1. The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century by Adam Davidson (Knopf)

In his exuberant new book, Davidson makes a case that the forces of technology and trade that have destroyed what he calls the widget economy – the faster, cheaper reproduction of the same product – have created the opportunity for passion. With his distinctive voice as creator of NPR’s Planet Money podcast and New Yorker staff writer, Davidson winningly blends case studies of fervent, enthusiastic believers – creators of amazing ice cream, expensive pencils, menswear – with a set of counterintuitive rules so that work lives and our deepest passions can merge to make people better off financially, and personally.

2. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain (Liveright)

In her nuanced account, Chatelain spotlights the intertwined relationships between the struggle for civil rights and the fast-food industry. A history professor at Georgetown University, Chatelain begins in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death as a McDonald’s franchise becomes the epicenter of the 2014 conflict, both a gathering place and a symbol of exploitation and despair. Chatelain details the arc of how black-owned franchises empowered citizens by providing scholarships and community support and yet eventually became concentrated in the poorest, most racially segregated areas, peddling unhealthy foods in isolated, low-income neighborhoods.

3. Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun (Grove)

They are the “Jan Brady of generations” — women born between 1965 and 1980 — and they’re finding middle age tougher than their equivalent predecessors, argues Calhoun in her engaging and resonant new look at the conundrum. In a blend of memoir and sociology with a touch of manifesto, Calhoun focuses on her own Generation X, the group between baby boomers and millennials, who graduated from college in a weak job market and have a “bone-deep” worry about money and are burdened with aging parents and often unappreciative children. Despite these challenges, with her light touch and humor (her last book was Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give) Calhoun calls on her generation to set realistic expectations and face up to their lives as they really are.

4. Long Bright River by Liz Moore (Riverhead)

Moore’s unput-downable blend of family drama, police procedural, and thriller set in the once working-class Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, now blighted by opioids, features two sisters, one a cop and the other a homeless addict. Moving back and forth through time, Moore’s novel evokes a sense of a neighborhood, as did Richard Price in his fiction set in North Jersey, and adds a sense of contemporary urgency as the estranged sisters’ lives intersect. Moore’s insightful revelations of dynamics between the sisters, and the weight of their shared history, provide an enduring quality that provides a velocity to this engrossing novel.

5. Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey (Knopf)

In a stream of consciousness style and with an unnamed narrator, Popkey’s debut novel is sharp and provocative. It’s written – as suggested in her title – as a series of conversations between the narrator and other women over nearly two decades of trying to figure out herself and the messages she has absorbed over time, particularly about power, consent, and desire. Through the spectrum of conversations as they progress, Popkey gets at the knotty power dynamics between men and women, and feelings that were once inchoate and are now being expressed.