1. Recitatif by Toni Morrison, Introduction by Zadie Smith (Knopf)

Nobel laureate Morrison’s only short story, originally published in 1983 and now as a slender, elegant volume enhanced by Smith’s insightful introduction, is a knockout. Two little girls, one Black and the other white, daughters of single mothers unable to care for them, bond in an orphanage. Years later, they encounter each other at a Howard Johnson’s where one works, and then again at an upscale grocery store, one with a chauffeur and the other worried about her budget and melting Klondike bars, and later they are polarized over school integration. Morrison does not reveal either girl’s race and she strips her narrative of racial codes, yet has created two characters whose own racial identity was crucial to them.  In her captivating story, Morrison ingeniously leads readers to challenge racial stereotypes and consider nuanced power dynamics with questions that linger beyond the last page.

2. Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us by Ro Khanna (Simon & Schuster)

COVID-19 laid bare the digital divide, and with his engaging book, Rep. Khanna, whose district includes headquarters for heavy hitters Google and Apple, lays out his plan to reform the tech industry. He aims to connect places like California’s Silicon Valley with Kentucky’s Silicon Holler where towns like Paintsville are revitalizing the economy of eastern Kentucky through a tech-savvy workforce. Khanna is a progressive with a nuanced view of the tech industry, and his book is a practical guide of policy recommendations to redistribute jobs and wealth. His “Internet Bill of Rights” establishes a “baseline of online protections for Americans consistent with our democratic values.” Drawing from his own childhood in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Khanna has a fierce and compelling vision for “how the digital economy can create opportunities for people where they live instead of uprooting them.”

3. Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (Pantheon)

In her panoramic social history, Pratt Institute professor Thanhauser follows a thread stretching from the opulence of Louis XIV’s France to forced labor in contemporary China’s Xinjiang province. She posits that clothing is essentially made with five fabrics – linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool – and that there is hardly any part of the human experience that clothing does not touch. Thanhauser’s inventive and lively history is enhanced by her vivid depictions of exploited child laborers and farm workers. Beyond the human costs, she finds an environment destroyed by toxic waste. Thanhauser’s rich history will send readers to thrift stores for used clothing and their closets for excavation projects.

4. Catch the Sparrow: A Search for a Sister and the Truth of Her Murder by Rachel Rear (Bloomsbury)

Rear meticulously reconstructs the disappearance of her stepsister Stephanie, 27-year-old violin teacher, a mystery unsolved for two decades until the random discovery of her skull in a shallow stream. An engrossing true-crime story is elevated by Rear’s heft and energy in investigating the investigation and uncovering her stepsister’s abusive, traumatic relationships with men, including her father. After years of the police department’s corruption and dysfunction, the arrest of a sexual predator and maintenance worker in Stephanie’s apartment building leads to a jailhouse confession to her murder, and Rear’s debut memoir compels readers’ attention to the haunting acts of violence against women that shape their lives.

5. Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder (W.W. Norton)

Roeder focuses his lively, engaging narrative on a set of games – checkers, chess, Go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble, and bridge – each of which, he writes, “developed its own unique personality” with its own fascinating characters and subculture of masters, virtues, and flaws. Together, explains Roeder in lucid prose, these games “belong to a rough hierarchy; each game on the list adds a strategic feature and, therefore, more closely hews to some aspect of the ‘real world.’” These games have a “special cultural longevity,” in that they appear both among ancient relics and in cutting-edge software.