1. The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights by Dorothy Wickenden (Scribner)

Who knew that Auburn, New York, provided such fertile ground for the fight for abolitionism and suffragism? In Wickenden’s engaging social history, this little city in the central part of the state is where Seneca Falls organizer and Quaker Martha Coffin Wright and Frances Seward, wife of William Seward, governor and Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, provided a stop for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. They were allied with Harriet Tubman, who had emancipated herself and her family, and moved to Auburn in 1857. Wickenden brings Wright, Seward, and Tubman to life, describing their evolution from homemakers into insurgents between the antebellum period and Reconstruction. “Tubman saw Wright and Seward as two of her most trusted associates, and they drew strength from her,” writes Wickenden in her eloquent prologue. “In the coming decades, these women, with no evident power to change anything, became co-conspirators and intimate friends – protagonists in an inside-out story of the second American revolution.”

2. Children Under Fire: An American Crisis by John Woodrow Cox (Ecco)

We mourn the loss of children killed in gun violence, but Cox, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Washington Post, has written a wrenching book about the emotional and psychological damage to those who survive but are traumatized. Cox gently writes about these young kids who live with PTSD, exploring their pain through his continued interviews and contacts with them. While he takes special aim at the revenue-generating school security market, which provides little security, and in his epilogue calls for universal background checks, research, and more, he is a sensitive, talented journalist who brings the children’s voices to the page. The stories of these survivors meld into a narrative that is worthy of place on a shelf beside Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here.

3. Eleanor in the Village: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Search for Freedom and Identity in New York’s Greenwich Village by Jan Jarboe Russell (Scribner)

Eleanor Roosevelt may be known as the wife of FDR and for her support for civil rights and peace, but this book focuses on the inspiration Roosevelt found in Greenwich Village, which Russell evokes with sensitivity and insight. Independent of her husband, who had betrayed her with his affairs, she turned inward and refashioned her relationship with him into a collaboration. Roosevelt drew strength and confidence from her progressive activist friends in the Village, where she kept an apartment beginning in 1920. While this part of her life was out of public view, she did not elude FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who amassed a “secret file” on her bohemian years.

4. Girlhood: Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

Febos made a big splash with her memoir Whip Smart, which detailed her experience working in New York City’s dungeons as a dominatrix, and followed that with Abandon Me, delving into addiction and destructive relationships. The roots of those memoirs are apparent in Febos’s extraordinary new collection of discursive essays – lean, sinewy prose, untangling knots of adolescent trauma. In “The Mirror Test,” Febos moves from the anguish of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth to the intersection of “racism and slut-shaming,” dropping thought-bombs along the way, for instance: “Living two lives distorts the temporal experience. Misery dilates time.”

5. Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Algonquin)

Greenidge follows her stylish debut contemporary novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman with the compelling, provocative Libertie, set in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn and Haiti, a work of fiction robust with subtle explorations of race and freedom. From the real story of the first Black woman doctor in New York state, Greenidge imagines her dark-skinned daughter, Libertie, who turns away from her mother’s exceptionalism, falls in love and with her doctor husband moves to Haiti, depicted to her as a Black utopia. Greenidge maintains a sense of intimacy and suspense as Libertie encounters questions involving colorism, class, the distinction of being born free, sexism, and, of course, in-laws.