Howard Norman is best known as the author of finely crafted novels like the National Book Award-nominee, The Bird Artist, and What Is Left the Daughter. In I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), he turns his novelist’s eye on his own experiences. In evocative and very personal essays, he shows the arc of his life thus far, studded by incidents he describes as “arresting strangeness.” He recounts his days growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his travels to the Arctic, where he developed an intense appreciation of Inuit life and culture, and the idylls of summers in his family’s 19th-century farmhouse in his beloved Vermont. The last part of the book recalls a tragic event that took place in his home in Washington, D.C. Evident throughout is Norman’s deep sensitivity to nature and the rhythms of life.