1. Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir by Lacy Crawford (Little, Brown) The elite boarding school’s pediatrician wrote “herpetic lesions” on her medical chart, and a quarter-century after this diagnosis, Crawford heard the nib of his pen as she read the report for the first time. The enduring trauma of her sexual assault at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire informs her life, and while Crawford recounts the shocking documented facts in her deeply affecting memoir, its extraordinary power resides in her artful, original, and evocative telling of the story and the cover-up. School administrators refused to believe her, shamed her, then silenced her. The insult “slut,” she writes, is part of the disappearing process — and its opposite “is not virtue but voice.”

2. Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff (Custom House)

Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents and locking them into detention center cages. Soboroff’s clear, compassionate reports for NBC/MSNBC galvanized public opposition to these policies, and in Separated, he delves into the history of “deterrence-based immigration policy” and shares his notes to provide an inside story of the harrowing details of the drama he witnessed. In wrenching portraits, Soboroff focuses on children and parents severed from one another, and pulls the lens back to provide a necessary perspective on this woeful chapter in American history.

3. The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice by David Hill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In his engrossing story of a forgotten history, Hill zeros in on his roots in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which by 1961 was, according to Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s chief organized crime investigator, the “largest illegal gambling operation in the United States.” Hill tells this story through a trio of fascinating characters spanning 1931 to 1968: his grandmother Hazel Hill, who worked her way up from barmaid to shill player drinking with the state’s aristocracy; powerful boss gambler and bootlegger Dane Harris; and Owney “The Killer” Madden, sent to Hot Springs by Meyer Lansky. Hill’s dynamic social history captures the arc of how this seedy vice district evolved into a magnet for star athletes and entertainers in an environment of election fraud and widespread corruption.

4. Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In this vivid chronicle of the ascent, reign, and decline of Joseph McCarthy, Tye places the Wisconsin senator in the context of the reflexive anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, and also details what happened behind doors of the 1953-54 Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Dismissed as a “gasbag” early in his career, McCarthy browbeat colleagues and stoked national fear of communism, Tye recounts, until finally public opinion turned against him. An alcoholic, McCarthy was often hospitalized and treated with potent narcotics such as morphine and codeine, and Tye argues that Roy Cohn was the “flesh-and-blood nexus” that tied the hate-spewing senator to demagogue Donald Trump.

5. The Party Upstairsby Lee Conell (Penguin Press)

Conell brings panache, compassion, and a contemporary urban twist to the upstairs-downstairs trope in her debut novel set in the universe of a Manhattan co-op building. Told from the father-daughter perspectives of Martin, the building super, and jobless, diorama-making art history major Ruby, who moves home to the building, where her childhood best friend lives in the penthouse apartment. Conell, who won the Nelson Algren Literary Award for short fiction in 2016, ignites this suspenseful novel, taking place over a single day, with a passion, psychological insight, and a keen sensibility about class and economic difference.