“The Marriage Portrait,” by Maggie O’Farrell. (Knopf, $28.)
Following her award-winning “Hamnet,” O’Farrell once again delves into 16th-century history, on this occasion taking her reader into Renaissance Italy to tell the tale of a young duchess. Lucrezia is taken to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso, the ruler of Ferrara. As she sits down to dinner with him, it dawns on her that he plans to kill her. Flitting backward and forward in time and articulating Lucrezia’s thoughts, dreams and fears, the novel brilliantly and exquisitely maps the course of her life and her efforts to survive.
“The Last White Man,” by Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead Books, $26.)
