1. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Penguin Press)

A companion to his PBS documentary, Gates’s book evokes the rich, dynamic history of black churches as they evolved as a source of strength and inspiration for centuries. “The Black Church was the cultural cauldron that Black people created to combat a system designed in every way to crush their spirit,” he writes. “Collectively and with enormous effort, they refused to allow that to happen. And the culture they created was sublime, awesome, majestic, lofty, glorious, and at all points subversive of the larger culture of enslavement that sought to destroy their humanity.” Deeply informative, and personal, The Black Church both tenderly recounts Gates’s childhood experiences and is fearless about sexism and sexuality, in a section titled “The Church’s Double Bind.”

2. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates (Knopf)

“I am aware that I’m an imperfect messenger on climate change,” writes Gates in his book about greenhouse gas and the environment. “The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem.” Unabashed, the tech titan asserts that wise use of technology could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. Recognizing that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges, Gates argues that it also has exposed inequalities that have increased the urgent need to solve the problem.

3. The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (Penguin Press)

Lemmon has distinguished herself in bestsellers Ashley’s War and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana for spotlighting women resisting tyranny and triumphing over oppression in the Middle East. She continues that track record in her gripping new chronicle of the all-women Kurdish militia that prevailed against ISIS in their small town in northeastern Syria. This band of four brave women had been denied school and independence, yet they earned significant U.S., military, and intelligence support to retake their town from ISIS. Relying on her own probing on-the-ground reporting, Lemmon details the history of the region and how these women not only won the battle for their town but also inspired change through their passionate vision for gender equality.

4. An Extravagant Death by Charles Finch (Minotaur Books)

After exposing Scotland Yard’s criminal activity, Charles Lenox, former MP and “preeminent detective in all of England,” is dispatched by Benjamin Disraeli to the U.S. in 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age. The transatlantic shift in this 14th installment of Finch’s mystery series ingeniously makes it very much a social novel, and Lenox’s eye for class and status markers enriches the story, as he observes, for instance, “the peculiar perfection of [an] American’s clothing, the sharp crease in his collars, the perfect pleat of his jacket,” in one of the class-conscious men in opulent Newport. In this fast-paced and suspenseful story, Lenox is quickly ensnared in the investigation of the mysterious death of a beautiful debutante who fell off a cliff, in a tale that evokes Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, but with a wry wink.

5. Send for Me by Lauren Fox (Knopf)

“Children of immigrants,” Fox writes in the author’s note at the end of her extraordinarily nuanced and moving novel, “are anthropologists of our own families. We’re participant-observers of cultures we live in, but that will never quite belong to us.” Fox entwines the story of Annelise – a young Jewish woman in a small German city as she works in her family bakery and finds love and heartbreak but flees with her husband and daughter before the outbreak of World War II with that of her granddaughter Clare in Milwaukee who discovers a neglected cache of Annelise’s letters. Fox elegantly incorporates lines and short excerpts of her own great-grandmother’s letters, adding to the power and intimacy of this fine novel.