1. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song by Emily Bingham (Knopf)

Stephen Foster’s ballad “My Old Kentucky Home” is as synonymous with the Kentucky Derby as big hats and mint juleps, but as Bingham documents in her extraordinary book, the song’s origin and popularity are deeply entwined with the stubborn “Lost Cause” myth. Bingham’s marvelous work of social and cultural history exposes how Foster’s nostalgic song and lyrics used in blackface minstrel shows reinforced the contortions and contradictions of slavery and pro-Confederate versions of history. A descendant of enslavers on both sides of her family, Bingham effectively draws from her own personal history as well as the more recent public debate over “My Old Kentucky Home” and the killing of Breonna Taylor in the Bluegrass State.

2. The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold by Sam Knight (Penguin Press)

Building on his story in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, Knight explores the belief that supernatural signs foreshadow disaster. Knight zeroes in on eccentric psychiatrist John Barker, who gave credence to the idea that a 1966 avalanche of coal mine waste in Wales had been anticipated. Barker teamed up with journalist Peter Fairley to establish an office and place ads in London’s Evening Standard encouraging citizens to report their premonitions, leading to hundreds of accounts, and interesting results.

3. Fly Girl: A Memoir by Ann Hood (W.W. Norton)

Hood is beloved for novels like Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine and The Knitting Circle as well as her memoirs of grief, but less known is that she began writing fiction from airplane jump seats, beginning her career as a flight attendant in 1978. It was the only job for which she applied during her senior year in college as the era known as the “Golden Age of Travel” was on the wane, and Hood was aware that flight attendants were “still stereotyped as not-very-smart sex kittens in airline advertising and in many people’s minds back then.” Her detailed recollections of her year in the skies are delightful, and she is keenly insightful about how her training and experience as a flight attendant were essential to her personal growth.

4. My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist’s Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole by Will Jawando (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In Jawando’s stirring memoir, the Nigerian American activist, lawyer, and council member in Montgomery County, Maryland, makes the case for the importance of Black men mentors. An overweight, smart, and gregarious youth, Jawando could have been “surveilled or ignored” but found inspiration and support from a constellation of men who guided him throughout his life, from a fourth-grade math teacher and high school gospel director, to his mother’s gay Black colleague. Jawando vividly recounts how these men saved him from bullies, took him to college, and introduced him to theater and museums. He points to a “father figure,” President Barack Obama, for whom he served as the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

5. The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton)

With roots in an Indian coconut plantation, Vara’s exciting debut novel takes the shape of a robust coconut tree with offshoots of glorious palms and nuts tied together in a grand trunk of a family saga, a satire of biotech and the digital age, and a piercing indictment of the caste system.  King Rao, a Dalit tech mogul and inventor of the “Coconut” personal computer, has planned a “Shareholder Government” run by algorithm. In this capacious work of imagination, alluringly narrated by King Rao’s daughter Athena, who is accused of his murder, “Shareholders” hold the power to free her as the ecosystem is being destroyed.