Daniel Hornsby’s new page-turning novel 'Sucker' is consistently funny, a sobering screengrab of our wealth- and power-obsessed nation.

In his debut book, 'The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine,' Ricardo Nuila presents the conflict between the profit motive of health care and the art of medicine by describing the hospitals that work for people and the hospitals that do not.

In 'The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church,' Rachel Swarns tells of “one of the largest documented slave sales in the nation," the Jesuit sale of 272 enslaved persons in 1838.

In recent years, several books have attempted to piece together what really happened behind the doors of power in Ireland's Magdalene laundries, including Emer Martin’s novel 'The Cruelty Men,' Claire Keegan’s novella 'Small Things Like These,' and new collection of essays, 'A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland,' edited by Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke.

It was touted as a sedative with no hangover. It was hailed as non-addictive. It was rumored to present no side effects. It was trumpeted in medical journal ads as “astonishingly safe” and “completely non-poisonous.”

To be the writerly son of a writerly father is not always the easiest vocation. When that parent is as famous as Andre Dubus, it must be doubly difficult. But who knows: Maybe it can make for great art? One might ask Andre Dubus III.