The novel of Ferrara

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight. (Simon & Schuster, $37.50.) Blight's monumental biography describes the context that enabled an escaped slave to become an adviser to President Lincoln and one of the 19th century's greatest figures. Unlike Douglass's own autobiographies, it also recounts his complex relationships with the women in his life. THE SOULS OF YELLOW FOLK: Essays, by Wesley Yang. (Norton, $24.95.) Three essays in this collection mine the question of Asian-American identity. Yang emphasizes the invisibility he often feels, and tries to enter the minds of people like Seung-Hui Cho, who killed more than 30 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH: Volume 2, 1956-1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. (HarperCollins, $45.) This volume, which spans the period of Plath's marriage until her death, includes more than a dozen letters to her therapist, revealing the hurt and humiliation that fed her final, furious poems. THE NOVEL OF FERRARA, by Giorgio Bassani. Translated by Jamie McKendrick. (Norton, $39.95.) Best known for "The Garden of the Finzi Continis," Bassani retrofits his novellas and stories into a sprawling portrait of an Italian Jewish community destroyed by the historical hatreds unleashed by World War II. INKLING, by Kenneth Oppel. Illustrated by Sydney Smith. (Knopf, $17.99; ages 8 to 12.) The son of a creatively blocked artist tries to work with a magical ink blot to help his dad, but the blot has a mind of its own in this astonishing novel about how we make art and connect with family. THE WALL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK, written and illustrated by Jon Agee. (Dial, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) A brick wall lies in the middle of each spread in this deceptively simple picture book. A young knight is glad to be protected from the scary stuff on the other side, until a flood carries him over and he sees that there's nothing to fear, and plenty of fun. NOWHERE BOY, by Katherine Marsh. (Roaring Brook, $16.99; ages 10 to 14.) In this hopeful, elegant novel, a Syrian teenager escaping the civil war that killed his family makes it to Brussels, where he befriends a lonely American boy who finds a way to hide and support him for nine months. DOOR, by JiHyeon Lee. (Chronicle, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) This remarkable wordless picture book bursts with buoyant energy as a boy finds the key to a long-unopened door and makes his way from drabness to a joyful, magical land. DRY, by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman. (Simon & Schuster, $18.99; ages 12 and up.) This propulsive action thriller, set at a time when Southern California has run out of water, explores the price of our collective blindness to impending climate disasters. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

This momentous volume from Bassani (1916-2000), set during, before, and after WWII, is not quite a novel: it's built from four short novels (the most famous is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) as well as a story collection (Within the Walls), and a series of short stories that were initially published separately (The Smell of Hay). It all hangs together, though bound less by plot or characters than by focus, milieu, time period, and atmosphere. All are set in and around the Jewish community of the northeastern Italian city of Ferrara. All are suffused with grief, dread, and a desperate ambivalence, as the characters try to work out whether war is coming; how to respond to the 1938 racial laws that stripped Jews of their civil rights; and, later, whether post-war life in fascist hotbed Ferrara is possible. Bassani masterfully conveys a creeping moral rot-in the story "A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini," the sole surviving deportee returns after the war and becomes a scandal of reminder; in the novella "The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles," the town's beloved doctor, a homosexual, is driven to suicide. In "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the town's richest Jews, the Finzi-Continis, abandon public life, while the narrator is tormented by his crush on their daughter; the protagonist of the novel The Heron spends a lugubrious day hunting, beset by worries. Many of the characters evade the Nazi death machine, but all feel their separateness and powerlessness (despite being middle- or upper-class), along with the failure of their neighbors not just to save them, but to admit their complicity. Bassani uses his intimate knowledge of Ferrara to build a memorial composed of equal parts grief, affection, frustration, and muted but palpable fury. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.