1. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House)

How could Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Wilkerson possibly follow up her magisterial history The Warmth of Other Suns, winner of the National Book Critics Circle and Anisfield-Wolf awards? She has outdone herself with this original, nuanced, important and very timely history of the “shape-shifting, unspoken” American caste system, the infrastructure that firmly maintains the social hierarchy.  “Caste is the bones, race is the skin,” she writes in her intellectually ambitious book, fusing the work of anthropologists, geneticists and economists into a narrative that stretches from America’s origins to Germany and the Nazis, who studied and admired the way America legally codified its subjugation of black people.

2. True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump by Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday)

With the lucidity in which he explains legal matters on CNN and for the New Yorker, Toobin argues that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election failed to finish the job and explicitly state what it tried to imply: that Trump had repeatedly obstructed justice. Toobin’s own inquiry reads like a thriller as he exposes how Trump, aided by Giuliani and team, mobilized his base against the enigmatic, reticent Mueller who ultimately pulled his punches and gave Trump a free pass, not even interviewing him face-to-face, leaving a gaping hole in the investigation.

3. Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood by Margot Mifflin (Counterpoint)

In her smart and witty narrative, Mifflin “unzips” the contradictory, curious, and entertaining story of the iconic Miss America pageant as a revealing reflection of women’s history. In chronicling the pagent’s checkered history, beyond its branding as a source of scholarships, Mifflin reveals how the contest wormed its way into the national subconscious, taking us through its disasters, hypocrisies and ambitions over the last century. Mifflin trains her eye not only on prominent contests like Vanessa Williams, the “pageant’s own Hester Prynne,” dethroned after revelations of nude Penthouse photographs, but also more obscure ones like Alabama’s Yolande Betbeze who fought for civil rights and refused to model a swimsuit, which in turn led to the rival Miss USA contest – once owned by Donald Trump.

4. Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen (Random House)

Andersen brings his distinctive brilliance this revisionist history of contemporary inequality, imbuing it with freewheeling cultural savvy and political sensibility. In his lively, engaging chronicle, Andersen describes “the quite deliber­ate reengineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business.”  Financial deregulation and evisceration of campaign finance laws (with Supreme Court help) contributed to this “winner-take-all casino economy.”

5. The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals by Becky Mandelbaum (Simon & Schuster)

Witty and original, Mandelbaum’s debut novel centers on estranged mother Mona, the bankrupt and overextended owner of “Bright Side” animal sanctuary in Kansas, and her 20-something daughter Ariel who returns home after the shelter has been the target of an antisemitic hate crime. The talented winner of a Nelson Algren award for short fiction, Mandelbaum brings a sharp, smart point of view to this constellation of relationships, from the fraught mother and daughter to the neighbor with his “Make America Great Again” sign. Set her story just after the 2016 election at a sanctuary full of pigs, mules and dogs, Mandelbaum brings a new perspective to these oddball, winsome characters who, like many of us, relate best through animals.