On the shelf: Bittersweet farewell to Bette Davis and more

Miss D & Me: Life with the Invincible Bette Davis by Kathryn Sermak with Danelle Morton (Hachette Books).

Bette Davis battled studio bosses, husbands and rivals during her long acting career, establishing a tough persona in real life to match her enduring Hollywood image. She would need all that strength when she faced illness in her final years, knowing she could achieve a dark victory by meeting death on her terms.

Her personal assistant during much of that time, Kathryn Sermak, depicts a lioness in winter in her memoir, Miss D & Me: Life With the Invincible Bette Davis. The actress, in her 70s, still showed some bite in dealing with family feuds and the demands of stardom even as she suffered from cancer and a stroke.

Davis found solace in activity, especially acting. “People will leave you,” she told Sermak more than once, “but your work will always stand by you.”

Sermak had come into Davis’ life in 1979, a 22-year-old ingénue hired for the summer who came to learn how an aging movie star lived.

The mercurial Miss D decided to play Pygmalion, grooming Sermak to become a young woman with the poise and discretion befitting her position.

Poignant with touches of humor, Miss D & Me is a fitting fade-out for an actress who made it look easy to stay tough. Davis chose the epitaph for her tomb at Forest Lawn Hollywood: “She did it the hard way.” Yet Sermak’s book brings to mind a different Davis that her fans will find more perceptive with each passing year: “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.”

Incisive look at racial issues

Bluebird, Bluebird: a Novel by Attica Locke (Mulholland Books).

Attica Locke’s incisive look at racial issues reaches another milestone in the gripping Bluebird, Bluebird. Locke unflinchingly illustrates the intersection of race and justice as seen in an insular community in East Texas.

The author packs the excellent novel with believable characters whose motives often are tied up in the complex morass of history and family.

Darren Mathews was raised by proud twin brothers, one of whom was a defense lawyer and professor of constitutional law, the other a Texas Ranger — members of “a tribe going back generations in rural East Texas, black men for whom self-regard was both a natural state of being and survival technique.” Despite a Princeton degree and two years of law school, Darren also became a Texas Ranger, a job that has never set well with his family or his estranged wife. But then there are the “homicides with a racial element — murders with a particularly ugly taint” that intrigue Darren.

Locke’s superior storytelling excels in Bluebird, Bluebird as the author deftly moves the brisk plot that centers on racism as well as greed, hate and even love. Unforgettable characters — each of whom has an intricate backstory — balance the tense action.

Finalists for national prize

The National Book Foundation recently announced 10 nominees for its major prize for fiction. Winners will be announced Nov. 15. The nominees include Jennifer Egan for Manhattan Beach; Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing; Carol Zoref for Barren Island; Lisa Ko for The Leavers; Margaret Wilkerson Sexton for A Kind of Freedom; Carmen Maria Machado for Her Body and Other Parties; Daniel Alarcon for The King is Always Above the People; Elliot Ackerman for Dark at the Crossing; Charmaine Craig for Miss Burma? and Min Jin Lee for Pachinko.

Selling best

At the top of the best-seller lists from Publishers Weekly:

Hardcover fiction: Sleeping Beauties by King/King (Scribner).

Hardcover nonfiction: Killing England by O'Reilly/Dugard (Holt).

Mass market paperbacks:  Sugar Pine Trail by RaeAnne Thayne (HQN).

Trade paperbacks: It by Stephen King (Scribner).