Astray By Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown, $25.99)

If Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel, “Room,” was a tale of imprisonment, then her new and splendid collection, “Astray,” is all about breaking through barriers.

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962 By Yang Jisheng, translated, from the Chinese, by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35)

Mao’s Great Leap Forward, designed to make China the world’s leading communist state, generated the worst famine in history.

The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family

of Jonathan Edwards By Ava Chamberlain (NYU, $27.95)

A careful reading of both individual and intellectual history of a fascinating figure from the early 20th century.