Preszler, professor of practice at Cornell University and director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative, opens with a paean to Christmas trees. Introduced by 19th-century German immigrants, they’ve become a symbol of peace and goodwill for the religious and unreligious alike. They’re also disappearing. Since realistic plastic models appeared in the 1980s, 75% of U.S. households have switched. Having absorbed this news, readers will proceed to learn that the first genuine bonanza discovered by 17th-century Europeans in North America was not gold or freedom but trees. Most will be surprised to read that pilgrim voyages to Massachusetts were financed by British timber merchants who expected to be paid back in their product. England’s forests had been logged past recovery, and the Royal Navy hated importing its masts from the Baltic. Of the miseries endured by these pious pioneers, cutting and hauling trees remained prominent. In fact, Preszler maintains that lumber was the nation’s largest industry for several centuries. “Timber framed the nation, both figuratively and literally, bankrolling America’s rapid expansion at devastating human cost.” There follows a painful account of the destruction of Eastern forests for construction as well as farming, followed by the massacre of Western pines and firs and 95% of sequoias. The author ends with another chapter on Christmas trees—the operation of a tree farm, a grueling hands-on enterprise to ensure production, after seven to 10 years, of a beautiful, fragrant, symmetrical product that keeps its needles until the New Year. Profits are slim, and most go to the retailer. An irony is that holiday evergreens, today mostly an agricultural product no less than apples, are portrayed as environmentally irresponsible, although artificial trees end up in landfills with their plastic spreading across continents and oceans and into our bodies.

If the unnamed narrator of Tokarczuk’s latest novel appears to bear certain similarities to Tokarczuk herself—an abiding interest in mushrooms and astrology, say—that’s neither here nor there. The novel is set in a remote Polish village close to the Czech border: so close to the border, in fact, that when a visiting German tourist suddenly dies, border guards from both countries take turns moving the man’s body back and forth to avoid dealing with the paperwork. As in the tour de force Flights (2018), Tokarczuk favors a storytelling style that more closely resembles a constellation—horizontal, spread-out, continually growing—over a single plotline. One chapter follows the life of a woman saint who was crucified by her father after suddenly growing a beard; others, the life of the monk who recorded the saint’s biography and couldn’t help feeling he’d been born into the wrong body. These chapters alternate with more mundane, domestic ones in which the narrator exchanges visits with her neighbor, Marta, or the other villagers go about their lives. And while at first there might appear to be little connection between the various narratives, gradually, and then more and more quickly, the connections accrue. One character is driven mad by the sudden realization that a planet he’d never known to exist had existed all along: “If you aren’t aware of something, does that mean it doesn’t exist?” he wonders. “If a person becomes aware of something, does that knowledge change him?” As a whole, the book is at once simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than it at first appears.

One of Natalie Olsen’s two best friends died of cancer. Now she stands at the bedside of the other, Cara, who’s been left in a coma with little brain activity by a super-strong date-rape drug. Cara left a club with a stranger and was found unconscious at a bus stop. Another woman is in the hospital in the same condition, and the police are looking for answers. After Natalie, who knows more than she’s saying, saves a handsome, well-dressed man named Nick from being struck by a passing car on 34th Street, she’s rewarded with an offer of a short-term job she really needs. While having coffee with Nick, she spies a magazine cover with a picture of the man Cara left the club with. The good-looking redhead is Nick’s boss, Geoffrey Rosenberg, cryptocurrency king and CEO of IxResearch, and the job is cleaning at his stunning estate. The position will not only help Natalie financially but give her a chance to spy on Rosenberg, who may have put her friend in a coma. The estate staff are distinctly unfriendly, and there are cameras everywhere and very strict rules, especially about alcohol. Natalie is hired to help at a big party being thrown to celebrate the company’s going public. Despite being in danger every minute, Natalie continues to hunt for clues that will uncover the truth about what happened to Cara.

Jasmine Morgan has gotten to where she is as a PR strategist because she’s good at her job, and, up until now, there’s been no sign of that changing. However, when she’s given a project involving the revitalization of a small Florida town, it’s made clear that she has competition in the form of her distractingly attractive archnemesis, Derek Carter. What makes the stakes even higher is that the winner of the most successful pitch doesn’t just get bragging rights—they also get to keep their job. As they reluctantly descend on Miller’s Cove together, they’re instantly at odds, but their arrival also attracts attention from the locals, who are suspicious of any outsiders who might be poking into the town’s business. To win their trust, Jasmine agrees to swallow her pride and consent to Derek’s idea that they pose as a pair of blissful newlyweds. It shouldn’t be all that hard to pretend to be in love with her professional rival, especially since she knows how good he looks with his shirt off, but their shared hotel room makes keeping her distance easier said than done. As their investigation into Miller’s Cove intensifies, so does their attraction, until the lines between fake and real start to blur. Eden’s latest contemporary romance has an intriguing premise but is lacking in execution; there’s no real build-up to the fake-marriage arrangement that makes up the bulk of the story, so Jasmine and Derek’s growing romance feels less than earned, especially on the heels of a combative dinner. While the story is full of familiar tropes that could prove appealing for some readers, it also spends too much time with its leads physically separated, when more interactions between Jasmine and Derek would have allowed their romance to develop more deeply on the page.

Researchers too often dismiss homelessness as a social problem that will “always be with us.” But the truth is far more complex. Drawing on historical analysis, policy research, and his own experiences working with homeless people, Markee argues that modern mass homelessness is an offshoot of the neoliberal agenda that has overtaken American politics. He begins by suggesting that the current “New Gilded Age” era mirrors the original Gilded Age’s extreme inequalities. Taking New York as his starting point, Markee examines the relationship between urban homelessness to economic crises like the Panic of 1873 and the Great Depression. Both led to dispossession, especially among those already made vulnerable by race or class, but it was not until the recession of the 1970s—and the brutal policies of austerity that defined it—that the modern phenomenon of mass homelessness emerged. Yet the problem was never linked to systemic/policy failures that resulted in, for example, the loss of affordable housing or the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Rather, blame was laid on homeless people themselves, who were categorized as a blight on urban spaces and demonized as criminals. From New York, mass homelessness spread to other cities across the United States during the 1980s as a pro-capitalist Reagan administration laid the foundation for Trumpian “oligarchical ethnonationalism.” Despite the current dominance of neoliberalism, Markee holds out hope that more compassionate policies—like laws ensuring the right to shelter—can return incrementally through continued social activism that remembers the sacrifices of homeless people Markee memorializes by name throughout the book.