No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence.

The upcoming trials of Trump—in Manhattan; Atlanta; South Florida; and Washington, D.C.—will not be the first time he encounters this dynamic. His claims of 2020 election fraud floundered before judges, resulting in a series of almost unmitigated losses. In one ruling that censured and fined a team of Trump-aligned lawyers who had pursued spurious fraud allegations, a federal judge in Michigan made the point bluntly. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” she wrote, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.”

But only now is Trump himself appearing as a criminal defendant, stripped of the authority and protections of the presidency, before judges with the power to impose a prison sentence. The very first paragraph of the Georgia indictment marks this shift in power. Contrary to everything that Trump has tried so desperately to prove, the indictment asserts that “Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020”—and then actively sought to subvert it.

[David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture]

Although Trump loves to file lawsuits against those who have supposedly wronged him, the courtroom has never been his home turf. Records from depositions over the years show him to be sullen and impatient while under oath, like a middle schooler stuck in detention. Timothy L. O’Brien, a journalist whom Trump unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2006, recalled in Bloomberg that his lawyers forced Trump to acknowledge that he had lied over the years about a range of topics. Trump has seemed similarly ill at ease during his arraignments. When the magistrate judge presiding over his arraignment in the January 6 case asked whether he understood that the conditions of his release required that he commit no more crimes, he assented almost in a whisper.

All of this has been a cause for celebration among Trump’s opponents—because the charges against him are warranted and arguably overdue, but also for a different reason. The next year of American politics will be a twin drama unlike anything the nation has seen before, played out in the courtroom and on the campaign trail, often at the same time. Among Democrats, the potential interplay of these storylines has produced a profound hope: Judicial power, they anticipate, may scuttle Trump’s chances of retaking the presidency, and finally solve the political problem of Donald Trump once and for all.

It has become conventional wisdom that nothing can hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. But his legal jeopardy could, in fact, have political consequences. At least some proportion of Republicans and independents are already paying attention to Trump’s courtroom travails, and reassessing their prior beliefs. A recent report by the political-science collaborative Bright Line Watch found that, following the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents indictment in June, the number of voters in each group who believed that Trump had committed a crime in his handling of classified information jumped by 10 percentage points or more (to 25 and 46 percent, respectively).

And despite Trump’s effort to frame January 6 as an expression of mass discontent by the American people, the insurrection has never been popular: Extremist candidates who ran on a platform of election denial in the 2022 midterms performed remarkably poorly in swing states. Ongoing criminal proceedings that remind Americans again and again of Trump’s culpability for the insurrection—among his other alleged crimes—seem unlikely to boost his popularity with persuadable voters. If he appears diminished or uncertain in court, even the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful might conceivably wane.

[Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 committee]

Above all of this looms the possibility of a conviction before Election Day, which has no doubt inspired many Democratic fantasies. If Trump is found guilty of any of the crimes of which he now stands accused, a recent poll shows, almost half of Republicans say they would not cast their vote for him.

But that outcome is only one possibility, and it does not appear to be the most likely.

Americans who oppose Trump—and, more to the point, who wish he would disappear as a political force—have repeatedly sought saviors in legal institutions. The early Trump years saw the lionization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a white knight and (bewilderingly) a sex symbol. Later, public affection turned toward the unassuming civil servants who testified against Trump during his first impeachment, projecting an old-school devotion to the truth that contrasted with Trump’s gleeful cynicism. Today, Mueller’s successors—particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia prosecution—are the subjects of their own adoring memes and merchandise. One coffee mug available for purchase features Smith’s face and the text Somebody’s Gonna Get Jacked Up!

Perhaps this time will be different. With Trump out of office, Smith hasn’t been limited, as Mueller was, by the Justice Department’s internal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting chief executive. Willis, a state prosecutor, operates outside the federal government’s constraints. And neither Bill Barr nor Republican senators can stand between Trump and a jury.

The indictments against Trump have unfolded in ascending order of moral and political importance. In April, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced charges for Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money scheme that began in advance of the 2016 election. In June came Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida, over the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Two months later, the special counsel unveiled charges against Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Willis’s indictment in Georgia quickly followed, employing the state’s racketeering statute to allege a widespread scheme to subvert the vote in favor of Trump. (He has pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and, as of this writing, was awaiting arraignment in Georgia. The Trump campaign released a statement calling the latest indictment “bogus.”)

But each case has its own set of complexities. The New York one is weighed down by a puzzling backstory—of charges considered, not pursued, and finally taken up after all—that leaves Bragg’s office open to accusations of a politically motivated prosecution. The indictment in Florida seems relatively open-and-shut as a factual matter, but difficult to prosecute because it involves classified documents not meant to be widely shared, along with a jury pool that is relatively sympathetic to Trump and a judge who has already contorted the law in Trump’s favor. In the January 6 case, based in Washington, D.C., the sheer singularity of the insurrection means that the legal theories marshaled by the special counsel’s office are untested. The sweeping scope of the Georgia indictment—which involves 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts—may lead to practical headaches and delays as the case proceeds.

Trump’s army of lawyers will be ready to kick up dust and frustrate each prosecution. As of July, a political-action committee affiliated with Trump had spent about $40 million on legal fees to defend him and his allies. The strategy is clear: delay. Trump has promised to file a motion to move the January 6 proceedings out of Washington, worked regularly to stretch out ordinary deadlines in that case, and tried (unsuccessfully) to move the New York case from state to federal court. The longer Trump can draw out the proceedings, the more likely he is to make it through the Republican primaries and the general election without being dragged down by a conviction. At that point, a victorious Trump could simply wait until his inauguration, then demand that the Justice Department scrap the federal cases against him. Even if a conviction happens before Americans go to the polls, Trump is almost certain to appeal, hoping to strand any verdict in purgatory as voters decide whom to support.

Currently, the court schedule is set to coincide with the 2024 Republican primaries. The Manhattan trial, for now, is scheduled to begin in March. In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Aileen Cannon has set a May trial date—though the proceedings will likely be pushed back. In the January 6 case, Smith has asked for a lightning-fast trial date just after New Year’s; in Georgia, Willis has requested a trial date in early March. But still, what little time is left before next November is rapidly slipping away. In all likelihood, voters will have to decide how to cast their ballot before the trials conclude.

The pileup of four trials in multiple jurisdictions would be chaotic even if the defendant were not a skillful demagogue running for president. There’s no formal process through which judges and prosecutors can coordinate parallel trials, and that confusion could lead to scheduling mishaps and dueling prosecutorial strategies that risk undercutting one another. For instance, if a witness is granted immunity to testify against Trump in one case, then charged by a different prosecutor in another, their testimony in the first case might be used against them in the second, and so they might be reluctant to talk.

In each of the jurisdictions, defendants are generally required to sit in court during trial, though judges might make exceptions. This entirely ordinary restriction will, to some, look politically motivated if Trump is not allowed to skip out for campaign rallies, though conversely, Trump’s absence might not sit well with jurors who themselves may wish to be elsewhere. All in all, it may be hard to shake the appearance of a traveling legal circus.

Attacking the people responsible for holding him to account is one of Trump’s specialties. Throughout the course of their respective investigations, Trump has smeared Bragg (who is Black) as an “animal,” Willis (who is also Black) as “racist,” and Smith as “deranged.” Just days after the January 6 case was assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump was already complaining on his social-media site, Truth Social, that “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL” with Chutkan presiding (in the January 6 cases she has handled, she has evinced little sympathy for the rioters). Anything that goes wrong for Trump during the proceedings seems destined to be the subject of a late-night Truth Social post or a wrathful digression from the rally stage.

However damning the cases against Trump, they will matter to voters only if they hear accurate accounts of them from a trusted news source. Following each of Trump’s indictments to date, Fox News has run segment after segment on his persecution. A New York Times /Siena College poll released in July, after the first two indictments, found that zero percent of Trump’s loyal MAGA base—about 37 percent of Republicans—believes he committed serious federal crimes.

And beyond the MAGA core? A recent CBS News poll showed that 59 percent of Americans and 83 percent of self-described non-MAGA Republicans believe the investigations and indictments against Trump are, at least in part, attempts to stop him politically. Trump and his surrogates will take every opportunity to stoke that belief, and the effect of those efforts must be balanced against the hits Trump will take from being on trial. Recent poll numbers show Trump running very close to President Joe Biden even after multiple indictments—a fairly astonishing achievement for someone who is credibly accused of attempting a coup against the government that he’s now campaigning to lead.

The law can do a great deal. But the justice system is only one institution of many, and it can’t be fully separated from the broader ecosystem of cultural and political pathologies that brought the country to this situation in the first place.

After Robert Mueller chose not to press for an indictment of Trump on obstruction charges, because of Justice Department guidance on presidential immunity, the liberal and center-right commentariat soured on the special counsel, declaring him to have failed. If some Americans now expect Fani Willis or Jack Smith to disappear the problem of Donald Trump—and the authoritarian movement he leads—they will very likely be disappointed once again. Which wouldn’t matter so much if serial disappointment in legal institutions—he just keeps getting away with it—didn’t encourage despair, cynicism, and nihilism. These are exactly the sentiments that autocrats hope to engender. They would be particularly dangerous attitudes during a second Trump term, when public outrage will be needed to galvanize civil servants to resist abuses of power—and they must be resisted.

Trump’s trials are perhaps best seen as one part of a much larger legal landscape. The Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 seem to have held extremist groups back from attempting other riots or acts of mass intimidation, even though Trump has called for protests as his indictments have rained down. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced criminal charges alleging that more than a dozen Republicans acted as “fake electors” in an effort to steal the 2020 election for Trump—and as a result, would-be accomplices in Trump’s further plots may be less inclined to risk their own freedom to help the candidate out. Likewise, some of those lawyers who worked to overturn the 2020 vote have now been indicted in Georgia and face potential disbarment—which could cause other attorneys to hold back from future schemes.

[Alan Z. Rozenshtein: The First Amendment is no defense for Trump’s alleged crimes]

This is a vision of accountability as deterrence, achieved piece by piece. Even if Trump wins a second term, these efforts will complicate his drive for absolute authority. And no matter the political fallout, the criminal prosecutions of Trump are themselves inherently valuable. When Trump’s opponents declare that “no one is above the law,” they’re asserting a bedrock principle of American society, and the very act of doing so helps keep that principle alive.

None of this settles what may happen on Election Day, of course, or in the days that follow. But nor would a conviction. If a majority of voters in a handful of swing states decide they want to elect a president convicted of serious state and federal crimes, the courts can’t prevent them from doing so.

Such a result would lead to perhaps the most exaggerated disjunction yet between American law and politics: the matter of what to do with a felonious chief executive. If federal charges are the problem, Trump seems certain to try to grant himself a pardon—a move that would raise constitutional questions left unsettled since Watergate. In the case of state-level conviction, though, President Trump would have no such power. Could it be that he might end up serving his second term from a Georgia prison?

The question isn’t absurd, and yet there’s no obvious answer to how that would work in practice. The best way of dealing with such a problem is as maddeningly, impossibly straightforward as it always has been: Don’t elect this man in the first place.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Trump on Trial.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary chief who led a short-lived mutiny two months ago, crashed today in a sparsely populated area northwest of Moscow. According to Russian media, Prigozhin and at least one of his top commanders are dead. As is always the case with breaking news, there is much we don’t know, but the sight of Prigozhin’s jet falling out of the sky suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin has conducted a public execution of a man who was once a trusted friend but later provided the greatest challenge that the Russian dictator has ever faced.

Here’s what we do know. The aircraft was one of Prigozhin’s personal business jets. The plane, a widely used Embraer Legacy 600, took off from Moscow and likely was headed toward St. Petersburg, Prigozhin’s base of operations. It was flying at 28,000 feet before it plunged to earth, according to flight-tracking data. A second jet, also believed to belong to Prigozhin, then turned around and landed safely in Moscow, but Russia’s aviation ministry has confirmed that Prigozhin and the Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin were listed as passengers on the crashed jet.

This is functionally the end of the Wagner Group, which has been among the most effective Russian fighting units in Ukraine. But killing Prigozhin and his lieutenants makes sense, at least according to the Mafia logic that governs Putin’s Kremlin. Prigozhin not only threatened Putin’s authority; he humiliated him. During Prigozhin’s ragged rebellion, Putin was visibly furious, but he soon agreed to meet Prigozhin for a discussion in Moscow. For a gangster boss like Putin, having to meet with the man who betrayed him must have been intolerable: The Russian president has reportedly ordered people killed for far less than marching on the capital.

If the plane crash was an execution, however, plenty of questions remain. Why now? And why in Russia? There are several indications that this was not a random aviation accident, but a signature move by the Putin regime to remind Russians, and especially Russia’s elites, that no one survives opposing the Kremlin’s master.

The timing issue may not be all that puzzling. (Why Prigozhin risked being in Russia at all is a larger mystery, but he is, or was, legendarily arrogant.) Although many in both Russia and the West expected Putin to move against Prigozhin almost immediately after the Wagner rebellion last June, his patience may reflect his insecurity. Prigozhin’s almost effortless success in occupying the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and the ease with which he marched thousands of men to within some 200 miles of the capital, must have enraged and terrified Putin. The Russian president has probably spent weeks huddled with his most trusted security and military subordinates trying to figure out exactly who knew what about Prigozhin’s plans.

[Read: Why coups fail]

Rooting out a conspiracy takes time; so does planning a murder. The initial deal between the Kremlin and Prigozhin, brokered by Belarusian President (and Putin crony) Aleksandr Lukashenko, allowed Prigozhin and his men to leave Russia and take shelter in Belarus. But because of that deal, Putin couldn’t kill Prigozhin in Belarus without making a fool of Lukashenko. Likewise, although Prigozhin traveled in dangerous areas—yesterday, he released a video of himself in which he claimed to be in the Sahel—killing him far from home in a place such as Africa might have left some doubt about how he died, or whether he died at all.

Blowing up a plane flying out of Moscow two months to the day after Prigozhin’s rebellion ended, however, sends an unambiguous message. Unless a bomb was on board, only a military system could shoot down a plane at 28,000 feet, and only a Russian military system would be present so deep inside Russia. (The reported crash site is more than 100 miles northwest of Moscow.) The Russian Ministry of Defense—the object of Prigozhin’s fury during his brief rebellion—would have to be involved in an attack at that distance and altitude. If Putin wanted to send a message that Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu was still in favor and that Prigozhin had to pay for his insolence, this was a clear way to do it.

Taking down a business jet is also a message to Russia’s elites, who rely heavily on private aviation to get around the country. If Putin is willing to reach out and kill Prigozhin in broad daylight over Russia, no one is safe. (Recall as well that Putin himself is reported to be jumpy about flying; he travels around Russia in a special train, much like Stalin did in his day.)

One other event in particular suggests a link to Shoigu in this regard: The same day that Prigozhin’s plane went down, two Russian outlets reported that General Sergei Surovikin had been removed from his post as the commander of Russian aerospace forces. Surovikin, nicknamed General Armageddon, was one of the few competent Russian field commanders in Ukraine, but like a series of other Russian generals, he was scapegoated for Russia’s poor military performance and relieved of command. When Prigozhin began his march, Surovikin made what looked very much like a coerced appearance in a video, with a gun in his lap, asking the mutineers to stand down. Rumors flew in Moscow that he knew of Prigozhin’s plans and supported them; he was soon detained (“resting,” according to a Russian official) and disappeared from public view.

If Prigozhin’s plot was aimed at Shoigu with Surovikin’s connivance, then destroying his jet in flight using aerospace assets that might have once been under Surovikin’s command is like throwing a Defense Ministry calling card on the burning bodies. Shoigu might be hated, and Surovikin might have been respected, but—again, to put this in a Mafia context—no one takes a shot at an underboss without permission.

As Ian Fleming’s villain Goldfinger warned James Bond: Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action. It’s possible that Prigozhin’s jet suffered a random mishap. It’s possible that the mishap took place exactly two months to the day after Prigozhin’s mutiny. It’s possible that the head of Russia’s air force was relieved at the same time that all this took place. But that’s a hell of a lot of coincidences, especially in a country where few things of importance happen without direction from Red Square.

Prigozhin has almost certainly been living on borrowed time since last June. But if he is dead in today’s crash, Vladimir Putin has taken his revenge in spectacular fashion. Still to be determined, however, is whether another murder will be enough to quell the growing instability in the streets, boardrooms, and barracks of Russia.

When I teach a literature class to undergraduates, one of my most important tasks is to help my students relearn how to read in the age of distraction. I assign them an exercise: Set a timer for 20 minutes and dive into a book, no phone in sight, and don’t stop before the alarm goes off. They frequently tell me that time moves differently when they do this. The first few minutes drag, and the exercise feels totally impossible and dull, but as they keep sitting and reading, they begin to focus on the world inside the pages in front of them. By the end, they’re usually surprised by the timer ringing, and hungry to keep reading.

My students aren’t the only ones who benefit from this exercise, and the activity works with any book. But this list will offer you a head start. The seven titles below self-consciously aim to grab their reader’s attention, whether through form or content. Each will pull you into reading in a different way: Some are brief and succinct; others are long and sprawling. Some use the second person to directly address the reader; others dive deeply into one subject and invite you along. But what they all have in common is their ability to refresh your powers of observation and make you see the real world in a new manner by the end.

Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls

The first book I recommend to anyone in a reading slump is Mrs. Caliban, a novella that’s less than 150 pages, with a fascinating plot and quick pacing. Written in 1982 but reissued in 2017, Mrs. Caliban follows Dorothy, a lonely 1950s-style housewife, who meets Larry, an amphibious sea creature who looks almost exactly like a man, just with green skin and webbed hands and feet. Larry finds refuge from his scientist captors in Dorothy’s house, and the two have an oddly romantic affair right under her husband, Fred’s, nose. Dorothy and Fred are “too unhappy to get a divorce,” so Larry is actually a welcome guest who offers Dorothy not only exotic tales about an underwater world, but also a listening ear for her struggles as a housewife. People (including my students) have speculated that Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water is loosely based on Mrs. Caliban, which makes sense—Ingalls’s writing is hypnotic and cinematic, and Mrs. Caliban is the kind of book you can read in one sitting: It captures your attention like a blockbuster.

[Read: Discovery of the month (from 1986)]

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

The end of The Fifth Season has my favorite section of any speculative-fiction or fantasy novel: a huge glossary of terms such as stone eaters, commless, and orogene that appears after the plot stops, giving the reader a hand in interpreting the wildly unconventional world of the book. And it’s helpful here, because the complex, intricate story takes place on a supercontinent called the Stillness that is on the verge of its regular apocalypse, known as the “fifth season,” a period of catastrophic climate change. “Orogenes,” who can use thermal energy to create seismic events, are considered dangerous people, and most are in hiding, shunned from society. Jemisin’s main character, Essun, is one of them, hiding her true identity as she works as a teacher in her village. She returns home one day to find that her husband has murdered her son and kidnapped her daughter—both of whom inherited her powers. She must journey to save her daughter, accompanied by a mysterious child, while the world around her crumbles. After reading a few chapters of The Fifth Season, you’ll be immersed in this new world and its intricacies, enraptured by the ways this society’s structures shed light on the worst realities of our own.

Mariner

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino

A story that has an experimental or mysterious structure turns you into a detective, trying to figure out not just what happened, but also why the writing is the way it is. To me, the most delightful work in this vein is If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino, a book about someone called the Reader and addressed as “you,” who is constantly undercut in his attempt to read a novel called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. Right away, the Reader finds that his copy has been misprinted, bound with another novel, which he then buys—but he only gets so far into his second choice before that one is interrupted too. Each novel he picks up is somehow confiscated, unfinished, missing, or full of mistakes. But as the Reader picks up story after story, never able to finish, he meets his female counterpart, Ludmilla, who is trying to read the same titles. The loops of their impossible journey are postmodern, but the tone isn’t abstract or cerebral—it’s funny and sweet. The metafiction of Calvino’s novel, literally addressed to “you,” dramatizes the difficulty of paying attention and finding just the right book. Ironically, it’s totally easy to read, as the Reader’s choices flip from romance to thriller to realist novel, all interwoven with one man’s journey to find his love.

Graywolf

Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado

Short-story collections can deploy a variety of tones and styles that most novels can’t—each story can be totally unique. Her Body and Other Parties has such an unbelievable range, trafficking in the funny, the bizarre, the unreal, and the haunting, that any reader could find something arresting in it. Machado reimagines the tale of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck right alongside a novella, “Especially Heinous,” in which the characters of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit contend with ghosts and doppelgängers. Even when she’s riffing on episodes of TV that the audience is familiar with, Machado makes the known world look stranger; as a result, supernatural occurrences begin to seem more and more logical. In another story, “Inventory,” a woman lists all of her sexual experiences while the world is slowly consumed by a pandemic. Her nostalgia for the way things used to be morphs into horror at what the world has become—and her lists, on the surface recalling the past but really narrating the present, become a way to cope with the uncertainty each day brings. Likewise, each story in Her Body and Other Parties does many things at once, every genre bent and every first impression unreliable, always fresh and also frightening.

OSU Press

Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Paying attention is not the topic but the mode of Kimmerer’s first book, Gathering Moss. Whereas her 2013 collection, Braiding Sweetgrass, delves into the many overlaps between Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems, here Kimmerer is deeply focused on just one organism: moss. Over a series of short personal essays, she peers at the tiny world of moss and what it can teach us. Moss can give us metaphors for our life, help us understand our relationships, and show us the way tiny things order the larger world, she argues. Relying on her background as a scientist and an Indigenous scholar, she shows us how rich, how deserving of respect, and how shockingly beautiful the minuscule world really is. Kimmerer writes about looking up from her microscope after examining moss and being “taken aback at the plainness of the ordinary world, the drab and predictable shapes.” Kimmerer’s personal style instills variety: Each essay provides new information not only about the organisms she’s observing, but also about her many roles within houses, laboratories, and communities. By the end, she has inspired readers to see just as she does, with intimate focus on the smallest parts of life.

[Read: Housekeeping is part of the wild world too]

Vintage

The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty

Reading a book that really paints a picture of its location feels a bit like traveling from home—you can get to know everything about a place’s history, people, and minutiae. Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, delivers on this front. A multivoiced story, it follows the many residents of La Lapinière, a low-income apartment complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, called the Rabbit Hutch by locals. The novel begins when Blandine Watkins, a teenage resident of Apartment C4, is attacked. She thinks of this violence as an “exit” from her body, a phrase that echoes her obsession with the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. From here, the novel works backwards to show what led to that moment, following different occupants of the Rabbit Hutch over one hot week in July: An online-obituary comment moderator irks a celebrity’s son to the point of danger, a mother finally tells her husband she’s afraid of her baby’s eyes, and the three young men Blandine lives with become obsessed with her. It’s a brilliant meditation on how much we don’t know about our nearest neighbors, and how the places we live can bring us together—or tear us apart.

[Read: Seven books where the setting exposes the characters]

Vintage

Possession, by A. S. Byatt

It may feel counterintuitive, but when nothing else can keep my attention, I know it’s time to go long. As opposed to the articles, tweets, and TikToks I see all day, I find that a long novel with a drawn-out structure and pacing—especially a deep dive into several psyches, over some period of time—will always keep me engaged. Plenty of classic novels offer this, but my favorite is Byatt’s Possession, a 1990 novel that adopts aVictorian structure and gives it a postmodern bent. There are two timelines—a contemporary narrative, in which the scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey discover letters between two Victorian poets and reconstruct a missing piece of literary history, and a Victorian narrative, in which we see the relationship between those same poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Woven into these two plots are poems, letters, and excerpts from scholarly books—all masterfully written by Byatt. The two worlds create intense dramatic irony: The reader gets to see both what Michell and Bailey get right and what their archives can never capture, reminding us how unknown the territory of the past truly is. The slow pacing means we get to delve into each perspective, but the book remains thrilling throughout, as a picture of history comes slowly into view. By the end, I find I’m always itching to start reading it again.