New in paperback

"Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam and the Limits of Tolerance," by Ian Buruma (Penguin). Buruma has made a career of analyzing foreign cultures. Here he returns to his native land to examine the 2004 murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. A Dutch-born Islamist of Moroccan descent shot van Gogh, angry at "Submission," a film he had made with the Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali about the treatment of women under Islam. Buruma tries to understand why the Dutch multicultural experiment has not gone well, despite the government's liberal immigration policies and lavish social services.

"A Woman in Jerusalem," by A.B. Yehoshua. Translated by Hillel Halkin (Harvest/Harcourt). When an unidentified woman is killed in a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market, the owner of the bakery where (it is eventually discovered) she worked asks his human resources manager to find out what happened and to make amends. This bureaucrat, who is never named, brings the woman's body to her mother's village in a former Soviet republic. Wrestling with the indifference of authorities, the hostility of the woman's relatives and his own failed marriage, the man is transformed into a morally engaged individual and even a sort of hero.

"The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Vintage). This analysis of how journalists covered the civil rights movement and why they came to play such an important role in the struggle for racial justice won the Pulitzer Prize for history this year. Roberts, a former managing editor of The New York Times, and Klibanoff, the managing editor for news at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, show that until the confrontation in Little Rock in 1956, the mainstream press was slow to grasp the significance of the civil rights story.

"Ines of My Soul," by Isabel Allende. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Harper Perennial). Allende's historical novel tells the story of Ines Surez, a 16th-century Spanish woman who became the mistress of the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia and with him founded Santiago. "Any similarity to events and persons relating to the conquest of Chile is not coincidental," Allende writes.

"The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery", by D.T. Max (Random House). An Italian family has been plagued for at least 200 years by an extremely rare hereditary disease that destroys the brain's capacity to fall asleep. Fatal familial insomnia, as it is now called, is believed to belong to the same class of disorders as mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Max explores the history of the family and the mysteries of the disorder.

"Ancestor Stones," by Aminatta Forna (Grove Press). A woman of African descent leaves England to assume control of her grandfather's coffee plantation. From her four aunts she learns how they, and Sierra Leone, have changed.

"Seminary Boy," by John Cornwell (Image/Doubleday). Following a boyhood sexual assault, Cornwell fled his working-class family in East London for a boarding school where he prepared for the Roman Catholic priesthood. This spiritual coming-of-age memoir evokes the grueling asceticism and joyless routine of the seminary, where Cornwell spent five years during the 1950s.

"Death Of A Writer," by Michael Collins (Bloomsbury). This darkly funny murder mystery takes on a liberal-arts college English Department. When a professor sinks into a coma after a failed suicide attempt, a graduate student discovers the thriller he wrote about the murder of a young girl that was quietly published some years earlier. The book becomes a sensation and attracts the attention of a local detective, who turns up evidence that it may not be fiction.