1. Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration by Christine Montross (Penguin Press)

In her damning indictment of the American justice system, psychiatrist Montross blends research and her own experiences and investigation to show how mentally ill people – most of whom are poor, of color, and with addictions – end up in prison, which makes their illness worse. She shows that untrained prison personnel and difficult conditions, particularly solitary confinement, fail to rehabilitate prisoners who cause trouble because of their mental illnesses. Beyond her clear diagnosis of the problem, Montross locates examples of solutions in places as disparate as Chicago’s Cook County Jail, with its use of cognitive behavioral therapy, and Norway, where a shift in philosophy addresses underlying problems before incarceration. 

2. The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey (Little, Brown)

Is James Strang the most infamous American con man you’ve never heard of? That’s the question animating Harvey’s biography of the opportunist prophet-king, a convert who persuaded the Mormons who did not follow Brigham Young to Utah to join him on Michigan’s Beaver Island. Strang’s authoritarian rule may have done him in, but Harvey’s marvelous rendering of this con man in fraught antebellum America may have a particular resonance today.

3. Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game by Oliver Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Stone has made his career as a filmmaker out of presenting counterevidence and confronting historical convention in a bold, brash, and remorseless way, and those talents inform his riveting, take-no-prisoners autobiography. The son of a divorced French socialite mother and a Wall Street hustler father, he got kicked out of Yale, served in Vietnam, and drove a cab. At film school at New York University, Martin Scorsese’s wisdom – “chase the light” – informed him, and Stone went on to win two Oscars. Remarkably averse to Hollywood name-dropping, Stone casts himself as the protagonist in his own drama, and illuminates the arc of his career and his challenges to great American narratives.

4. Lake Life by David James Poissant (Simon & Schuster)

A family gathering at a summer lake house suggests the ingredients of a light beach read, but Poissant has cooked up a deliciously satisfying novel, sharpened with suspense and psychological acuity. After a couple on the Cornell University faculty retire and prepare to sell their dilapidated North Carolina lake house, they gather for a week with their adult children and their significant others in this rich family drama, which emerges in chapters rotating their perspectives as tensions mount and secrets emerge. Drawing on his talents as a short story writer, which were evident in his collection The Heaven of Animals, Poissant reveals not only the demons plaguing this set of six, but also the costs of concealment and its power to shape relationships. 

5. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf)

O’Farrell brilliantly recasts Shakespeare’s family life in Stratford-upon-Avon in her reimagination of a moment in which he is offstage, away in London, as his wife waits for his greatness to emerge. O’Farrell focuses on Agnes, a sorceress’s daughter, and her perspective on her vexed marriage, her father-in-law’s volatility, and her apprehensive intuitions about herself and her twins. Between sickly Judith and strong Hamnet, it is Hamnet who falls ill and dies of bubonic plague, which reaches Stratford by a monkey’s flea. The world of theater and London is in sharp contrast to Agnes’ experience, yet she comes to understand that her husband’s great play Hamlet has the power heal her own grief.