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Less than two months into her study abroad program in Italy, Amanda Knox was accused and eventually convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher. After her conviction was overturned, Knox returned home to Seattle — and now faces a potential retrial. Knox tells her story in a new memoir.

Historian Rick Atkinson's new book completes his trilogy on the second world war. He tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that the events of the war may be 70 years in the past, but they're still very much a part of American culture.

Fred Hiatt's new young-adult novel, Nine Days, is based on the real-life story of a Chinese dissident's daughter trying to solve the mystery of her father's disappearance. Ti-Anna Wang, the real-life woman who inspired the tale, says her father had been kidnapped by Chinese agents during a trip to Vietnam.

Author Ethan Rutherford started reading Daphne du Maurier's collection of stories, Don't Look Now, while it was still light out and didn't move from his chair until dark. Each one features characters who endure the strange and the extreme, and who are forever changed by the events that befall them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest book tells the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, who fall in love as students in Nigeria but soon emigrate to different countries: Ifemelu to America and Obinze to England. Adichie tells NPR's Scott Simon that Ifemelu's discovery of racial identity mirrors her own.

Curse words change over time — back in the ninth century you could say the "s" word and no one would be offended. But we always need a set of words that are off-limits, and in her new book, author Melissa Mohr explains how the words that shock us reveal a lot about society's values.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wed in 1920, and the two went on to have a famously turbulent literary marriage. Would Zelda have been better off without her husband? Novelist Therese Anne Fowler says, "They were two sides of one coin."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt said little and did less on behalf of Jews trying to get out of Nazi Germany; but he also won Jewish votes by landslide margins and led the Allies to victory in World War II. A new history by Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman revises FDR's performance upward.

Dameron was a composer and pianist who fused the sophisticated arrangements of the Big Band era with bebop's complex harmonies. A new biography shines a light on the too-brief life of the man known as "The Architect of Bop."

Journalist Jess Bravin's new book details the secretive system of military tribunals used to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Reviewer Jason Farago says the book reads like a thriller — but the violation of American values inherent in the tribunals is a true tragedy.