“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” So begins Rivka Galchen’s strange and enthralling first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24), a whirlwind musing on doppelgangers, sanity and meteorological currents. With deadpan wit and surrealist narration, Galchen’s narrator, the psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein, takes the reader on a ride through New York, Buenos Aires and Patagonia, in search of his lost wife and of the nature of reality itself.