A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

OPEN THROAT, by Henry Hoke >> (Picador, 176 pages, $17.) Over the course of a few weeks, an unnamed mountain lion — a resident of the hills around Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign — eavesdrops on hikers’ conversations, mourns its former loves and flees from a fire. Hoke’s novel, which the lion narrates, is an “act of ravishing and outlandish imagination,” the New York Times’ reviewer wrote.

FIRE WEATHER: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, by John Vaillant >> (Vintage, 432 pages, $20.) The Times’ reviewer wrote that fire proves an “unforgettable protagonist” in this dive into the May 2016 burning of Fort McMurray, a Canadian town that was home to 40% of American oil imports. Vaillant’s telling of the disaster, which devastated the surrounding area and forced 88,000 people to flee, made this one of the Times’ 10 Best Books of 2023.

THE UNSETTLED, by Ayana Mathis >> (Vintage, 336 pages, $18.) In 1980s Bonaparte, Alabama, Dutchess Carson is one of five residents holding down what was once a thriving all-Black town. Meanwhile, her daughter and grandson make a life for themselves in tumultuous Philadelphia. Shifting through their perspectives and those of others, Mathis’ novel mirrors “the reality that every historical event inspires multiple, conflicting points of view,” the Times’ reviewer wrote.

TAKING CARE: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World, by Sarah DiGregorio >> (Harper Perennial, $21.99.) From nursing’s history as one of the world’s oldest professions to the importance of nurses to the COVID-19 pandemic response and to harm reduction, DiGregorio “reminds us that perhaps more than ever before, nursing is politics,” the Times’ reviewer wrote.

MY MURDER, by Katie Williams >> (Riverhead, 304 pages, $18.) Louise is the final victim of a serial killer, cloned back to life by a shadowy government agency. As she returns to her family and reevaluates the last few weeks of her alienated life, the “self-possessed wisecracking” of her narration, according to the Times’ reviewer, reveals itself as the humorous “defense mechanism of a lonely and disconnected soul.”

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan >> (Penguin, 448 pages, $18.) Reading “at times like a screenplay for a crime procedural, at others like a horror film,” the Times’ reviewer wrote, Egan’s history recounts the rapid expansion of the KKK across the Midwest in the 1920s and the gruesome murder of a woman that eventually undermined its then leader.