1. Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood by Mark Oppenheimer (Knopf)

In 2018, a white nationalist killed 11 Sabbath observers in Pittsburgh, perpetrating “the greatest antisemitic attack in American history” in one of the oldest and most stable and internally diverse Jewish neighborhoods in the nation. Oppenheimer’s roots in this little Jewish Eden stretched back to the antebellum period, and, rather than focus on the massacre, he eloquently vivifies the Squirrel Hill neighborhood after the cameras departed the scene. In portraits of those who remained, he captures their perseverance and acts of hesed, or “lovingkindness.” In Squirrel Hill, Oppenheimer – co-host of Tablet magazine’s podcast Unorthodox, coordinator of Yale’s Journalism Initiative, and former New York Times religion columnist – provides a polyphonic portrait of a resilient neighborhood.

2. Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience by Eli Saslow (Doubleday)

As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world’s contraction into pods and bubbles, Saslow has collected a panoply of personal accounts, in the tradition of Studs Terkel. Based on a Washington Post series that won the 2020 George Polk Award for oral history, Saslow’s book features interviews with a kaleidoscopic range of people across the nation – including a Chicago woman enduring long-haul COVID-19, an Arizona school superintendent determined to keep his school safe, a Detroit nurse at a woefully staffed hospital, and a Hartford, Connecticut, nursing home aide who passed the virus on to her mother, who died. These intimate accounts read like prose poems that possess a magical power of uplift and a humanity that Saslow found restorative: “The people in this book inspired me with their ability to trust, their empathy, their insight, their candor and emotional courage.”    

3. The Last Diving Horse in America: Rescuing Gamal and Other Animals – Lessons in Living and Loving by Cynthia A. Branigan (Pantheon)

The spectacle of horses diving off a platform at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier may have once suggested America’s promise and possibility, but it came to represent only a display of cruelty to animals, Branigan writes in her deeply affecting personal narrative. Branigan’s bond with the brave bay gelding Gamal forms the backbone of her story, which was launched by her work with writer and animal welfare activist Cleveland Amory and led to her own transformation into a writer and activist. Branigan went on to rescue not only horses but llamas, burros, and greyhounds too, and founded Make Peace with Animals, a nonprofit organization to which she will be donating net proceeds from her unsentimental, inspiring chronicle.

4. My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson (Henry Holt)

Johnson’s assured, richly rewarding short stories and novella are so rare in a work of debut fiction The brilliant titular piece is set in near-future Charlottesville, Virginia, where right-wing supremacists pillage the city, narrated by a descendent of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings who had an internship on the Monticello grounds where those in fear decamp for safety. Identity, race, legacy, and power are entwined in this powerful collection that form a mosaic portrait of American society.

5. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In The Corrections, his popular Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 novel, Franzen created a suburban, Midwestern nuclear family with parents and children whom readers should love but end up detesting. He has returned to that rich terrain, illuminating midcentury America through two generations of the Hildebrandt family, with the father a pastor at the local church and his younger children involved with its youth organization, “Crossroads,” while the mother is a complex story of her own. The first in a trilogy, this capacious, engrossing drama is a heartland bounty bursting with psychological and social insight and a new generosity.