1. Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America by Stacey Abrams (Henry Holt)

In her rousing call to action, Abrams recounts her narrow loss in the hotly contested 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia that elevated her to national prominence and lays out her new campaign to fight voter suppression and ensure fair elections. Abrams looks back at landmark victories like Brown v. Board of Education and draws on her family history, especially of her Mississippi grandmother who cast her first-ever ballot a few years after passage of the Voting Rights Act. Abrams highlights the vigilance, patience, and hard work necessary to ensure fair elections and protect voting rights and makes an urgent case for her cause.

2. Code Name Madeleine: A Sufi Spy in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Arthur J. Magida (W.W. Norton)

The daughter of an American mother, whose brother was a prominent yogi, and a father who was a renowned Indian-born Sufi mystic teacher and musician, Noor Inayat Khan was an unlikely spy and brave heroine of World War II. A glamorous, artistic poet who grew up in suburban Paris, Khan did wartime service with the British Special Operations Executive and trained in wireless telegraphy. Operating as “Madeleine,” she was underestimated by the Nazis as a secret agent, but eventually she was captured by the Gestapo and executed at Dachau.

3. Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes (Knopf)

Longfellow’s “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere” may be America’s most memorized poem, even as he has long been dismissed as a “white-bearded Fireside Poet.” Basbanes’ marvelous biography revives the iconic 19th-century poet’s reputation, contending that “twin attractions – accessibility and inclusion – [earned] him recognition as a ‘poet of the people.’” Basbanes captures the full scope of Longfellow’s life, admiring him as “in every respect a man for all seasons, discreet, loyal, and principled to a fault,” from the grief of the deaths of both of his wives to the vitality of his circle of New England writers of the day, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as his friendship with influential figures such as abolitionist and U.S. Senator Charles Sumner.

4. All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad (Dutton)

The title of this debut novel reveals from the outset what is disclosed later, but its animating force is the mystery of the vexed relationship between Maggie and her mother, Iris, who dies in a car crash and has left a stack of letters for men. In her grief, Maggie sets out to fulfill her responsibility to Iris, who had not accepted her daughter’s queerness, and in her road trip understands that her parents’ marriage was far more complicated than she had perceived as a child. As Maggie searches to solve the mystery of her mother, she contends with her own personal demons, especially her resistance to real emotional commitment.

5. A Burning by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)

A terrorist attack ignites a blaze that kills a hundred people and sparks a young Muslim girl to condemn the government in a careless Facebook remark, setting forth a conflagration that radiates through this remarkable debut novel. Through this girl from a slum who is trying to move beyond her station in life; a hijra (a third gender in India) who aspires to Bollywood; and a high school teacher, Majumdar tells a kaleidoscopic story of contemporary India from different perspectives. Inequalities are reinforced by minority status, and Majumdar’s gaze extends even to society’s darkest corners as she captures the anguish of poverty and injustice with an unflinching eye.