1. Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin Press)

Psychologically keen and culturally perceptive, Harris has written a smashing success of a biography of Mike Nichols, whose five decades as a legendary film and theater director followed a start in improv comedy, and whose greatest creation was perhaps himself. Nichols’ The Graduate (featured in Harris’ brilliant debut, Pictures at a Revolution, about the 1967 best-picture Oscar nominees) was a revelatory moment in American culture and a pivot point in entertainment, and Harris chronicles how this Jewish refuge from Nazi Germany and college dropout transformed himself into an influential force at the epicenter of the cultural universe, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Angels in America. More than a litany of Tony, Oscar, Grammy, and Emmy awards, this biography bursts with insight about Nichols’ self-creation, which Harris signals by beginning with Nichols at age 7, crossing the Atlantic Ocean by ship.

2. Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration by Reuben Jonathan Miller (Little, Brown)

Mass incarceration has an afterlife, one that Miller captures in his powerful narrative of “a supervised society – a hidden world and alternate legal reality.” Through vivid stories and evidence of this afterlife, which he witnessed growing up on the South Side of Chicago and as a sociologist and chaplain at the Cook County Jail, Miller describes “a new kind of prison,” one that “has no bars” and moves through families, denying opportunity to build a new future. As Matthew Desmond showed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted that eviction is not a one-time event, Miller demonstrates that the “vulnerability to surveillance and arrest” extends beyond jails, courts, and prisons. While he has found some making a life for themselves after serving their sentences, he acknowledges in heartbreaking prose that he is haunted by the reality that “almost everyone I visited at that jail looked like me, and they would come back over and over again.”

3. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz (W. W. Norton)

“As long as we tell our urban ancestors’ stories, no city is ever lost,” writes Newitz in their super-smart and richly rewarding history of a quartet of doomed ancient metropolises. A charming guide to each site, Newitz illuminates once-thriving cities that no longer exist: Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic city found in what is now Turkey; Pompeii, destroyed with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.; Angkor, once the capital of the medieval Khmer Empire in Cambodia; and, near the Mississippi River in Illinois, pre-Columbian Cahokia. With a distinctive blend of on-the-ground interviews and deep knowledge of history and science, Newitz reveals that while the demise of each metropolis was unique, they all “suffered from prolonged periods of political instability coupled with environmental crisis.”

4. The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty (Knopf)

As president of Radcliffe College, Mary Ingraham Bunting dreamt up a fellowship for women with a doctorate or equivalent. Doherty’s brilliant group biography of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study’s first two cohorts, 1960-63, focuses on five women: painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and the real stars of the book, fiction writer Tillie Olsen and poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, who dubbed themselves “the equivalents.” Doherty traces the arcs of these women’s lives, their work, and, most significantly, their deep and sometimes complicated relationships with one another, bringing a keen sense of their struggles to balance intellectual work with domesticity. The Equivalents was recently named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, and in telling the story of what Bunting once called “a messy experiment,” Doherty clarifies the transformative influence these women had on one another at that moment, foreshadowing the dynamism of feminism as it diversified, ignited, and spread in multiple directions.

5. The Removed by Brandon Hobson (Ecco)

Wyatt, a buoyant 12-year-old Cherokee boy in a shelter, tells stories to the other foster kids and lands for a few days with the Echota family, the only available Cherokees, whose middle child, Ray-Ray, was killed by a white police officer. It sounds like a promising premise, and Hobson delivers a fiercely beautiful and emotionally wrenching novel. Wyatt’s arrival sends family members spinning, and through ingeniously entwined alternating perspectives – the patriarch stirred from the fog of his Alzheimer’s, the mother in perpetual mourning, and the surviving brother and sister – Hobson illuminates their continued suffering 15 years after Ray-Ray’s death. In introducing a mysterious figure into the family drama as it prepares for the Cherokee National Holiday and an annual bonfire commemorating Ray-Ray, Hobson enriches his gripping novel with vivid stories and echoes of history, families fracturing under the heavy legacy of the Trail of Tears.