1. Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State by Barton Gellman (Penguin Press)

Gellman has made a career of surveilling the surveillance state, with three Pulitzer Prizes to confirm the importance of his indefatigable investigations into the shadowy world of national security and intelligence. Gellman paints a nuanced portrait of NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his famous leak of secret U.S. intelligence documents in 2013, and his deftly entwined narratives also provide the revelatory inside scoop on his own reporting, adding his own smart, wry insights. From the start, Gellman is upfront with readers, contending that Snowden “did substantially more good than harm,” with the caveat that he is more prepared than Snowden to accept that the disclosures exacted a price in lost intelligence.

2. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)

More than fantasy fulfillment in which Hillary Clinton was elected president, Sittenfeld’s latest novel imagines an entirely alternative history for Hillary Rodham – one in which she does not marry Bill Clinton. Sittenfeld, who fictionalized Laura Bush in American Wife, brilliantly flips perspective and channels what Hillary Rodham might have been thinking and her impressions of those around her – friends, media, allies, and foes – beginning with her childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois. In imagining in how Hillary Rodham’s blind spots and internal conflicts expressed themselves in her behavior, Sittenfeld offers a rewarding portrait of a middle-American woman with keen, though perhaps largely unexpressed, perceptions of the world.

3. Troop 6000: The Girl Scout Troop that Began in a Shelter and Inspired the World by Nikita Stewart (Ballantine)

Widely known for suburban girls selling Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties cookies, the Girl Scouts get an image reset in this uplifting account of Troop 6000, launched in a Queens, New York, homeless shelter by a single mother of five. Stewart chronicles the troop’s evolution from its embryonic form as eight girls gathering on a craft project in a room at the shelter to a flourishing group of homeless girls throughout New York City. Stewart, a New York Times reporter, adroitly captures the girls’ growth as they develop confidence, but also portrays the inevitable squabbles among them and underscores the traumas, stress, and challenges experienced by thousands of homeless Americans.

4. Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Melancholy informs Ford’s wonderfully rich and resonant collection of stories set in New Orleans, Maine, and Ireland, as protagonists – many of them older male attorneys – come to terms with the stories they’ve told themselves over the years. Ford hears their inner thoughts and anxieties, capturing quotidian aspects of life and its ambivalence in a way that makes them universal. Chance encounters, slow death, sudden passing – these are just some of the vitrines for Ford’s genius.

5. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour (Vintage)

The marvelous essays in Khakpour’s collection blend together to form a memoir, from her family’s departure from Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution, through the success of her debut novel as a “9/11 author,” to apprehensions about deportation under the Trump administration even though she was a naturalized citizen. Khakpour writes with wit and charm as she rolls her eyes at the designation “Miss Literary Iranian America,” recounts the awkwardness of being the only Iranian in her school, and describes life as a warrior on the book festival circuit after the publication of her novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects. But she is also serious, as she calls for recognizing the challenge of being brown in the age of Trump.