What We're Reading: Nov. 24 - 30, 2009

Published November 24, 2009 at 9:00 AM EST

This week, Michael Crichton's last book, ever, sails the seas of pirate adventure. In story collections: Alice Munro's strong and subtly mysterious women; Ha Jin's immigrants caught between two worlds. And a space-program history finds surprising drama in the unmanned voyages.

Pirate Latitudes

A Novel

By Michael Crichton

After Michael Crichton's death in 2008, the manuscript for Pirate Latitudes was discovered among his files — apparently his last completed book. It reaches all the way back to the Caribbean in 1665, where the daring Capt. Charles Hunter assembles a band of compatriots to commandeer a Spanish ship packed with gold. An adventure novel in the most unapologetic sense — the first chapter actually features a character commenting, "Warm day for a hanging" — Pirate Latitudes embraces the wenches and cannons of the genre while providing plenty of historical detail.

Hardcover, 320 pages, Harper, list price: $27.99, pub. date: Nov. 24

Too Much Happiness

Stories

By Alice Munro

Fans of Alice Munro will find much that is familiar in Too Much Happiness. Her stories are filled with smart, self-contained characters, mostly women, who seem in control of their lives. Yet under the surface there is something dark, even perverse, which takes the reader by surprise and makes these seemingly simple lives so much more complex than they first appear. Her characters are not necessarily lovable, or moral, but the way Munro reveals what lies beneath is always fascinating. And in the story that gives the book its name, Munro leaves behind contemporary Canada for a work of historical fiction set in 19th century Europe. In it Munro explores the life of Sophia Kovalevski, a mathematician and a novelist whom Munro discovered while browsing through an encyclopedia. It's a departure for Munro and makes one wonder where her imagination might take her in the future.

Hardcover, 320 pages, Knopf, list price: $25.95, pub. date: Nov. 17

A Good Fall

Stories

By Ha Jin

Ha Jin, who came to the United States from his native China in 1984, won a National Book Award in 1999 for his novel Waiting. His first book of short fiction since 2000's The Bridegroom, A Good Fall gathers 12 stories set mostly in the Chinese immigrant community of Flushing, N.Y. The stories are often deceptively simple, relying less on storytelling hooks than on intensely personal perspectives. One is, on the surface, little more than a sister's moan of aggravation about her needy sibling; one traces the life and death of a parakeet.

Hardcover, 256 pages, Pantheon, list price: $24.95, pub. date: Nov. 24

Ambassadors From Earth

Pioneering Explorations With Unmanned Spacecraft

By Jay Gallentine

This book is the latest in a fascinating but little-known series on the U.S. and Russian space programs called Outward Odyssey. The University of Nebraska Press plans to publish 12 books, and so far the authors have explored areas not touched on before — especially on the Russian side. Even for well-chronicled missions like Gemini and Apollo, the researchers for the series have added new details to the record. This latest installment, Ambassadors From Earth, details the failures and successes of U.S. unmanned systems like Ranger and Voyager. Manned spaceflight has always elbowed money and attention away from unmanned systems. But the relatively inexpensive robotic explorers have given us some of the most intriguing discoveries of our universe.