1. Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department by Geoffrey Berman (Penguin Press)

In his explosive new book, Berman, former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, details how Donald Trump’s Justice Department made “overtly political” demands to advance the president’s personal and political agenda by targeting his enemies and protecting his friends. The Rockefeller Republican walked a tightrope by doing good work, like repatriating Nazi-looted art and taking on Big Pharma and Jeffrey Epstein. The arrival of William Barr as attorney general ratcheted up White House demands, and after 2 1/2 years, the rope snapped. With his new account, in riveting prose, Berman chronicles our worst fears about political pressure and the abuse of power.

2. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In a brilliant set of case studies that begins with her own, Aviv weaves a narrative that emphasizes multiplicities of life with mental illness. Exploring why some people with the same diagnosis recover while others have illnesses as “careers,” Aviv eloquently evokes that continuum. “The divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable,” the New Yorker author writes, “a fact that I find both haunting and promising.”

3. Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ma’s brilliant debut novel Severance, set in a post-apocalyptic world of a Bible publishing company, satirized capitalism with wit. Her ingenious sophomore effort, a phantasmic short story collection, mostly centers on unnamed female narrators who have immigrated from China. Ma’s disquieting stories, written in sharp, pristine sentences, tend toward eccentricity; take investment guy “The Husband,” who only speaks “$$$$.” “Hi, honey, I say. How was your day? $$$$, $$$$$$$$$$, he says.” Or the dreamlike and absurd story of a woman in a “geriatric pregnancy” who shows her doctor an arm protruding from her vagina, and the doctor checks out a website that appears to be WebMD and advises her to be careful and to keep it warm.

4. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In his debut work of fiction, Escoffery deftly links stories into this wonderfully prismatic novel of a Jamaican family in Miami, struggling to survive a hurricane as well as prevalent storms of economic instability and the truth of racism. At the center of Escoffery’s collection, named to the Fiction Longlist of the National Book Awards, is its unforgettable protagonist, Trelawney, the younger of two brothers who struggles to establish his own identity as generations of family conflict emerge, providing a universality to the world of Escoffery’s imagination. 

5. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry (Ecco)

Perry’s powerful journey through folkways of the American South was recently named to the Nonfiction Longlist of the National Book Awards. Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton who was born in Alabama, is an engaging and provocative guide, writing in a conversational tone and sharing her observations and internal dialogue as she crosses the South, juxtaposing past and present.