1.Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America by Dahlia Lithwick (Penguin Press)

In Slate and in her podcast Amicus, lawyer-journalist Lithwick has distinguished herself as a wise and insightful analyst of law and the courts. Her revelatory new book celebrates the contemporary women lawyers who, building on the work of the late activist and lawyer Pauli Murray, challenged Trumpism, fighting the Muslim ban and working for reproductive freedom and voting rights. These lawyers are heroes, and Lithwick brings a special gravity to the book when she reflects on her own experiences working on the 9th Circuit, especially during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

2.Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War IIby Bruce Henderson (Knopf)

Henderson illuminates the little-known history of the Nisei – first-generation Japanese Americans– recruited to fight for the U.S. military as soldiers and interpreters, many having been incarcerated in internment camps established byFDR’s Executive Order 9066. Henderson excavates this history of the Pacific theater, showing that these recruits were avidly loyal American patriots who knew the enemy and were highly motivated to defeat them. Henderson vividly captures the irony that while these heroes played a crucial role in the victory in the Pacific, their relatives faced hatred and incarceration in the U.S.

3. By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham (Norton)

Founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University Burnham draws from research cataloging “racially motivated homicides” in the South between 1920 and 1960 and examines the “quotidian violence that shaped routine experiences like grocery shopping and tied the nation’s legal institutions to its racial culture.” In rigorous and sensitive prose, she writes about the “chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life” and sustained Jim Crow. In closing her sober chronicle of these years of violence, Burnham makes a passionate call for reparations.

4. The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

MacArthur “genius” Li sets her new novel in post-World War II France, focusing on two adolescent farm girls –precocious, transgressive Fabienne and passive, pliant Agnes –who form an intense, complicated bond. In her distinctive, precise prose, tinged with melancholy, Li allows Agnes, after Fabienne’s death years later, to recount how stories Fabienne told her led her to Paris, London, finishing school, the publishing world, and literary fame, and how over time, their relationship had been recalibrated. Li keys into these early friendships and evokes suggests their outsized influence in the trajectory of their lives.

5.Two Nurses, Smoking: Stories by David Means (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Enigmatic and lucid, these stories in Means’ sixth collection are rich with epiphanies, sort of thought-bombs nestled into sentences of these knockout stories that circle grief. The opening story, “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog,” is narrated by a middle-aged dachshund – or Means –who is lost, until she isn’t. “I wish I could make words be dog,” Means writes, “… then perhaps I could find the way to inhabit the true dynamic, to imagine a world not defined by notions of power, or morality, or memory, or sentiment, but instead by pure instinct locked in her body, her little legs, as she trotted up the hill … to the driveway, stopping there for a moment to sniff.” The closing story, “The Depletion Prompts,” is really a series of short prose poems about writing, and living. And avid Means readers will recognize 1970s teenage runaway Meg from his earlier collections; she reappears in three stories, still with rambling boyfriend Billy.