John Freeman

William Boyd It makes grim, compelling and minatory reading, but Hitler’s People (Penguin, $35) by Richard J. Evans is not only the only book you ever need to read about Nazi Germany but a salutary example of what happens when crazed populist leaders win power. Twenty-two short portraits of the key players and lesser apparatchiks of the Nazi years manage to encompass the whole history of the Third Reich and its baleful legacy. Evans’s hundred-page chapter on Hitler — the “Boss” — is masterly. Evie Wyld’s fourth novel, The Echoes (Knopf Doubleday, $28) with its edgy and moody supernaturalism (the narrator is a ghost) establishes her growing reputation as one of our finest young writers.

John Freeman’s gorgeously crafted novella, Hit and Run, is a gripping account of a few tumultuous months in a youngish man’s life. It is imbued with a black-and-white, noirish tinge, beginning as a detective narrative, moving through domestic drama and romance and eventually morphing into a ghost story, profitably exploring what these genres have in common. Based on real events, though it isn’t clear which elements are true, it shows how lives can unravel (and ravel) at the whims of fate, and at the same time demonstrates that everything is connected. This is a work about significant moments, about “a piece of time so sharp it carved a human being from existence,” glittering with reflections and refractions.