What’s new: Books by Dan Vyleta, Thad Carhart and Clara Bingham

SMOKE, by Dan Vyleta. In a strange Victorian England that isn’t exactly the one in history books, the bad and sinful lower classes emit smoke and soot from their bodies, while the aristocracy are smokeless. Two boarding-school friends, Thomas and Charlie, along with a young girl named Livia, begin to question this order, and set off for London to discover the truth in this fantasy page-turner. (Doubleday, $27.95)

FINDING FONTAINEBLEAU: An American Boy in France, by Thad Carhart. The author of “The Piano Shop on the Left Bank” revisits his 1950s childhood in the town south of Paris, famous for its château. The book is a lovely snapshot of daily life in a bygone France, as well as a tribute to the artistic and architectural glories of this centuries-old royal palace, a predecessor to Versailles. (Viking, $27)

WITNESS TO THE REVOLUTION: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul, by Clara Bingham. This oral history of the months from August 1969 to August 1970 re-examines the dramatic events of that year through the voices of Bill Ayers, Carl Bernstein, Bernardine Dohrn, Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Seymour Hersh and others. (Random House, $30)