1. Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa| (Doubleday)

Fierce and convincing, health journalist Villarosa exposes the discriminatory inequality embedded into the health care system, from neglect to abuse of Black Americans. She effectively weaves history, profiles, and studies showing that, for example, Black people are denied kidney dialysis and transplants and receive lower dosages of pain medication than white people. Villarosa makes a passionate appeal to address racism engrained in health care and remake the system.

2. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (Random House)

Yong, a writer at The Atlantic and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his lucid journalism on COVID-19, lavishes his talent on the animal world, contending that creatures as diverse as rattlesnakes, owls, ticks, and sea turtles have umwelt, a zoological term for the perceptual world inhabited by these critters. In his cogent, clear book, Yong delineates the unique characteristics of various species – asymmetric ears of owls, for instance – and reveals that they sense just a tiny part of the world. In bringing together this orchestra of living things, he inspires curiosity in and empathy with those with which we share the earth.

3. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden by Zhuqing Li (W. W. Norton)

In Li’s marvelously told account, her aunts – sisters raised in privilege in the southeastern city of Fuzhou – happened to be geographically and ideologically separated during the 1949 Chinese Civil War, one in Communist China and the other in Nationalist Taiwan, each persevering through hardship before reuniting in 1982. Li, professor of East Asian studies at Brown University, enriches the dual biographies of these tenacious sisters with her own experience in the exodus from China.

4. Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and His Daring Quest for a Free Cuba by

David E. Hoffman (Simon & Schuster)

Hoffman has written a wonderful biography of Fidel Castro’s fierce opposition leader Oswaldo Payá and detailed an important, overlooked chapter in modern Cuban history. Washington Post contributing editor and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, Hoffman recounts Castro’s rise and Payá’s disillusionment with the regime that destroyed its constitution and his determined campaign for free speech and a free press, until he died in a mysterious 2012 car crash.

5. Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe (Morrow)

Wolfe’s poignant debut novel, set in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side in 1999, focuses on preteen Fe Fe Stevens and her set of friends, the summer before their public housing high-rise towers were to be demolished and displaced. Wolfe propels this drama in short, engrossing chapters that capture the waves of the double dutch jump rope played by the girls, the rewards of friendship and religion, as well as the threats of sexual abuse and gang warfare.