1. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott (Random House)

What ever happened to Dasani Coates? In her riveting 2013 series for the New York Times, Elliott introduced readers to the unforgettable, precocious, feisty 11-year-old girl living with her family in a Fort Greene, Brooklyn, homeless shelter. After spending more than eight years with Dasani, Elliott has written a classic book that deserves a space on a bookshelf with Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Dasani, who is her siblings’ de facto mother, feels invisible, but this remarkable book, as it exposes the web of history, poverty, policies, and agencies that have failed this girl, has ensured that she is very much seen.

2. American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman (Random House)

“Jobs lie at the heart of the social contract between citizens and their leaders,” writes Stockman in her engrossing narrative in which she delves into the meaning of work by focusing on three laborers who had worked at Rexnord’s bearing plant in Indianapolis before it was shuttered and the jobs went to Mexico and Texas. Through Stockman’s portraits of a female steelworker for whom the work meant escaping an abusive marriage, a union leader with no patience for co-workers who trained their replacements, and another man propelled to begin a barbecue business, she infuses the intimacy of Studs Terkel’s Working to her chronicle while also focusing on universal economic forces that squeeze working-class America and lead to increasing economic inequality.

3. Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo (Knopf)

Guelzo brings his powerful analytical gifts and literary flair to a complex and divisive historical figure: Gen. Robert E. Lee. Multiple winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, Guelzo illuminates Lee’s upbringing, including his obsession with money and his decision to enter West Point, and how, after undistinguished years as a general, he finally met with success in 1862 and showed his prowess as a leader. Guelzo gracefully dissects Lee’s philosophy and explains how he opposed secession and a drawn-out war and that while he found slavery objectionable and opposed mistreatment of the enslaved, he resisted Reconstruction and steps toward Black equality.

4. We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza (Atria)

A long, deep interracial friendship from childhood into adulthood may be rare in fiction, but combine it with a headline-grabbing police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, and it could be the stuff of a Law & Order episode. Co-written by two friends, this riveting novel involves a Black TV journalist covering the tragedy and her pregnant white friend, married to a police officer who pulled the trigger, and it is nuanced and compelling, a testament to their imaginative powers. Set in Philadelphia, that “city of brotherly love,” this is a rare work of fiction that is very much of this moment but also a testament to the transcendent powers of women to untangle knots of history.

5. The Pessimists by Bethany Ball (Grove Press)

An elite private school in opulent suburban Somerset may seem like an easy target, especially when it involves nutty, striving parents with a doomsday arsenal, an obsession with cleanliness, and an online porn addiction, but Ball has written a witty satirical novel with sharp social and psychological observations about power dynamics and domesticity. Parents of children at the Petra School live in awe of Headmistress Agnes, with her screechy, preachy missives to the school community destabilize its network, and Ball perceptively captures the three families at the center of this novel as they are caught up in the school’s tripwires and social status which they have fully embraced.