1. King Richard: Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs (Knopf)

After so many excellent, enlightening books about Watergate and Richard Nixon – from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men to Garry Wills’ Nixon Agonistes – the bar is very high regarding the disgraced 37th president. In King Richard, Dobbs focuses on the first 100 days after Nixon’s second inauguration, after the 1972 landslide election and just as the Watergate scandal was heating up. Dobbs has a gift, evident in his earlier books such as One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, for locating revelatory historical material, and he uses Nixon’s newly released recordings for an original, enlightening approach to the only U.S. president to resign from office. In title, structure, and theme, Dobbs has found resonance in Shakespearean tragedy, in which a leader amasses power and then self-destructs.

2. Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power by Zachary Karabell (Penguin Press)

The Wolves of Wall Street are nowhere to be found in Karabell’s fascinating history of the private investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, which has stayed out of the spotlight and is worth emulation as a model that did not succumb to the industry’s excesses and imbalances. In his vivid telling, Karabell traces the firm from the Brown brothers’ humble Belfast beginnings to their arrival in the U.S. in the early 19th century, business importing linen and exporting tobacco and cotton, evolving from trading to financing and merging with Averell Harriman and surviving not only the Depression but the 2008 financial crisis. Karabell acknowledges dark stains in the past of Brown Brothers Harriman – cotton and its dependence on the work of enslaved people, the firm’s imperialist international interventions. In cleaving to the idea of partnership, Karabell writes, the firm is not merely a vessel for “anonymous shareholders,” and he portrays the firm as a “window into the crucial nexus of money, power and influence that made America.”

3. The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood by Julian Rubinstein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In his stunning book, Rubinstein investigates why Terrance Roberts, an anti-gang activist described as a “rock star for the peace movement,” shot and paralyzed a Denver gang member in 2013 and finds a story that extends from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter. With origins in Denver, Rubinstein returned to his hometown and researched the shooting, which occurred in The Holly, a neighborhood in the northeast part of the city that he came to think of as the “invisible Denver.” With a deep knowledge of the history of this troubled neighborhood and its generations of anguish, Rubinstein depicts its richness, tension, displacement, corruption, and conflict with the panoramic quality that animated The Wire.

4. The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado (Penguin Books)

Peynado won the Nelson Algren Short Story Award in 2015 for her story “The Great Escape,” and reading it along with the 15 other stories in this brilliant collection is a testament to her transgressive imagination. “We were the first generation to leave our island country,” begins the Dominican American author’s title story. “We were the ones who developed a distinct float to our walk on the day we came of age.” These wide-ranging, shape-shifting stories meld forms – fabulism, science fiction, surrealism, satire – but they are bound together by Peynado’s remarkable and original insights, her ingenuity, and her talent for not only seeing class distinctions and xenophobia but imagining them emerging on the horizon.

5. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon)

Recently Korelitz may be best known for You Should Have Known, which was made into HBO’s The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, and while her novels are propelled by the force of whodunnit, her new novel is part of a subgenre she invented with Admission and The Devil and Webster: mysteries at the leafy institutes of liberal arts. In The Plot, a once-wunderkind writer, now stalled and teaching graduate school, steals a book idea from his promising but self-aggrandizing, and now-dead, MFA student. Korelitz brings her sharp eye for manners – and for plot. As the teacher’s novel becomes a hit, he receives a message charging that he’s a thief, and Korelitz proves herself to be a wizard of endings.