Atlantic County Library System

In Anuradha Roy’s melancholy new novel, an older man, poring through a cache of letters, grapples with the decades-old mystery of his mother’s disappearance.

“Nothing Is Lost: Selected Essays” offers a sampling of the famed editor and critic’s cutting-edge reports on the art and artifice of American life.

Mark Lamster’s book recounts the long and productive life of an architect who had an outsize influence on the art form throughout the 20th century.

The crime writer, whose new Rebus novel is “In a House of Lies,” is giving his archives to the National Library of Scotland: “There might be material there for some future Ph.D. researcher … long after I’m dead.”