1. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump (Simon & Schuster)

Despite the Trump family’s determination to prevent its publication, this tell-all by President Donald Trump’s only niece, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist, has arrived on the scene, and it takes direct aim the family’s “dark history.” She takes special aim at patriarch Fred C. Trump, whose emotional cruelty, she says, created the toxic family that made her uncle who he is. In her family psychobiography, Trump exposes ugly details of its anxiety, dysfunction, financial greed, and dehumanization. Judging from its place at #1 on Amazon even before publication, Americans are emphatically saying “tell me more.”

2. Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Crown)

In his compelling book of memoir, criticism, and biography, Glaude celebrates James Baldwin’s moral passion and intellectual integrity as a guiding light to understanding today’s political turmoil, including conflicts over Confederate monuments, incarceration and the Black Lives Matter movement. Glaude, chair of the African American studies department at Princeton University, argues for the relevance today of Baldwin, a writer whose significance and influence rose even as the literary establishment dismissed him. Baldwin bore witness, and Glaude eloquently channels Baldwin’s urgent call for a genuine democratic community in which all can flourish. 

3. Rockaway: Surfing Headlong into a New Life by Diane Cardwell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Growing up in Manhattan’s pressure cooker of ambition with the popular image of surfers as “laid-back stoners and tattooed dudes,” Cardwell (Vibe magazine founder and former New York Times reporter) seems an unlikely sort to take to the waves. In her deeply affecting memoir, Cardwell tells her story of reinvention in the wake of the demise of her marriage, finding surfing and stumbling upon “a secret tribe of magical creatures – fairies and nymphs frolicking in a hidden bay.” She moves to a cottage on Rockaway Beach, New York, and when Hurricane Sandy devastates her new home, she finds strength in rebuilding it with her friends and continues to surf.

4. The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio (Ecco)

The teenager known as “X” – short for Excel, “like the spreadsheet” – is at the center of this smartly off-kilter inversion of the traditional novel of the family immigration experience in America. X’s life is upended when his mother, who was a D-list movie star in the Philippines, confides the secret that he is TNT – tago ng tagoin Tagalog, or “hiding and hiding.” As he spins his story out, Tenorio cuts back and forth through time and introduces fascinating characters, especially his mother, Maxima, a scam artist living with her martial arts trainer. In his irreverent and generous novel, Tenorio provides a nuanced, original perspective on the Filipino-American diaspora.

5. Other People’s Pets by R.L. Maizes (Celadon)

The family business takes on a new meaning in this deliciously satisfying debut novel by the author of a fine story collection, We Love Anderson Cooper. La La (Louise) is an “animal empath” who connects with four-legged creatures more than humans. She has been raised by her locksmith father, who schools her in the art of home burglaries until he gets caught and she drops out of veterinary school and takes on his legal fees by burgling houses where pets are in trouble and mistreated. In this Robin Hood twist, Maizes tells a fast-paced story with style and keen insights into the mysterious, powerful bonds between animals and people.