6 paperbacks to help post-holiday blues

A new book might just help with the post-holiday blues, no? Here are six freshly released paperbacks, all highly recommended.

• “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster, $22). Winner of numerous awards, including the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in history, this thick volume explores the remarkable life of Douglass, from his early days as a fugitive slave to his fame as an orator, abolitionist and political theorist. The book is “cinematic and deeply engaging,” wrote a New York Times reviewer, calling it “a tour de force of storytelling and analysis.”

• “The New Iberia Blues” by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, $16.99). The 22nd book in Burke’s popular mystery series featuring Louisiana sheriff’s deputy Dave Robicheaux involves an escaped murderer, a visiting Hollywood director and a washed-up corpse nailed to a cross. In a starred Kirkus Review, the reviewer noted: “Many of the character types, plot devices, and oracular sentiments are familiar from Burke’s earlier books. But the sentences are brand-new, and the powerful emotional charge they carry feels piercingly new as well.”

• “Working” by Robert Caro (Vintage, $16). Speaking of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, Caro is a two-time winner of the award, for his work documenting the lives of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses. This slender book, a best-seller, is a collection of essays by Caro, now in his 80s, about interviewing, researching and writing. An NPR reviewer of “Working” called the book “an inspiring — and reading it as a journalist, honestly sometimes shame-inducing — window into the seemingly superhuman reporting, researching, writing, patience, and above all, willpower that have powered his reinvention of the political biography and history genre.”

• “The Night Tiger” by Yangsze Choo (Flatiron, $17.99). A best-seller (thanks to Reese Witherspoon’s book club, which chose it as a selection last spring), Choo’s second novel takes place in 1930s Malaya (now Malaysia), where a child is given a mysterious mission by a dying man. A starred Kirkus Review called it a “sumptuous garden maze of a novel that immerses readers in a complex, vanished world.”

• “The Last Romantics” by Tara Conklin (HarperCollins, $17.99). Reading Seattle author Conklin’s second novel last year, I thought of Ann Patchett’s “Commonwealth,” Angela Flournoy’s “The Turner House” and Chloe Benjamin’s “The Immortalists” — all books that irresistibly pull the reader into a family. “The Last Romantics” is an elegant page-turner focusing on a group of siblings making their separate ways through decades but bound by an invisible, twisting cord. It’s a haunting story about leavings, or about how things and people shift to fill an empty space — or don’t.

• “The Lost Man,” by Jane Harper (Flatiron, $16.99). Unlike Australian author Harper’s two previous novels featuring police investigator Aaron Falk (“The Dry” and “Force of Nature,” both terrific), this one’s a stand-alone set not in the city of Melbourne, but in the remote outback, where “next-door neighbors” live three hours apart. It’s an eerie, mesmerizing setting for a story about a mysterious death in an isolated family; I remember the pages flying by.