trade shows. Booksellers from all over New England come together in Providence, RI to look at, talk about, and touch all of the Fall books. It’s a great time, seeing old friends and discussing what we’ve all read in the past few months. “You really liked that?”I didn’t at all!” “I’ll add that to the top of my reading queue.”

This year I took the train down from South Station each day to Providence, whose station is only a five minute walk to the convention center. I love, love taking the train. It’s so civilized. You show up 10 minutes before the train leaves, everyone calmly boards, and you hope you get a seat on the good side with the views as you go down the coast. It also gives you a chance to read uninterrupted (unless you get caught up in a conversation about Bobby Valentine with the conductor) for a while.

Usually the pretty foliage distracts me from whatever I’m reading on the train. But this time I was lucky to grab a spectacular debut novel called The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Anyana Mathis that absorbed all of my attention. Each chapter tells the story of a different member of the family. Throughout them all, we see Hattie and how early tragedies in her life echo for generations. In the opening story set in 1925, 16 year old Hattie nurses her twin babies sick with pneumonia. Unable to afford a doctor, they die, devastating Hattie for the rest of her life. From here, we move onto other children of Hattie’s, who feel the lack of tenderness from their mother. I was surprised to find that each story gave such vibrant portraits of each family member, telling a vignette that illuminates their entire lives.

Mathis’s novel induces heartache and tears but also respect for the characters. This first novel launches a rare talent, one that I will watch eagerly for her next works.

Ruta Sepetys’ first novel, about a teenage girl trapped in a Siberian prison, was published last March. Unfortunately, the title was Between Shades of Gray, and it’s probably suffered for having a name so similar to a certain infamous novel written around the same time. I haven’t read it, but it’s been well-reviewed – Sepetys is certainly making a name for herself as a writer who speaks to young adults without dumbing anything down.

Her new book, Out of the Easy, is set in New Orleans in 1950. And while it’s likely to be targeted and sold mostly to young adults, it’s hardly a children’s book. The protagonist, Josie Moraine, begins her tale with the frank but alarming sentence “My mother is a prostitute.”

Josie is determined to escape that shameful legacy and head to college in the Northeast, but it’s a long shot, especially once her mother gets tangled up in a murder…

The subject matter is challenging and mature, but Sepetys manages to avoid being explicit or titillating while still not pulling any punches. Instead, Josie is written convincingly as a young woman trying to keep her head in a world of hurt and danger and disrespect.