1. Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War by S.C. Gwynne (Scribner)

Gwynne’s gripping history begins with Ulysses S. Grant’s determination to control the Union Army and destroy Robert E. Lee in a way that that would make the “early years of the conflict look innocent and honorable by comparison.” Gwynne, a wonderful storyteller whose Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, makes good use of his narrative gifts as he re-creates those fraught times, through Sherman’s March, the surrender at Appomattox, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He closes on an emotional note, with Clara Barton at the graves of the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp, after the “war that had stitched the nation back together had also made a terrible mess of things.”

2. From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West by Heidi Blake (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown)

In her shocking book, Blake, global investigations editor of BuzzFeed News, builds on a 2017 project that revealed the Kremlin’s history under Putin of murdering its opponents and extends that investigation beyond Russia. She uncovers details of dissidents who fled to the U.K. and U.S. yet could not escape the Kremlin, and vividly details the backstories of the murders of prominent Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya and defector Alexander Litvinenko. In her elaboration on these cases and many others, Blake marshals evidence and argues that world leaders such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Barack Obama, eager to believe that Putin was a liberalizing force for Russian society, provided support to the Kremlin while it pursued its bloody agenda.

3. Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey through the Twentieth Century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Stein’s masterful book about the Levy family of Sephardic Jews, rooted in the Ottoman city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece), is a remarkable recovery of history, drawing from multiple generations of family papers written in eight languages, spanning the globe. She describes it as a Jewish, Ottoman, European, Mediterranean, and diasporic story of how a family experienced “wars, genocide, and migration” and over decades “loved and quarreled, struggled and succeeded, clung to one another and watched the ties that once bound them slip from their grasp.” From the Levys’ massive trove of letters, records, and correspondence, from the Ottoman Empire through World War II and the Holocaust, Stein elegantly structures her tightly written chapters around family members, propelling this history through decades of discovery, even learning that one descendant was a Nazi collaborator.

4. The Confession Club by Elizabeth Berg (Random House)

With Ann Patchett’s warmth and Richard Russo’s keen understanding of small-town American life, Berg has her own recipe for delectable novel rich with baked goods and charm. In her third book set in Mason, Missouri, the women in a cooking class morph into a supper club. They learn to accept one another’s quirky habits and support each other in times of grief and duress, but Berg upsets the town’s equilibrium by introducing a new man in town. A handsome Vietnam veteran, homeless after his wife left him, settles into an abandoned farmhouse and throws the town dynamic into a tizzy, but nothing that can’t be settled with good conversation over a well-cooked meal.

5. Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin (FSG Originals)

MacLaughlin unmoors Ovid’s The Metamorphoses from its Roman roots in a contemporary, fresh reset of the classic in a set of 30 stories in which women take control of their narratives. Daphne, Arachne, Baucis, Medusa, Leucothoe, and Eurydice replace Icarus and Daedalus and on in a violent, sexual, rage-filled and patriarchal world. MacLaughlin’s language and style evoke alt-rock, commonplace speech, and even therapy sessions, with quotidian modern references to 7-Eleven and Skittles. The way MacLaughlin, author of the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, keys into modern life makes for a playful, fierce, and witty perspective, like Alcmena (mother of Hercules) reset as a pilates-going eater of kale, chard, and broccoli rabe who begins her chapter: “I took being preggers very seriously. You’ve got to!”