1. Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

In Lalami’s richly rewarding works of fiction – including her Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor’s Account, a historical novel of a Moroccan slave brought to America by a conquistador – she explores themes of identity and belonging. The same smart sensibility informs her new book, a fierce memoir and manifesto on the contradictions of American citizenship. Lalami deftly divides her book into sections, from “Allegiance” and “Faith” to “Tribe,” “Caste,” and “Inheritance,” which together underscore how she, born in Morocco, became an American citizen in 2000 but as a Muslim, Arab, woman, and newcomer, found that her citizenship felt provisional, partial, and easily revoked. As she writes so effectively about living in a country that embraces her with one arm and pushes her away with another, she captures the rages, frustrations, and anxieties of a provisional existence.

2. The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020 by Tim Weiner (Holt)

Weiner won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of secret items in the Pentagon budget for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, and as a New York Times correspondent specializing in national security, he brings a sophisticated understanding of the fraught Russia-U.S. relationship over the past 75 years. Beginning with Stalin at the end of World War II, Weiner excavates the historical record to reveal how the Kremlin went about subverting the U.S. and undermining its power. He doesn’t just detail policy and politics; he has a gift for bringing to life the people involved, from the CIA agent ordered to kill a Congolese leader with poison toothpaste, to Vladimir Putin, who launched a cyberwar to elect Donald Trump and keep him in office.

3. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones (Basic Books)

In her forceful and compelling history, Johns Hopkins professor Jones corrects and enriches the conventional narrative of the noble suffrage crusade led overwhelmingly by white women with the determined and strategic efforts by Black women to build their own movement to win the rights that had been denied them. Writes Jones, who amplifies her book’s power by drawing on her past, including her Kentucky-born, enslaved great-grandmother, “The women of my family, like so many Black women, constructed their political power with one eye on the polls and the other on organizing, lobbying, and institution building.”

4. If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore (Liveright/Norton)

While perhaps challenging to imagine a time before Facebook, Lepore locates it in the Cold War–era market research firm Simulmatics, which laid the groundwork for data collection, targeted messaging, and predictive analytics. Lepore, a Harvard professor and New Yorker writer, draws on the archives for this company, founded by an advertising executive and MIT political scientist, which went bankrupt a decade after its launch in 1959. Longlisted for a National Book Award, Lepore’s new book energetically and distinctively evokes the early days that foreshadowed not only the explosion of micro-segmenting and micro-messaging, but also its dark side.

5. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press)

This painfully beautiful novel has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award and may draw the readers and attention it deserves. It’s set in the 1980s in a mining town outside Glasgow that Thatcherism has sent into a downward spiral, with mother Agnes Bain losing her dreams and finding solace in drink and her hopes for her son Shuggie, the child who has not abandoned her and their dismal town. But from an early age, it seems Shuggie is different, and Stuart makes real the heartbreak in this world.