1. Three Girls From Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Story of Race, Fate and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner (Simon & Schuster)

Turner’s beautiful memoir traces the trajectory of her own life and entwines it with those of her younger sister Kim and best friend Debra and wins its place on a shelf with classics The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates and Danielle Allen’s Cuz. At once a panoramic view of the Great Migration, and Turner’s “original three girls,” – her mother, aunt and maternal grandmother -- it is also an intimate story of the precariously narrow ledge of transition to adulthood, as Kim dies young and Debra lands in prison for murder yet, in a scene Turner beautifully renders, reconciles with the family of the man she murdered. Turner turns the lens on herself, rejecting her own belief that the daring Kim and Debra had made choices. “But it’s really a story about second chances,” Turner writes. “Who gets them, who doesn’t, who makes the most of them.” 317

2. Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket (Liveright)

Poison for Breakfast is certainly not an unfortunate event, but rather a rare book that bursts with curiosity and intelligence. From its opening sentence – “This morning I had poison for breakfast” – Lemony Snicket hooks readers into investigation this sentence and solving its mystery, but that this is really a book about being open to feeling bewildered, as though, he writes “you don’t have any idea what is happening.”  Magically Snicket’s carries readers through his investigations through town, from tea shop to honey farm and park where cheese-producing goats graze and eventually the library. Snicket’s discursive style, conversations in his head, lugubrious asides and literary references to Sophocles Rex by Sophocles and Elizabeth Bishop are joyfully ingenious, and free of sentimentality.

3. Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court by Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

In their essential, magisterial book, Burton and Derfner view U.S. racial history through the lens of the Supreme Court. The spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment animates this book and the prominent authors, historian Burton, whose prize-winning books include Chicago Tribune Heartland award winner The Age of Lincoln, and civil rights lawyer Derfner who helped desegregate the South focus on about 200 cases over the centuries,  the Constitutional clauses dealing directly with slavery, such as the ‘]three-fifths, slave trade and fugitive slave ones, as well as the persistent inequities suffered by free Black people, and include issues such as Native American removal, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, Latino discrimination, and more. “In charting the progress if Equality, Freedom, and Justice for All, the line is not straight, but the past links to the present,” the authors write.” Ultimately the book speaks to the future.” 11

4. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf)

Many call themselves “cultural critics,” but Nelson is the real thing. She sets the standard. Nelson’s The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle in 2015 for criticism drew more from her personal experience than her remarkable On Freedom in which she untangles conversation about everything from global warning to cultural appropriation in prose that dances in the mind beyond its final pages. Attentive to paradox but unrestrained by its duality, Nelson considers what freedom means, and rescues the idea from sloganeers, calling for “radical compassion.”

5. Matrix by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

After winning fans for Fates and Furies, her brilliant literary excavation of a contemporary marriage, Groff time travels to the 12th century and imagines the life of Marie de France, a bastardess of royal blood who was banished by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine at age 17 to a disease-ridden, poverty-stricken abbey. Eventually forming a sisterhood with prickly and temperamental nuns, they create a lake and supply of clean water, as they deal with the Crusades, apparitions, and challenge the Catholic church. With rich imagery, dramatic pacing and her distinctive light touch, Groff brings not only the world of the abbey to life but she magically reveals the alchemy and transformation of Marie and the women around her.