1. Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis (Little, Brown)

In Dopesick (2018), Macy indicted Purdue Pharma for its responsibility for the opioid addiction crisis and empathically vivified the victims. Now, as a great chronicler of this persistent epidemic, Macy looks to the future and reports on the lives of both addicts and those in the trenches dedicated to destigmatizing addiction, determined to prevent overdoses. With her holistic, nuanced perspective, drawing from extensive interviews, Macy makes a compelling case for harm reduction in the form of clean needle exchanges and safe injection sites, for instance, as well as services to heal broken communities.

2. The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land by Sally Denton (Liveright)

In her meticulously researched history, Denton focuses on a caravan of women and children, part of the LeBaron clan, killed in a 2019 massacre on a Mexican road controlled by a drug cartel. Their homestead, “Colonia LeBaron,” provided Denton with a “portal to the past” for her inquiry into the LeBarons, a breakaway group of Mormon fundamentalists that had existed in Mexico since the mid-1800s. In addition to establishing the connection between the Mormons and Mexican drug cartels, Denton extends her compelling investigation into the relationship between polygamy and religious extremism. She looks back deeply into the history of the polygamist subculture and the split in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it played out beyond U.S. borders.

3. This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Crane (Counterpoint)

Crane titles one chapter of her beguiling, irresistible memoir “Three Words” – those unanticipated words “I’m not happy.” Crane challenges the traditional divorce chronicle through her stop-motion camera account, in third person, about the “wife,” the “husband,” and the “bud,” an old friend who has room for her as a roommate, with the bonus of his “kid.” Carefully chiseled prose poems provide quick snapshots (weeping in the dog park), and other moments – creating her Tinder profile – provide wit. In a radical act of reimagination, Crane reconfigured her life, finding a joyous spirit along her journey.

4. Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls by Kathleen Hale (Grove)

In Waukesha, a small river town west of Milwaukee, the 2014 news was shocking: Two 12-year-old girls, obsessed with ghoulish website Creepypasta and a mythical figure called “Slenderman,” had tried to murder a classmate. As one adolescent stabbed the classmate – who survived – nearly 20 times, the other egged her on. Both girls were committed to psychiatric hospitals. In her nuanced investigation, Hale writes sympathetically about impressionable adolescents and society’s failure to read clues of mental illness, and provides a compelling account of this tragedy as an object lesson.

5. Dead-End Memories: Stories by Banana Yoshimoto, trans. from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Counterpoint)

An internationally celebrated fiction writer for decades, Yoshimoto first published this  collection in Japan in 2003; it is her 11th book to be translated into English. Thematically, contrary to what the title may suggest, the focus is on young, professional women on the verge of  breaking away from pains of the past, often by connecting across generations, and empowering themselves to recover from trauma. Yoshimoto threads gatherings around food – cafeteria, restaurant, bar – through these wonderful, entirely satisfying stories, and she challenges so much fiction about alienation, dislocation, and disaffection, offering an alternative without being saccharine.