Books to cozy up to

The days are dark, but books bring brightness. Here are promising new paperbacks to read as autumn settles in.

“Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo. This novel shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments.” Set among a group of black women friends in contemporary England, it’s “a big, busy novel” full of interconnected stories, drawing comparisons to Alison Bechdel. Like Bechdel, Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions.

“Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood” by Karina Longworth. Longworth, a film critic and creator of the podcast “You Must Remember This,” is a masterful storyteller of Old Hollywood; here, she places millionaire and movie mogul Howard Hughes at its center. Longworth allows the conflicting versions of Howard Hughes to stand side by side, revealing his desire for control, sex and fame, and in so doing she creates a vibrant history not just of Hughes but of Hollywood itself, its sins and glories, its darkness and light.