1. You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker (PublicAffairs) Group biography at its best, Becker’s book brings to life its trio of intrepid female journalists who redefined the role of women in war reporting and enhanced appreciation of the nuances of the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The trio were the brilliant magazine writer Frances FitzGerald, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fire in the Lake; stunning photographer Catherine Leroy; and fierce combat reporter Kate Webb. Becker contends that these journalists transformed the war story: “They were outsiders – excluded by nature from the confines of male journalism, with all its presumptions and easy jingoism.” A journalist herself, Becker followed the trail blazed by these women in Southeast Asia, reporting on the war from Cambodia, which gives her a unique, nuanced understanding of the region’s landscape and dynamics.

2. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee (One World)

Cogent, convincing and principled, The Sum of Us argues that while racism damages all people of color, its harm extends to white people as well. With rigorous use of data and drawing on her experience traveling across America, McGhee explores economic inequality and the ways unity across racial and ethnic lines pays a great social dividend. In a powerful metaphor that extends through her book, she describes how some communities, rather than integrate public swimming pools, closed them entirely, depriving all residents of the benefit. But when multiracial coalitions demand them, McGhee writes, universal child-care and health care, reliable infrastructures, and well-funded schools help everyone. While McGhee is known as the former head of Demos, the progressive think tank, The Sum of Us should vault her to prominence as a public intellectual with bold and original ideas about equality in America.

3. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee (Knopf)

In an ideal match of biographer and subject, Lee, who has taken on 20th-century writers Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, now focuses her talent on the “playwright of ideas”: Stoppard, who first soared to critical and public acclaim in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Czech-born playwright, raised in Singapore and India before landing in London’s arts scene, provided Lee with access to his archives, friends, and records, and her biography is robust with detail on his relationships, creative processes, and influences on his plays, including Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia as well as screenplays like Shakespeare in Love. Sophisticated and lucid, Tom Stoppard: A Life captures Stoppard’s wit and curiosity, and explores the connections between his work and life, including his late-life discovery of his Jewishness, his anti-Thatcherism, and his creative genius.

4. Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America’s Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World by Joby Warrick (Doubleday)

For this riveting narrative that reads like a thriller, Warrick derives his title from President Barack Obama’s warning in 2012 that the use of poison gas was a “red line” that dictator Bashar al-Assad should not be foolish enough to cross. Warrick, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post, chronicles the secret manufacture and stockpiling of the nerve gas and then Assad’s deployment of it, killing thousands of civilians. Warrick’s vivid portraits of so many of the diverse inviduals involved, from victims to American engineers and U.N. investigators, provide a devastating perspective on the civil war in Syria.

5. The Blizzard Party by Jack Livings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The narrator of Livings’ intricate, kaleidoscopic debut novel, Hazel Saltwater, is a small child living in the Apelles, a grand Upper West Side apartment building, during a massive 1978 New York City snowstorm. A wild party rages in the penthouse, and a death follows. From the quotidian to the epic, Hazel links stories together in a mosaic that reveals a rich cast of characters, from the boy who will be her husband to her phobic father, who writes a blockbuster about the party. The scope of this engrossing novel stretches from World War II to 9/11, and Livings builds suspense as Hazel narrates her life and unveils the rich, complicated world around her.