1. The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton)

Once again, the author of Moneyball and The Big Short is ahead of the curve. In his 2018 book The Fifth Risk, Lewis raised the alarm about the hollowing out of federal government agencies and their inability to deal with future crises. In The Premonition, he homes in on a trio of prescient scientists who rang early warning bells about the COVID-19 crisis as it was unfolding. These doctors and scientists intuited what was coming and shared their hunches, as part of a small group across the country called “The Wolverines,” frustrated that there was no federal plan to fight the looming disease that was not yet even called a “pandemic.”

2. On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (Liveright)

This short, elegant book is not merely a history of the holiday of June 19, 1865, shortened to Juneteenth, the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that slavery had ended. Rather, it’s “a look at history through the medium of personal memoir, a Texan’s view of the long road to Juneteenth,” Gordon-Reed writes. It’s the American story that eloquently gets beyond stereotypes of Indians, colonialist settlers, Hispanic culture, slavery, race, and immigration, she explains. Gordon-Reed won a Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello, a rigorous work of scholarship on the family of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had multiple children. In On Juneteenth, she writes of her difficult attachment to her home state. “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite,” she writes at the end of her nuanced, persuasive book. “We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places – and people, ourselves included – without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.”

3. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard (Knopf)

Admirers of Richard Powers’ extraordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory may recall the pioneering forest ecologist who believed that trees could communicate with one another. She was based in part on Simard, who has written a fascinating memoir about the forest society that exists as trees send resources back and forth in biological neural networks below ground in tiny threads and operate as sort of telephone wires. Simard, who grew up in a family of loggers in western Canada, conveys the rewards of learning about how forests work, and her discovery of “Mother Trees,” the “majestic hubs at the center of forest communication,” is inspiring. Her passion and enthusiasm radiate through this book, even when she describes the sexism she has encountered. When the “Mother Trees” die, she writes, “they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape.” She adds: “It’s what all parents do.”

4. The Mysteries by Marisa Silver (Bloomsbury)

A pair of 7-year-old neighbor girls – impulsive Miggy and restrained Ellen, who follows her friend like a “cult devotee” – are at the center of Silver’s absorbing, polyphonic novel. Set over the summer of 1973 in St. Louis, with intricate details and particulars that evoke middle America and provide a universality, Silver brings multiple vantage points to this era in the shadow of Watergate and end of the Vietnam War Watergate, when the American ideal of two children and a station wagon was beginning to fray. In silky, exquisite prose, Silver spins a fast-paced narrative with enduring insight. “There are things she doesn’t want to remember and things she doesn’t want to forget, but everything is tangled together,” one mother muses as the novel’s end. “There’s no accident without that most remarkable friendship between two girls, in love with each other the ways girls can be, with petty manipulations and sudden rejections and instant affirmations. With devotion and envy and longing.”

5. The Practical Navigator by Chris Crowley (Sopris Books)

Just as Scott Turow, Time magazine’s ‘Bard of the Litigious Age,” put his imaginary Kindle County on the literary map, Crowley has evoked the Great Acadia, an elite yacht club with an annual regatta off the Maine coast, in a fleet of top-flight of intricate, thrilling, top-flight mysteries. At the emotional heart of Crowley’s book are lawyer Tim Bigelow and his older brother Harry, who is stepping down as club commodore and on course for a White House appointment until his successor, a hungry bull of a Greek billionaire, is murdered. Crowley’s deftly constructed page-turner moves easily from seas to shoals, courtrooms, and boardrooms, and is attentive to manners and affectations of old and new money, with characters from sexy to seedy.