1. The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics after 2020 by Jonathan Lemire (Flatiron)

As the House Jan. 6 committee focuses on evidence leading up to that horrible day and beyond it to make its case against Donald Trump, Lemire chronicles the accumulation of Trump lies from the campaign and over his White House years that led to the violent conflagration at the Capitol. In lively prose, Lemire, White House bureau chief at Politico and host at MSNBC, recounts Trump’s repeated claims of “rigged elections” even during the 2016 campaign, then his boasts that his inauguration crowd size was bigger than Barack Obama’s although the facts said otherwise. Unchallenged, Trump continued his lies without consequences, so that his unsubstantiated crusade about a conspiracy of fake, rigged elections and voter fraud fueled rage and anger that manifested itself in Washington.

2. Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury)

Fitzgerald’s first line – “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people” – sets the beguiling tone for his memoir in essays, a chronicle of growing up in a buttoned-up Catholic family in New England, attending boarding school, short stint acting in adult films, smuggling medical supplies over the Myanmar-Thailand border, and ultimately writing his own legend. Wily and wonderful, Fitzgerald makes a magical connection with readers. “My stories. A child crying and acting out, hoping to make his parents understand,” he writes. “A child who wants to know, once and for all, that he wasn’t a mistake.”

3. Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood by Hilary A. Hallett (Liveright)

Hallett recovers the life story of overlooked writer Elinor Glyn, raised in Canada and the Channel Islands, whose life and work mirrored the shift from Victorian society in the 19th century to the steamy romance novels of the next. A bookish girl, Glyn wielded her pen initially to support her family and then climbed the ladder of fame with her instinct for self-promotion. In her rich evocation of Glyn, Hallett has also written a vibrant social history of a world with aristocracy in decline and sexy Hollywood on the rise.

4. Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Liveright)

Sullivan’s big-hearted debut novel opens with 8-year-old Malaya weighing in at 168 pounds; a Black girl, she attends an almost all-white academy for the gifted and is ridiculed by her classmates. Malaya’s mother forces her to attend her own Weight Watchers meetings while her father, who grew up starving, equates thinness to poverty. The family has moved from a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side to a house in Harlem, and against this backdrop of gentrification, Sullivan has written a gorgeous, original coming-of-age novel of a girl transforming quickly into a woman and exploring what it means to find space for herself in the world.

5. The Kingdoms of Savannah by George Dawes Green (Celadon)

Green, founder of The Moth, knows the art of storytelling on stage, and he transfers that talent to the page in this absorbing, thrilling mystery steeped in atmospheric Savannah, Georgia. In a novel that traverses the city’s contemporary social hierarchy and delves into its ugly past, Morgana Musgrove, one of Savannah’s leading matriarchs, operates a detective agency left to her as part of her late husband’s crumbling empire. She investigates the stabbing of a young white man and the abduction of a middle-aged Black woman, enlisting her dysfunctional family to the case, which leads to revelations about the heinous past but signs of a more promising future.