1. Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In his devastatingly powerful book about the underpaid, undervalued, and dangerous work done by society’s less privileged, Press exposes a world hidden from view. His firsthand reporting provides case studies that illuminate the hazards faced by workers such as those who deal with mentally ill prisoners, “virtual warriors” who select “surgical” targets for drone strikes, slaughterhouse workers, and those who drill and frack in places like the Gulf of Mexico. The coronavirus exposed our reliance on invisible workers, and in his extraordinary Dirty Work, Press argues for an understanding of the “structural disadvantages that shape who ends up doing this work” and that “economic inequality mirrors and reinforces something else: moral inequality.”

2. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner (Little, Brown)

Through the story of her heroic great-great-aunt, Wisconsin-born Mildred Harnack, Donner brilliantly brings to life a leader of the Nazi resistance who was executed by guillotine in 1943 on Hitler’s orders. Harnack had settled in Germany with her German-born graduate school husband, and as the Third Reich emerged, they recruited for the resistance. Through her avid archival research, and with the velocity of a great thriller, Donner vividly documents Harnack’s work as a spy even when she was imprisoned, while also starkly evoking the era’s fears and anxieties.

3. Divided by Terror: American Patriotism After 9/11 by John Bodnar (University of North Carolina Press)

Two decades ago, the devastating terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon sparked waves of patriotism, but as Bodnar explains in his insightful book, that fervor manifested itself in very different ways. Bodner, distinguished professor emeritus of history at Indiana University, untangles strands to show how patriotism forms in moments of crisis and coalesces into collective memory. In casting America’s battle against terrorism as a noble cause, President George W. Bush tapped into a mythical narrative. As Brodnar puts it, a “spread-eagle type of national identity hell-bent on the exercise of military power and xenophobia has long been central to the goals of a right-wing patriotism.”

4. All’s Well by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster)

In her debut novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, in which a woman’s identity fluctuates with her weight loss, and then Bunny, her absurdist horror of an MFA program, Awad has distinguished herself with crafty, subversive fiction featuring slightly unmoored young women, struggling in a world that privileges beauty and conformity. As its title suggests, All’s Well involves Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well and a particularly dispirited former actress, now a theater professor in a flailing department, who is charged with staging the play. She grapples with a mutinous cast and develops a dependence on pills to deal with her own agonizing physical pain doubted by doctors, in this shimmering, magical novel that suggests, once again, that life is not what it seems.

5. Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In Luchette’s charming, smart debut novel, four young Catholic nuns are transferred from the Buffalo diocese to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where they run “Little Neon,” a Mountain Dew-hued home for eccentric residents who need to get sober. The nuns are second-class citizens in the eyes of the church, but fiercely bound to one another. “We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.” Agatha ventures out to teach geometry at a girls school, which Luchette wryly depicts against the backdrop of the shifting role of women in the church, as the circle of nuns gyrates with energy and their worlds enlarge.