1. The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan (Simon & Schuster)

Previews of longtime Washington Post reporter Jordan’s slyly titled, tightly held forthcoming book about Melania Trump argue that the first lady and the president share a devotion to their own mythmaking. Jordan, who won a Pulitzer Prize with her husband, Kevin Sullivan, for their coverage of Mexico’s criminal justice system, once interviewed Melania Trump during the 2016 campaign, and interviewed many other associates and observers. According to advance news stories, the book promises juicy anecdotes, including Melania Trump’s preference for Mike Pence for vice president because he would not rival her husband and her reportedly renegotiating her prenuptial agreement during the presidential campaign. These negotiations, Jordan says, and not just the need to remain in Manhattan for their son Barron’s schooling, were why Melania and Barron delayed moving to the White House.

2. Democracy in One Book or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn’t, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think by David Litt (Ecco)

Litt, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, is so smart and sharp-witted that he makes even dry issues like campaign finance reform interesting. The author of a well-received memoir, Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, Litt has now written a more issue-oriented book that is anything but wonky, observing that “representative government may be representing someone, but it isn’t us.” He takes on problems like voting disenfranchisement, advocates for actions like automatic voter registration and ranked choice voting, and takes special aim at Mitch McConnell, having some fun with the notion of a guerrilla action to break into the senator’s University of Kentucky fraternity.

3. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah (Bloomsbury)

Science journalist Shah proved prescient with her 2016 Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, which blended personal insights, journalistic investigation, and historical context into a rewarding, unexpected narrative. Shah now turns to the cultural and biological phenomenon of migration, and with her distinctive curiosity considers birds, butterflies, and humans in the process of dislocation and movement. She takes a global approach to “life on the move” and explains how migration is very much a part of history – a much-overlooked part.

4. All the Way to the Tigers by Mary Morris (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Tiger King. Tiger Mother. Tigers are certainly having their moment. Morris, who became the queen of the journey memoir in 1998 with Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, about finding herself in places as varied as the Honduran jungle and the Caribbean seashore, now chronicles her time in India among the big cats. Her trip winds through memories, disappointments, and the setback of a painful bronchial infection in her pursuit of the Bengal tiger. In her ingeniously narrated book, Morris seeks to understand tigers and their place in the imagination, and she contemplates the richly resonant question of the thin line “between sane and savage, between wild and tame” in her own restlessness.

5. The Daughters of Erietown by Connie Schultz (Random House)

Schultz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for providing “a voice for the underdog and underprivileged” in her columns for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, including an extraordinary one on the women working coat checks. Her richly enjoyable debut novel expands her gaze to the landscape of middle America through four generations of women, each with her own aspirations and roadblocks, beginning in the mid-20th century. Schultz vividly captures the details of daily life, like beehive hairdos, as well as historical markers like the JFK assassination and the sweep of the women’s movement, as she illustrates the challenges of life in a hardscrabble town with broken men from violent families, divided into those who wear ties and those who do not.