Newly Released Books

This month, four novels that explore the needs and fragility of human psychology, and two books about life (and the search for life) far from Earth.

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FIREFLY
By Janette Jenkins
165 pages. Europa Editions. $15.

This brief, beautifully observed novel finds Noël Coward in his last years, at Firefly, his home in Jamaica, where he died of a heart attack at 73 in the early 1970s. The urbane Coward is the perfect figure to mine for both poignancy and humor at a stage of his life when he is, in his own words, “a professional hermit.” Looking at his reflection, he sees “an overgrown reptile.” (“Whatever happened to the face-lift?” he wonders.) Ms. Jenkins allows her fading protagonist the occasional bon mot. “Love hurts,” Coward says, “but it’s curable.” She juxtaposes his sunset against the aspirations of a young Jamaican servant named Patrice, who dreams of living in London and working at the Ritz. Coward’s reluctance to write a letter of recommendation to the hotel — whether he simply can’t be bothered, or because he’s jealous of a young life in London, or because he cares for Patrice more than he lets on — constitutes the book’s minor but moving drama.

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SEX IS FORBIDDEN
By Tim Parks
290 pages. Arcade. $24.95.

Beth Marriot works in a kitchen at a Buddhist retreat in this fictional counterpart of sorts to “Teach Us to Sit Still,” Mr. Parks’s erudite 2010 memoir about turning to meditation to treat chronic pain. Beth is a singer whose spiritual thoughts carry an echo of rock ’n’ roll choruses: “By 30 I reckon I’ll be purified or dead.” She’s attempting to recover from — or to hide from — a tangled romantic life and her guilt about an incident that left an acquaintance in a coma. While at the silent retreat center, she discovers and begins reading the journal of a male resident. This conceit, though a bit too convenient, allows Mr. Parks to lay out the experiences of both Beth and that man, GH, each gaining something from the mindful practice while still struggling mightily for more. “I have felt my body melt into air,” Beth says. But, she adds, “it hasn’t brought me peace.”

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THE NIGHT GUEST
By Fiona McFarlane
241 pages. Faber & Faber. $26.

Ruth is a widow living in a beach house in Australia. She feels soothed by the presence of the sea “in an indefinable way, just as she imagined a plant might be by Mozart.” She has begun vividly imagining the presence of a tiger in the next room in the middle of the night. She calls the animal her “consequential visitor,” a term that also applies to Frida, a pushy but helpful woman who appears one day, claiming to be a home aide paid by the government. Ruth recalls her childhood years spent in Fiji, where her father was a doctor, and makes contact after many decades with Richard, an older man who once broke her heart. Frida, undoubtedly useful to Ruth, begins acting in increasingly suspicious ways. Ms. McFarlane’s debut, filled with lively writing and convincing psychological portraiture, is a slowly unfolding mystery that is less about who done it than about the vagaries of “that sticky organ,” the human brain.

HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE
By Emma Chapman
273 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.99.

Marta has been married for 25 years to Hector, who is 20 years her senior. She begins seeing an apparition, a disheveled blond girl. “Her hips are narrow and wrong-looking, as if her legs have been attached at a strange angle.” Is the vision trying to tell Marta something about her own dimly remembered past? About the potentially disturbing way in which she met her husband? Ms. Chapman’s first novel revolves around a stark mystery: Is Marta crazy, or does it just benefit Hector for her to think she is? Marta’s unreliability and the possibility of Hector’s crime are established so early on that the spare story eventually begins to drag. Even the blond girl’s appearance, initially startling, happens frequently enough to lose its ghoulish shock. Despite the thinness of the plot, the Hitchcockian flavor of the book’s open-ended finish will satisfy readers who like their chills left to the imagination.

AN ASTRONAUT’S GUIDE TO LIFE ON EARTH
By Col. Chris Hadfield
295 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $28.

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The astronaut Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space, has become a star on Twitter, where nearly a million followers enjoy his stunning photos and videos about life in zero gravity. His charm intermittently survives the transition to the page. He emphasizes the importance of being “focused less on the magical than the mundane,” in a profession that trains you to ask, “O.K., what’s the next thing that will kill me?” He bemoans not getting to pick fellow travelers, making his lofty position relatable to office drones with noisy cubicle neighbors. “No one wants to go to space with a jerk,” he writes. But for a subject this naturally thrilling, Mr. Hadfield makes an overly earnest tour guide — as anyone with the rigorous discipline necessary to be an astronaut might. He is not Anthony Bourdain, and this is not “NASA Confidential.” “Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it’s productive,” goes a typical line. This memoir is part fascinating view, part Boy Scout manual.

FIVE BILLION YEARS OF SOLITUDE
The Search for Life Among the Stars
By Lee Billings
294 pages. Current. $27.95.

At one point in this survey of our efforts to find company in the universe and to fend off planetary extinction, an astrophysicist named Greg Laughlin suggests moving Earth out near Mars by using large comets to deflect some of Jupiter’s “orbital energy” over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Ideas like that one will leave readers who aren’t rocket scientists slack-jawed. Mr. Billings writes as accessibly as possible about a field in which careers and reputations are “forged or shattered on the barest probabilistic whiffs of planets emerging from a statistical haze.” The astronomer Frank Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, tells Mr. Billings: “Right now there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them.” Mr. Billings’s book is a reminder of the incredible strides we’ve made in charting the cosmos, and of how even our most advanced efforts may not be enough to detect and communicate with other life if, in the end, it’s out there.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Released. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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