1. Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty by Maurice Chammah (Crown)

Chammah, an Austin-based staff writer with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news site focused on criminal justice, has written a multidimensional history of capital punishment in America. Chammah’s gift for narrative shows as he tells the stories of capital cases from the perspective of prosecutors and judges, as well as the executed and their families, and places them in a larger context: the rise in executions, and the decline in public support for them. Delivering on the promise of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award he won to support the writing of this book, Chammah illuminates the nuances and complex questions involving crime and justice.

2. A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery (Little, Brown Spark)

So many stories have been lost from the years between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and Montgomery vividly rescues one of them: a fascinating Kentucky saga that was sparked by a moment that echoed over decades. Near the end of the 19th century, George Dinning’s home was raided by white vigilantes. The formerly enslaved farmer narrowly escaped with his family, but he fired a shot that killed one of his attackers and he spent seven years in prison. In a paradoxical history that Montgomery deftly excavates, Dinning was pardoned and awarded damages in a civil lawsuit after Bennett Young, a former Confederate soldier who raised money for monuments and became a prominent Louisville lawyer, took up his cause and continued pro bono work on behalf of impoverished African Americans.

3. Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness by Roy Richard Grinker (W. W. Norton)

In this wise, insightful book, social anthropologist Grinker argues that “normal is a damaging illusion.” He chronicles how the stigma of mental illness has twisted and turned over time, pointing to particular moments – for instance, 1941, when John F. Kennedy’s 23-year-old sister, Rosemary, was forced to undergo a lobotomy – and cultural trends and patterns to understand  the dynamic history of how mental illness has been stigmatized. Grinker, a professor at George Washington University, contends that the “persistence of stigma” inhibits people from seeking help, observing that in the United States, “the time from the onset of symptoms to psychiatric care is startling,” with an “average time from first psychosis to first treatment” of 74 weeks.

4. They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick (University of Nevada Press)

In this fascinating dual biography, Charles Ohiyesa Eastman, a Dakota physician with a university education, and Elaine Goodale, a teacher of the Sioux, not only witnessed the Massacre of Wounded Knee, in which hundreds of Lakota people were murdered by U.S. Army soldiers; they were deeply informed by their experience, becoming dedicated advocates for Native American rights. Initially Elaine was the more prominent of the couple, known for her poetry and prose, but when she, a white woman who spoke Lakota and supervised schools, married Charles, she stopped working and he became the more prominent activist for the cause, a powerful orator who wielded political influence. Eick deftly chronicles the pair as they grew from partnership to estrangement, exposing the demands on women, especially mothers raising children, and provides a window into the fight for Native American rights and a woman’s quest for her own identity.

5. Trio by William Boyd (Knopf)

Boyd is prolific – 16 novels, five story collections, some plays, and countless reviews, as well as reflections on his African childhood and boarding school years – so while he is recognized as an “international man of letters,” why isn’t he really famous? Possibly because while readers know they will find quality and won’t be bored, Boyd’s curiosities and passions defy classification. As its title suggests, Boyd’s novel focuses on three characters – an in-the-closet but married male movie producer, a pill-popping leading lady, and the director’s alcoholic wife struggling to write her Virginia Woolf-esque novel – on the set of a film titled Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon, in Brighton in 1968. Hilarious, tragic, and stylish, Trio is the ideal antidote to our pandemic blues.