1. By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution by David Talbot and Margaret Talbot (Harper)

In their inspiring chronicle of social change of the 1960s and ’70s, the Talbots – a brother and sister team – zero in on activists who “have often spurred liberalism to more daring leaps toward a truly egalitarian society.” In seven discrete chapters, they profile the radical leaders impatient with incrementalism who protested the Vietnam War, organized grape pickers into the United Farm Workers, took a stand at Wounded Knee, protested at Stonewall, fought for Black power, and provided safe (but illegal) abortions, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who birthed “celebrity activism.” No hagiographers here; the Talbots point to the failures and imperfections in their characters, making their legacies human and real.

2. Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott Borchert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In FDR’s New Deal, the stimulus package included a program for unemployed writers: The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). This fascinating history focuses on the revelatory state guides written by icons like Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, and John Cheever in what Borchert describes as “a composite, bluntly and unapologetically inclusive.” Borchert goes behind the scenes and captures the dramatic arc of the project – its “unlikely birth, tumultuous life, and ignoble death” – along with the tensions in 1930s American society combusting in the project’s offices and reflected in the guides.

3. Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 

Famed ceramicist de Waal’s unforgettable memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, told the story of the collection of tiny Japanese figurines that were part of his family’s survival in Nazi-occupied Europe. Now he shifts his focus to a neighbor in fin de siècle Paris. He evokes this world through a series of imaginary letters to famous art collector Count Moïse de Camondo, who was born in Constantinople and yearned for acceptance by the French, and in this gorgeously designed book, rich with illustrations, he foreshadows the Camondo family’s tragic end.

4. Filthy Animals: Stories by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was centered on a gay Black graduate student from small-town Alabama, at a big, nameless Midwestern university. While Taylor’s new story collection returns to that terrain, he excavates it more deeply with even more verve and insight in stories that are subtly linked by a trio of characters with a mutual attraction: queer mathematician Lionel and dancer students Charles and Sophie who are in an open relationship. In a marvelous pattern, Taylor reveals the dimensions of this fraught love triangle in its continuous revelatory shifts.

5. Kin: A Memoir by Shawna Kay Rodenberg (Bloomsbury)

Far from Hillbilly Elegy land, Rodenberg is the mother of five, a registered nurse, and a community college instructor who grew up in eastern Kentucky and often grudgingly served as an unpaid tour guide for CBS News, introducing producers to a place “often as inscrutable and inaccessible to outsiders as a war-torn third-world country.” When she was a small child, Rodenberg’s Vietnam veteran father moved his family off the grid to a rural Minnesota End Times religious community, but, after learning that she had been sexually abused by a leader there, led them back to the mountains where their family had lived for centuries. In her deeply affecting memoir, Rodenberg writes vividly about the ardors of basic life, her shotgun wedding at 19, and her determined efforts to win her independence.