1. Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine Women by Lizzie Skurnick, introduction by Rebecca Traister (Seal)

How often is a man described as shrill, nurturing, pretty, exotic, or feisty? These words, Skurnick forcefully argues, minimize women and are the language of misogyny. Skurnick, creator of the New York Times word coinage column “That Should Be a Word,” has a keen ear for coded language – particularly adjectives – that minimize, marginalize, and diminish women. She assembled this compendium of essays by writers like Beth Bich Minh Nguyen, who wrestles with cultural stereotyping (“small Vietnamese girl”), and Laura Lippman, who was depicted as “disciplined,” and notes that while some men are considered “geniuses,” women are more often regarded as obsessive perfectionists, or, if geniuses, are seen as “emotionally unstable.” Pretty Bitches is a jolt to the system that embeds even compliments (“pretty”) with misogyny.

2. Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Achorn (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Although our 16th president has been studied down to the whisker, Achorn brings a new perspective through the aperture of the 1865 inauguration at which Lincoln spoke the words “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” In focusing on the 24 hours around the inauguration, Achorn captures this moment in our nation’s capital from wildly different perspectives, including drunken Vice President Andrew Johnson; abolitionist Frederick Douglass, concerned about Lincoln’s commitment to the plight of African Americans; actor John Wilkes Booth, determined to kill the president; and author Walt Whitman, covering the inauguration for the New York Times. Achorn’s rich, polyphonic history covers the sumptuous social events as well as the prisoners of war on the muddy streets and the injured languishing in ill-prepared hospitals.

3. Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury by Honor Moore (W.W. Norton)

In The Bishop’s Daughter, poet Moore wrote about her father, Paul Moore Jr., a prominent bishop of the Episcopal Church and a liberal activist. Now she turns to her mother, Jenny, a former debutante and the mother of nine children who – with her husband – embraced the ideals of Dorothy Day to live a life of service near poverty in Jersey City in an effort to build a multiracial ministry. Neither parent was a saint. “It was a catastrophe,” Moore begins her fascinating memoir, which grapples with her vexed relationship with her complicated mother, who kept Paul Moore’s bisexuality a secret. Her mother bequeathed her trove of letters and unpublished writing charting her continuing reinventions to Honor Moore, who has written a vivid social history of feminism, protest, and the struggles of a mother and daughter.

4. Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn (MCD)

A Filipino Hawaiian family is at the center of Washburn’s enthralling debut novel told in rotating first-person perspectives with  tides and tradition pulling them back from their sugarcane plantation on the big island of Hawai‘i. When the family’s 7-year-old middle child falls from a glass-bottom boat into the ocean, he is circled by sharks, one of which rescues him and returns him to safety, which seems like a supernatural gift from the Hawaiian gods that both bless and curse the family. Suspense builds as Washburn’s supple prose moves between pidgin and its reconfigured grammar, through the indigenous mythology and its clash with contemporary culture and imperialism in the beguiling 50th state.

5. Actress by Anne Enright (W.W. Norton)

A new novel from Enright, the first laureate for Irish fiction and winner of the Man Booker Prize, is an occasion, and Actress does not disappoint. Middle-aged novelist Norah narrates the story of her mother, Katherine O’Dell, a gorgeous, red-headed actress who reigned in the 1940s and ’50s. Regarded as a great Irish star, O’Dell was a fake from the beginning, a London-born actress made Irish with a misplaced apostrophe, and she eventually ends up in a mental institution. Enright is a genius of emotional insight, rendering relationships between actress and audience, artist and art and the contradictory power of myth needed to survive the world.