1. The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 by Joseph J. Ellis (Liveright)

In the victorious red, white, and blue, Ellis finds the gray. Through his compelling narrative, Ellis argues that paradoxically, the “American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution.” In style and substance, Ellis lifts the mythical haze shrouding this history by vivifying boldface names, like George Washington and John Adams, and battle sites like Valley Forge and Yorktown. But his polyphonic account also elevates overlooked characters like an army surgeon from Connecticut, Albigence Waldo; Col. John Glover and his elite unit of soldier-sailors called the Marblehead Mariners; Joseph Plumb Martin, “the Zelig of the American Revolution”; and Harry Washington, George Washington’s enslaved namesake, who escaped Mount Vernon for freedom offered to those who joined the British Army. History may not be prophecy, but as Ellis writes in his prescient, eloquent, and wise chronicle, two enduring political legacies were firmly embedded in the American founding: “(F)irst, any robust expression of government power, most especially at the federal level, was placed on the permanent defensive; second, conspiracy theories that might otherwise have been dismissed as preposterous shouts from the lunatic fringe enjoyed a supportive environment because of their hallowed association with The Cause.”

2. Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating by Wyatt Williams (University of North Carolina Press)

In this elegantly written, deeply reported narrative, Williams sets a new standard for a restaurant critic. Exchanging his fork for a reporter’s notebook, he heads to Springer Mountain in Georgia and finds neither the idyllic chicken farm he expected nor a single factory, but rather a conglomerate that sends him off not only to investigate the conditions for producing meat from factory slaughterhouses to game hunting – but also to pose more philosophical questions about consumption. Rather than writing a polemic against meat-eating, Williams poetically probes what separates humans and animals.

3. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach (W.W. Norton)

Stiff (cadavers). Gulp (alimentary canal). Roach’s books demystify the icky, scary, stomach-turning stuff of life. Now Roach brings her distinctive brand of wit, scientific rigor, and curiosity to the inevitable human-wildlife conflict. No friendly beasts for her. Roach was guided through the conflicts by “predator attack investigators,” as well as those with more formal titles like “human-elephant conflict specialists” and “bear managers.” Traveling to places like the “leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya,” she taste-tested rat bait and was mugged by a macaque. Roach goes beyond the world’s exotic creatures and looks closer to home, calling for a more generous coexistence. “Rodents are a good bellwether,” she writes, arguing that if people can be less cruel to rats, life will be better for humans.

4. Harrow by Joy Williams (Knopf)

Williams is revered for her brilliant short stories, and her novels, while more rare, are a great occasion. The publication of Harrow, her new one, coincides with a well-deserved 2021 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction for a body of extraordinary work, with past recipients including Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, and Don DeLillo. Thematically, Williams’ fiction is distinguished by her ethical concerns involving the destruction of nature and cultural breakdown, and Harrow is in that tradition. It’s set in a somewhat dystopian, corporatized near future in which a girl is reborn and sets off to travel across a decimated landscape of decay, a journey that casts a captivating spell on readers.

5. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)

Like Doerr’s bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning All The Light We Cannot See, his new novel, longlisted for the National Book Award, features young protagonists and is written in brief poetic chapters with a cumulative power. While Cloud Cuckoo Land looks to the past, in this case 15th-century Constantinople, he reaches to present-day Idaho and a spaceship of the next century, enlarging his cast of characters and linking them not by events but rather through a fable of Doerr’s creation, involving a man who strives to transform himself into a bird and fly to an idyllic new planet. A shared love for this myth connects the characters, suggesting a bridge between generations that is provocative, profound, and propulsive.