1. Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia by Chris Hamby (Little, Brown)

Hamby won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for his reporting on how doctors and lawyers withheld evidence of black lung disease that denied coal miners legal benefits, and he was later awarded a J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards to support the completion of a significant work of non-fiction. Hamby has delivered on that promise, extending and enriching his reporting on the West Virginia miners with advanced-stage black lung on the brink of poverty who teamed up with his idealistic lawyer to wage battle against the coal industry. Beyond courtrooms and mines, Hamby journeys deep into hollows and homes and powerfully evokes the injustices done to minors who “battled breathlessness to make it from their front porches to their mailboxes and dragged oxygen tanks wherever they went.”

2. The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America’s Middle Class by Jim Tankersley (PublicAffairs)

New York Times reporter Tankersley blends his expertise on the economics beat with his feel for politics and life across America in his excellent new book focusing on what he describes as the “uncovered lies that have poisoned our national economic debate.”  In his immensely readable book, he challenges the accepted origin story of America’s great postwar boom with a smart, original analysis full of characters including workers whom history tends to overlook. Tankersley shows how more inclusive policies toward black and Latino workers played a large role in building the middle-class and convincingly argues that increased opportunity for minorities, women, and immigrants is critical to preserving and expanding the middle-class going forward.

3. The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman (Viking)

As anti-democratic tensions flare in Hong Kong and China more generally, Kaufman chronicles the history of the Sassoons and Kadoories, the rival Baghdadi Jewish families who journeyed to China in the 19th century and jump-started modern economic development, indelibly shaping Shanghai, the city that made them billionaires.  While the two families competed in trade, they joined together to protect 18,000 European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany during World War II. Kaufman’s three decades of experience as a journalist reporting on China are evident as he follows his subjects through the sweep of the Opium Wars, Japanese occupation, Communism  and the global economy. Kaufman’s tale of two families provides a fascinating perspective on Jewish and Chinese history and multicultural British colonialism. 

4. Luster by Raven Leilani (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ediie, an unfulfilled Black woman in her 20s living in Bushwick loses her job after meeting Eric, a much older, married white man online. From these basic shards, Leilani magically electrifies what could otherwise be the making of a standard-issue debut novel.  Invited by Eric and his wife to live with them  and their adopted black daughter in their open marriage in suburban New Jersey, Edie becomes enmeshed with this contorted family. Ambitiously imagined and linguistically audacious, Leilani’s novel captures the feelings of dislocation and disequilibrium amidst the shifting, explosive dynamics of race, sex, money and power.

5. The Queen of Tuesday by Darin Strauss (Random House)

As Curtis Sittenfeld reimagined Hillary Clinton’s life in her marvelous novel Rodham, Strauss invents an alternative story of Lucille Ball: a furtive love affair between the TV icon and his own grandfather, Isidore Strauss. Strauss whips together a beguiling mix of fiction and reality as Lucy and Izzy meet at a Fred Trump event on Coney Island and in infrequent secret trysts grow bewitched by one another. The TV marriage on I Love Lucy disintegrates, and Lucy becomes a powerful, expansive Hollywood figure, but the beating heart of this novel is Izzy, whose life grows increasingly drab and hollow when Lucy’s presence fades.