1. Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein (Simon & Schuster)

With The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Perlstein distinguished himself as the sage national authority on the rise of conservatism. Now, in the fourth and final volume of his remarkable set, he ratifies his status as an expert on how the party of Lincoln morphed into a conservative phenomenon over four formative decades. Perlstein lays out how nostalgia, anti-establishment passions, culture wars, and conservative evangelicalism congealed into the highly effective “ New Right.”

2. Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth by Brian Stelter (Atria/One Signal)

CNN chief media correspondent Stelter has been called a “eunuch” by Tucker Carlson and “Humpty Dumpty” by Sean Hannity, and chances are that Stelter will be inviting worse deprecation when his new book about the deep connection between the Trump administration and Fox News Channel hits the shelves. In exposing the personal dynamics and decision-making in the multimillion-dollar Fox media empire, Stelter provides juicy details of the collusion between Trump and Fox, despite fights and power struggles within the media organization. Stelter takes special aim at Fox’s skeptical coverage and minimization of the COVID-19 pandemic and its celebration of hydroxychloroquine.

3. The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra (Liveright)

As William Faulkner used Yoknapatawpha County to view America, Gorra trains his viewfinder on the author’s fiction as a way to think about the Civil War and Reconstruction. A gifted literary critic and scholar at Smith College, Gorra weaves history and literature and explores Faulkner’s increasing interest in slavery and race relations in the evolving South and the interplay of memory, past and present. In this era when a writer like Faulkner could be canceled for writing empathically about white Southerners, for instance, Gorra illuminates the civil war within the author himself. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” And Gorra makes a case for the importance of reading him now.

4. Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey by Kathleen Rooney (Penguin)

The story of the “Last Battalion,” trapped by Germans for days in France’s Argonne Forest during World War I, is the stuff of history books, and Rooney’s new novel brings her characteristically revealing new perspective to the rescue mission. The savior: The British carrier pigeon Cher Ami, now taxidermied in a display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Cher Ami is the book’s charming, well-trained narrator, who flies 25 miles at high speed to deliver a critical message from the battalion. Sharing narration is Maj. Charles Whittlesey, the battalion leader and a well-educated New York City lawyer with a secret life who tires of the patriotic fanfare. He speaks from a ship on his way to South America and, like Cher Ami, tries to make sense of the war.

5. With or Without You by Caroline Leavitt (Algonquin)

Think Sleeping Beauty, but with a coma and a middle-age sort-of love triangle. In Leavitt’s propulsive novel, a highly responsible nurse, Stella, falls into a coma while her longtime partner Simon, a rock ’n’ roll has-been, and Libby, her best friend and one of her doctors, develop an intense bond. When Stella recovers, the equilibrium and dynamics of these relationships are recalibrated, and avoiding easy endings, Leavitt generously finds paths for this trio of characters, each bearing childhood wounds, and imagines a world in which each finds a different sort of fulfillment — and not necessarily the one they were seeking.