What’s New in Paperback: ‘How Beautiful We Were’ and ‘The Cult of Us’


HOW BEAUTIFUL WE ARE, By Imbolo Mbue. (Random House, 384 p., $18.) Mbue’s sweeping tale of the struggle between a fictional African village and an American oil company has been named one of Book Review’s Top 10 Books of 2021. According to our critic Omar El Akkad, “Mbue deftly shadows areas of greed. and guilt mingle.”

Cowboy Graves: Three Novels, Roberto Bolaño’s photo. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Penguin, 208 p., $16.) Our critic, Garth Risk Hallberg, said that what anchors the “Bolañoverse” is “the loss of youth leading to a greater loss of historical possibility.” In these stories, Bolaño’s fictional double return to Chile after the 1973 coup, a poet reckoning with the consequences of the coup, and a 17-year-old boy taken to a secret surrealist art group in French Guiana.

GOOD GIRLS: An Ordinary Murder, Sonia Faleiro’s photo. (Grove, 352 p., $17.) In 2014, the bodies of two young cousins ​​were found hanging from a mango tree in India. Parul Sehgal, a former critic of the Times, noted that Faleiro, who investigated the circumstances of the deaths, wrote a “binding” account. “It has the speed and flair of a whodunit, but no clear description.”

THE CULT OF WE: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Big Startup Mistake, By Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. (Crown, 464 p., $18.) While the rise and fall of WeWork has been covered extensively since 2020, this latest addition is invaluable. As our critic Katherine Rosman puts it, “The book reserves its firepower in the disastrous combination of Neumann’s salesmanship, fundraising addiction, and focus on personal wealth.”



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