1. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

In the short, tragic life of George Floyd, two Washington Post reporters tell the story of the Black man whose infamous murder by police inspired global protests for racial justice. In gripping prose based on 400 interviews, Samuels and Olorunnipa vivify Floyd – known as “Perry” to his friends and family – from his childhood in Houston, poor and in segregated schools, to his evolution into an adult who dealt with unemployment, poverty, addiction, and a criminal record. The journalists reconstruct centuries of American history as they explore his family’s origins, trace his steps, and present a rich, nuanced, and absorbing picture of Floyd that steers clear of hagiography or hatchet job.

2. Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank by Eric Orner (Metropolitan)

Longtime Democratic Massachusetts congressman, champion of the working class, and gay icon Barney Frank jumps off the pages of Orner’s sharp graphic novel. Orner, Frank’s onetime press secretary, imparts an insider’s view and whiff of political satire to this visually rich and marvelously nuanced portrait of an idealistic and ethical yet weathered powerbroker, a lonely firebrand, both gruff and gregarious.

3. Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast by Joan DeJean (Basic Books)

DeJean, a professor of French literature and cultural history at the University of Pennsylvania, has uncovered the harrowing 1719 story of La Mutine, a ship full of 130 weak, impoverished women unjustly convicted of crimes and deported from France as part of a corrupt scheme to populate the colony of Louisiana. Only 62 women survived the torturous voyage, and DeJean reveals their stories of unity and resilience, and how they made lives for themselves as wives, mothers, and property owners. “Across the ocean on the second coast, this country’s French coast,” writes DeJean, “these rebelliously unconventional colonists realized a female version of ‘the American dream.’”

4. Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close (Knopf)

The 2016 election was imminent, and 23 minutes after the Chicago Cubs win a playoff game that later leads to a World Series victory, the family patriarch suddenly dies in J. P. Sullivan’s, the restaurant he founded, destabilizing three generations of this Irish family in suburban Oak Park, where, as Close writes, “being Irish is a competitive sport.” Close has cooked up a delicious, hilarious apple pie of a novel, full of generous humor, buoyant wit, robust family squabbles, and a velocity that goes down as smoothly as a jello shot. In a poignant note, Close describes the process of soaking ketchup bottle tops in boiling water and “marrying” the nearly empty bottles with the nearly full ones, and wiping them so they look almost new. “It was almost magic,” although Close writes almost wistfully: “No one marries the ketchups anymore.”

5. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama (Bloomsbury)

This gorgeously rich and sweeping debut novel, sparked by China’s invasion of Tibet in 1959, is both a revelatory excursion into a mysterious land and a multigenerational tale of displacement, exile, and identity. Sisters Lhamo and Tenkyi, who land in a refugee camp in Nepal, reckon with their pasts, and come to terms with loss and exile, even after their paths diverge. Lama extends her rich narrative by weaving Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, and childhood love Samphel into this resplendent tapestry, adding the influence of  a powerful ancient relic that radiates through this enthralling novel.