.Please Please Read These

A teenage quantum-physics whiz enjoys three lesbian affairs at once in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (Anchor, $13), whose skewering of high school and Delhi caste dynamics is so sharp it hurts and so funny you can’t put it down. Ben Polis was nineteen before he could read a book. Then he wrote one, as recounted in Only a Mother Could Love Him (Ballantine, $13.95), his brutally honest ADD/ADHD self-help memoir. Gandhi loved enemas, according to Based on a True Story (Chicago Review, $18.95), in which Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen uncover the facts behind more than a hundred films that claim to depict history. Someone sets fire to a swan as Before the Frost (New Press, $24.95) begins: It’s Swedish mystery master Henning Mankell’s latest, starring cop Kurt Wallander’s daughter Linda, now a cop too. His mom killed herself when he was twelve, and guilt has wracked novelist Amos Oz for fifty-plus years, as evoked in his wrenching memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness (Harcourt, $26). College begins, as do raging lust and drunken puking, in A Question of Attraction (Villard, $23.95), David Nicholls’ arguably autobiographical novel that brings back the ’80s in all their silly-haircut splendor. Breeding guinea pigs in Liberia might end local hunger and circumvent wild-animal poaching, aid-worker William Powell muses in Blue Clay People (Bloomsbury, $24.95), his anguished look at life in an endangered rainforest.