1. American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein (W. W. Norton)

Bernstein, co-host of WNYC’s powerful podcast Trump Inc. (in co-production with ProPublica), uses her background covering politics and money in New York and New Jersey to bring a forensic eye to the strategic and opportunistic union of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Digging into the origin stories of their immigrant families, Bernstein follows the money and the real estate ventures that led to their wealth and reveals the mutual benefits of the alliance — while also shedding light on the Russian connection. Bernstein’s theme, as William D. Cohan wrote in his New York Times review, is that “the Trumps and the Kushners are ruthless, cold, power hungry and endlessly ambitious.”

2. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas (Henry Holt)

In her deeply knowing book, longtime BBC journalist Ghattas, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points to 1979 as the year that changed the Middle East and instigated the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. She effectively argues that the contemporaneous events of the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the seizure of a holy site in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by Islamic insurgents dramatically shaped the Muslim world for decades. Ghattas, an experienced international reporter whose previous book, The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power, was her inside account of Clinton’s time as secretary of state, illuminates ancient divisions between Shia and Sunni Islam, and explains how the influence of 1979 continues.

3. A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism by Caroline Moorehead (Harper)

In the final book of her remarkable and engrossing Resistance Quartet about women resisters in World War II, Moorehead focuses her attention on four brave, ingenious young women in Northern Italy who fought Mussolini and Hitler. This group of women hid in the mountains and, because they were overlooked as irrelevant, could conceal messages and arms, and lead underground newspapers and strikes on behalf of the Resistance. In her thoroughly researched history, Moorehead vividly depicts this fascinating set of women who were ordered by the pope to respect male authority in a region that was simultaneously avidly Fascist and devoted to resistance.

4. The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Hachette Books)

Eisenberg mines West Virginia’s Pocahontas County and herself in her wickedly smart mix of true crime and memoir, beginning with the unsolved murders of two young women hitchhiking to the hippie Rainbow Gathering festival decades ago. Deeply reported and with a nuanced sensibility, Eisenberg’s book untangles the legal drama of the story, with twists involving wrongful conviction, dubious confession and multiple arrests, and considers them in the context of the poverty, toxic masculinity, and isolation of the region. Drawing from her experience in rural West Virginia, including playing bluegrass music with the men associated with the Rainbow Gathering, Eisenberg writes compellingly about the culture of violence and about distinguishing myth and lies from truth.

5. Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano (Dial)

This absorbing novel has popped onto the best-seller lists and is an immersive winter escape read. It is built on the tragedy of a terrible plane crash in which a 12-year-old boy, who was traveling with his older brother, TV scriptwriter mother, and mathematician father, is the only survivor. Rather than an offer an unremittingly heartbreaking saga of a boy’s struggle to endure his new life with his childless relatives, Napolitano deftly feathers stories of other passengers with that of Eddie – later Edward – as he comes of age, survives the trauma, and evolves in an arbitrary and cruel world that is punctuated by occasional bursts of humanity and goodwill, often in the form of the written word.