The best new books to read in March

Known for her best-selling Ember in the Ashes series, YA novelist Sabaa Tahir leaves the realm of fantasy and enters all-too-real territory with this affecting coming-of-age story. Growing up in a small (and small-minded) California desert town, high school seniors and best friends Noor and Salahudin navigate love and loss, all the while wondering whether their dimming hopes for the future have any chance of survival. (March 1) —Mary Sollosi

As the title hints, Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk uses his memoir to go long on the many years he spent trying to make people laugh. He details the time he spent as a writer on Saturday Night Live, as a performer on The Larry Sanders Show, and as the partner of David Cross on the groundbreaking HBO sketch series Mr. Show With Bob and David. For those seeking a firsthand account of the '90s alternative-comedy scene from one of its prime movers, it's hard to think of a better book upon which to call. (March 1) —Clark Collis

Now working mostly as a screenwriter and director (Women Talking, starring Frances McDormand and Rooney Mara, is due this year), Polley is also an excellent excavator of her own past. These six essays — touching on everything from her days as a child actress to #MeToo reckonings and a high-risk pregnancy — crackle with insight and intimacy. (March 1) —Leah Greenblatt

The students at the bougie institution central to this campus novel traffic in transcendence — of the spiritual, intellectual, and sexual varieties. And their search for a higher power (wherever it may be) is equal parts dangerous and delicious. (March 8) —Seija Rankin

Brought up in backwoods isolation by her doomsday parents on a steady diet of paranoia and canned goods, Willa Marks has spent her whole young life preparing for the end of the world. When she actually goes out into it, she finds a reality both better (sex, fresh produce) and worse (about climate change at least, her mom and dad weren't wrong) than she imagined. But when a utopian community in the Bahamas draws her in with its promises of a cleaner, greener planet, Willa begins to realize it may be something less than Shangri-La. (March 8) —Leah Greenblatt

Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves) isn't the first author to find the family of Abraham Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth fascinating, though at nearly 500 pages her novel might be the most comprehensive imagining of the lives they lived. She weaves an intimate, engaging portrait of a tribe whose aims and alliances were always shifting, buffeted by tragedy (several beloved siblings died young) and fickle fortunes. (March 8) —Leah Greenblatt

Disorientation is told from the perspective of Ingrid Yang, a Ph.D. student who, after dedicating years to researching a Chinese American poet, discovers that he's actually a white man in yellowface. As she spirals into an investigative hole, she notices worrying elements of her own life: Her academic adviser is a conspiracy theorist, her white fiancé is a fetishist, her university is full of book burners. Chou's debut novel is a searing literary satire of campus politics. (March 22) —Seija Rankin

After three years of podcasting with his internet trolls, Dylan Marron (also a newly minted Ted Lasso staff writer) releases a book that presents learned tricks of the adversarial-interactions trade. Additionally, the memoir offers his gift of understanding for those who need it most. (March 29) —Seija Rankin