1. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow (Little, Brown)

The 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service was shared by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times and by Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker for their “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers.” And while Kantor and Twohey’s new book, She Said, focuses on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and abuse case and penetrates its web of complicit characters, Farrow takes aim at the corrosive secrecy around sexual abuse and the NBC executives who suppressed his reporting. Farrow adds a new dimension to the Weinstein story by detailing his charges of NBC’s complicity and its protection of its former star Matt Lauer, with horrific, bloody details from a former NBC employee who confided that Lauer had raped her. While Farrow graduated from Yale Law School, this book does not read as a collection of legal evidence, but rather draws from his sense of justice and humanity, evident in his bond with Dylan, his adopted sister, who long ago charged that their father, Woody Allen, had molested her as a child.

 2. No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History,” by Gail Collins (Little, Brown)

Gidget, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the abolitionist Grimké sisters – and those are just some of the “G’s” highlighted in Collins’ rich, conversational history of women and age, from Colonial days (Mary Washington) to today (Hillary Clinton). With her distinctive wit and style, the New York Times columnist roots her narrative in the vicissitudes of history and, as she writes, how women “figured out how to get around what seemed like fixed social deadlines for being a valuable part of society.” Collins is a gracious guide though generations of women embracing the adventure of aging. “Calling it an adventure isn’t self-deluding, she writes, “if you acknowledge right off the bat that this may involve hip replacements.”

3. Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Cohen takes a biographical approach to urban renewal in her fascinating book about planner Ed Logue, who renewed New Haven, revitalized Boston, and brought his vision to New York state over three decades, but left a complicated legacy. More than writing a straightforward biography of a heroic but deeply flawed figure, Cohen, a Harvard professor who served as dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, traces the arc of federal urban renewal, often dismissed by both liberals and conservatives as a “scandalous chapter in American urban policy.” Logue, who was governed by his enlightened adage “planning with people,” emerges as a figure of Greek tragedy, his good intentions thwarted by his inability to bring integrated housing to Westchester County and by administrative mismanagement that ultimately led to disaster.

4. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams (W.W. Norton)

In his pathbreaking memoir that should destabilize conventional wisdom, Williams contends with the American dictum that a “single ‘drop of black blood’ makes a person ‘black’ primarily because they can never be ‘white.’” The birth of his daughter with blond hair and eyes with inky-blue irises prompted his inquiry into identity, race, and self-image, and he engagingly brings readers into his own personal process of investigation, which also draws from scholarship on race as a social construct. In a smart counter to contemporary arguments about codification and white privilege, and to contravene persistent thinking, Williams expresses his wish “to show how the idea of race has unraveled in my own life so that it might spark some of that much-needed repair, one-on-one, in whatever room you happen to find yourself.”

5. Girl by Edna O’Brien (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

O’Brien’s bombshell first novel, The Country Girls, set in her native Ireland and banned by the Irish censorship board when it was published nearly 60 years ago, is credited with cracking the code of silence on sexual matters. As Ian Parker writes in his excellent profile in the New Yorker, O’Brien is still writing about women fighting back and fleeing, Girl is her fictional portrait of the girls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria five years ago, and it is horrifying and violent, yet tender. O’Brien doesn’t do victims; her girls are tenacious survivors, and while her narrative focuses on a single girl, she enriches the story so deeply that it feels like a chorus with one solo. Imbuing the tale with myth and rituals, O’Brien takes a story ripped from the headlines and transforms it into art.