1. Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement by Mark Whitaker (Simon & Schuster)

In his electrifying narrative, Whitaker chronicles 1966 as a transformative year, one that sort of hit the reset button in the long struggle for racial justice with its calls for “Black Power.” Focusing on the determined, varied young idealists of the Freedom Movement, the former Newsweek editor evokes the enthusiasms, frustrations, and passions across the nation. He provides a keen sense of being right there, from the brutal murder of Tuskegee student activist Sammy Younge outside a gas station bathroom, to the Mississippi heat and “melodrama” of the march to Jackson with James Meredith, to Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., then north to Chicago in the crusade for open housing. Whitaker delivers sharp insights into the dynamics and fissures within organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and is attentive to cultural changes like the flowering Black Arts Movement, the establishment of Black studies in higher education, as well as the building white backlash.

2. Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow (Atria)

Afraid that saying the wrong thing will get you canceled? This congenial book is a “portable tool kit,” as the authors describe it, to help you welcome, not fear, conversations about identity. Relentlessly practical, yet dexterously blending research and case studies, Yoshino and Glasgow – co-founders of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU Law – artfully begin with “The Impossible Conversations” and close with “The Essential Conversations.” Along the way they impart optimism and enthusiasm that motivate readers to action on social justice that is not necessarily on a grand scale, but rather in break rooms, living rooms, town halls, and school board meetings. “As you enter identity conversations,” they write, “we want you to think of them as moments when you use your moral agency in the domains in which you have power. This is the work of civil rights only you can do.”

3. Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

In an enslaved couple’s dramatic escape from Georgia to freedom in Philadelphia, Woo captures the risky ingenuity of light-skinned Ellen Craft’s passing as a disabled white man with her husband, William, posing as his slave. Freedom proved elusive, as they lived in fear of capture and the Fugitive Slave Act, and Woo artfully evokes the faithful bond between the ingenious Crafts and their lives in pursuit of freedom.

4. Decent People by De’Shawn Charles Winslow (Bloomsbury)

Winslow returns to the small, racially segregated North Carolina town he so richly evoked in his 2019 debut, West Mills, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. As the tightly knit community is reeling following a brutal triple homicide, a woman who grew up in the town returns from New York to retire there and is entangled in solving not only the crime but also other mysteries that have haunted its history.

5. Victory City by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

Over three decades after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called for his assassination, Rushdie barely survived a brutal knife attack onstage at a literary festival in New York last year after he had written his 13th novel, Victory City, which is now hitting the shelves. And what a victory it is. Rooted in history, set in India, this delicious work of magical realism involves an ancient manuscript discovered in the ruins of a city destroyed centuries before, the work of a prophet named Pampa Kampana, who died in 1565 whose whispers provide citizens their stories, and their past.