1. Rage by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster)

President Donald Trump recently tweeted that Woodward’s new book would be a “fake,” but he didn’t explain why he granted 17 interviews since December with perhaps the most famous reporter in the world. Partial recordings have been released before publication, and horrifyingly Trump clearly admits playing down the danger of COVID-19 publicly when he knew full well the deadly severity of the crisis. Woodward also reports that Trump dismissed generals as “suckers” and boasted that he has done more for Black people than any president since Lincoln and yet “I’m not feeling any love.”

2. Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown)

Akhtar’s charming debut novel, American Dervish, about a Muslim boy coming of age in Reagan-era Milwaukee, and his new one, which features a narrator with the same name as the author who, like Akhtar, is the son of Pakistani doctors who writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a Muslim American, may appear to be “autofiction,” but rather than exclusively looking inward, Akhtar’s inventive novel defies label. An ingenious storyteller, Akhtar melds elements of historical inquiry and cultural analysis with pitch-perfect dialogue and an essayish style with the theme of the playwright and his parents contending with loneliness, greed, predatory capitalism, and alienation in the “terrifying lust for unreality” that has engulfed the paradox of predatory contemporary America. Akhtar, soon to be president of PEN America, has written a prescient, brilliant novel that keys into the anxieties playing out across the nation on the eve of a momentous election. 

3. Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America by Maria Hinojosa (Atria) 

Anyone who has heard Hinojosa’s distinctive, passionate voice on NPR’s Latino USA will recognize it on the pages of her wonderful memoir, compelling readers to turn the pages as she guides us through American history beginning in 1962, when she arrived in the U.S. with her family, “marked as a ‘dirty Mexican.’” Hinojosa’s story is a time capsule as she grew up watching Walter Cronkite, following news of George Wallace and civil rights, then breaking into news in the early days of All Things Considered and CNN and covering the big stories of the era, eventually moving on to the horrific treatment of children at the border. An Emmy-winning journalist, Hinojosa moves easily between the story of her own upbringing on the South Side of Chicago and her sexual assault at 16 to her experience juggling being a wife, mother, friend, and journalist devoted to telling stories of those who feel powerless and isolated. “History is written by the victors, which means we should question the version of history that has been handed down to us,” she writes in her eloquent call for historical revision. 

4. The Awkward Black Man: Stories by Walter Mosley (Grove)  

This autumn, Mosley will be awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which follows the PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award and the Harold Washington Literary Prize for the author of more than 50 books, including his bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series. As if to underscore the range of his incredible talent, he is publishing an excellent collection of short stories – 17 first-person narratives that wrestle in distinctive ways with the experiences of Black men. Racism manifests itself in different experiences for these men. It is their loneliness that links them, ranging from a middle-aged copy editor for a group of online magazines who is cheating on his longtime therapist with a new one, to a father who takes care of his three children after his wife leaves him, to a bank teller considering whether to leave his job, to a heavy man who is pleased about his weight loss until he learns the cause.

5. The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War by David Nasaw (Penguin Press) 

In his account of the years after the end of World War II in Europe, Nasaw, a distinguished biographer of Andrew Carnegie and Joseph P. Kennedy, focuses on the millions of displaced Eastern Europeans unable to return, unable to repatriate, or left homeless. His engrossing, far-reaching chronicle follows this diaspora of Jewish survivors, enslaved laborers, and released POWs in a mirror of deeply held prejudices around the world. Nasaw’s deep research illuminates individual stories as well as the implications of national policies: Australia preferred white Latvian and Estonian anti-communists; Britain favored Polish soldiers who had fought under its command as well as single young women to work in its tuberculosis sanitariums; Canada rejected Nazi collaborators and admitted more Jews. In particular, Nasaw vividly captures the chaotic American Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which was so intent on fighting communism that it admitted anti-Semites, Nazi collaborators, and war criminals.