1. His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter (Simon & Schuster)

Following his widely admired books about Democratic heroes Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, veteran-journalist-turned-biographer Alter challenges conventional wisdom with his robust biography of Carter, chronicling the evolution of the Georgia outsider who stumbled as a leader but became a warrior for peace and was – until now – “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.” Based on deep research and more than 250 interviews, Alter’s book charts Carter’s achievements in his one-term presidency, including the Panama Canal Treaty and the Camp David Accords, as well as more obscure legislative successes, but despite his access to Carter does not refrain from noting his missteps. Alter is a talented storyteller, and his lively narrative captures Carter’s full arc from Georgia farm to White House and beyond. Alter notes Carter’s travels to more than 140 countries on his humanitarian pursuits, as he refused to accept the above-it-all code of the ex-presidents club, and concludes that “Carter is a driven engineer laboring to free the humanist within.”

2. The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (Doubleday)

In “ultimate Washington player” James Baker, Peter Baker (no relation), the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, have located a fascinating perspective on power and influence. Serving Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes, though never elected to office himself, Baker molded events around the world, from Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the 2000 election recount in Bush v. Gore. Baker and Glasser, a husband-wife team, logged more than 200 interviews, and in their nuanced portrait of Baker, he emerges as far more interesting than his taciturn image as White House chief of staff, secretary of state, secretary of treasury. Ambitious, ruthless, and opportunistic, and rivalrous with his good friend George H.W. Bush, Baker also was a pragmatist who revered order and made government work.

3. Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by David S. Reynolds (Penguin)

Do we need another book about Abraham Lincoln when there have been about 16,000 so far? Yes, we need to read Reynolds’ Abe. Neither hagiography nor take-down, Abe refutes the traditional view of Lincoln as the “quintessential self-made man.” Reynolds eloquently describes how Lincoln’s character was shaped by the culture of antebellum America and recovers bits of popular cultural history that combined to allow him to operate in different registers. “When he entered the presidency,” Reynolds writes, “he was neither inexperienced nor unprepared. To the contrary, he redefined democracy precisely because he had experienced culture in all its dimensions – from high to low, sacred to profane, conservative to radical, sentimental to subversive.”

4. Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter by Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao (Viking)

In their innovative, compelling memoir, Vietnamese-born Lan Cao, an accomplished novelist and lawyer, and teenage daughter Harlan reveal in alternating chapters their perspectives on America and the contours of their own relationship. Lan Cao escaped Vietnam alone in 1975 when she was just 13 years old and went on to great success, after graduating from Mount Holyoke College and Yale Law School. But she was haunted by her traumas in Vietnam and her American relocation, and those anxieties informed her parenting, in what the authors describe as her “shadow selves.” Their shifting perspectives on tragedy and culture clashes propel this memoir, as mother and daughter grapple with assimilation and identity, intensified by the death of Lan Cao’s husband, a prominent Duke law professor who was inspired to name their daughter after Supreme Court Justice John Harlan.

5. The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe (Morrow)

Torn from the headlines reporting that a small-town Illinois comptroller embezzled $50 million, Tedrowe’s smart, psychologically insightful novel makes a sly wink to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and reimagines the confidence man as a she. Underestimated, naïve, ambitious Becky Farwell wants to do good, but drawn into the elite art world she slightly overreaches and becomes ensnared in it, growing obsessed and drawn to her reinvention. The suspense rachets up as Farwell lives her double life, striving to fit into this swank world of New York art collectors and believing she’s benefiting her little town. Tedrowe makes the pages fly through the secrets and self-delusions, skillfully inspiring empathy and identification with a criminal mastermind.