1. The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them by Sudhir Venkatesh (Simon & Schuster)

Following his extraordinary 2008 memoir Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, sociologist Venkatesh immersed himself in poor South Side Chicago neighborhoods where gangs flourished. At the core of his absorbing and illuminating book are two teen boys in rival gangs struggling for dominance to sustain their illegal trade. Reflecting his decades developing relationships and a sense of the city’s rhythms, Venkatesh chronicles the young gang leaders as well as would-be peacemakers in the clergy and law enforcement determined to withstand the riptide of inequality, violence, and the proliferation of guns that drags down the community.

2. Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell by Tim Miller (Harper)

Who are the “Never Trumpers”? GOP campaign veteran Miller, now an MSNBC analyst, writer-at-large for The Bulwark, and host of Not My Party on Snapchat, provides an entertaining and illuminating map for his transformation, and that of his friends. A clever writer of an account filled with anecdotes, Miller recounts signs that he ignored – like the cynical selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, “Build the Wall” rhetoric, and being a closeted gay man when the GOP opposed gay marriage – and blames himself for the mess of America today. He also jabs the “Tribalist Trolls” wedded to nationalism and the “Inert Team Players” blindly loyal to the GOP.

3. The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach by Sarah Stodola (Ecco)

Read The Last Resort, and you’ll never wish for a beach resort vacation again, despite that enticing “all-inclusive” package. In her compelling, original book, Stodola explores the origins of the manicured seaside paradise, but the real power of her investigation is her revelations about the environmental destruction wrought by overdevelopment and the explosion of tourists visiting these mini paradises. Beach resorts may have provided short-term economic benefits of tourism, but they are on a course of environmental destruction that will destroy these paradises if they are not protected.

4. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (Norton)

In her fine biography of author Rys, Seymour makes the case that her elusive subject should be recognized as perhaps one of the finest English woman novelists of the 20th century. Seymour traces the arc of Rys’ life, including the death of her son, her transient life, her alcoholism, and her connections with writers like Hemingway and Conrad. But the heart of this biography is in peeling back the layers to reveal the writer whose sympathies and inclinations led her to write the 1966 classic Wide Sargasso Sea, a post-colonial prequel to Jane Eyre, told from the perspective of Mr. Rochester’s wife in the attic, which went on to spur feminist thought.

5. Dele Weds Destiny by Tomi Obaro (Knopf)

In Obaro’s summer gem of a novel, a trio of tightly entwined friends from their northern Nigeria college days reconnect in Lagos after 30 years to attend the wedding of Destiny, the medical student daughter of a jet-setting member of the group whose husband mysteriously makes his fortunes. Obaro evokes the deep and universal bonds developed in the women’s college years as she reveals their secrets, and she also enriches this novel with Nigerian sensibility, from its music and food to its uncertainty and instability.