This week's lineup of new books boasts a couple of headliners in Ian McEwan and Patricia Lockwood. Whatever their differences as writers — and there certainly are a few — both are recognizable by their unrepentant glee in keeping readers off balance. The truth will not come easy in their latest efforts either.

For those of a more cosmopolitan bent, the calendar offers a detour from the American perspective with two works in translation: one by French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, the other by Yoko Tawada, a Japanese expat living in Germany.

Then there's the novel whose biggest twist is that it finally exists at all, after Kiran Desai devoted 20 years to writing it. Alarming as that may sound, it's clear that all that time spent on The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was not spent in vain.

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