1. We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Asgarian won the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for what became her gut-punch of a book built on deep investigation, a nuanced sense of history, and a keen sensitivity for the powerless. In a horrific murder-suicide, a white female couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families drove the family SUV off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Asgarian investigates the broken foster care system that ignored earlier reports of child abuse, tracks down generations of the children’s birth families, and exposes the depths of this tragedy.

2. Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Bowden’s Black Hawk Down was a bravura report on the deadly 1993 urban fight known as the Battle of Mogadishu that left so many Americans and Somalis dead, and his stunning new page-turner turns his attention to a danger closer to home. The Wire made Baltimore’s dangerous neighborhood Sandtown famous, and Bowden focuses his investigative lens on the powerful gang “Trained to Go” (TTG) and its imprisoned leader Montana “Tana” Barronette. Using court documents, FBI files, and interviews, Bowden delivers a narrative about gang violence and white indifference and argues that a multidimensional investment – beyond policing – is needed to break the cycle of poverty and violence.

3. Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family by Rachel Jamison Webster (Holt)

Attending a family wedding, Webster was surprised to learn that she had a famous relative: Benjamin Banneker, a free person of color who was a self-taught astronomer and naturalist and who surveyed the District of Columbia to establish its boundaries in the Revolutionary era. With the help of her newfound Black cousins, Webster traced their ancestry to 1683 and realized that her branch had “passed” as white for many generations. A rich, multifaceted mélange of genealogy, memoir, and biography informed by her sensibility and imagination as a poet, Webster’s book engages in a dialogue between past and present. “I decided that it was impossible for me,” she writes, “to tell a story of Black genius and resistance without questioning my own position as a white woman and studying the origins and ramifications of whiteness itself.”

4. Commitment by Mona Simpson (Knopf)

Since her hit 1987 debut novel, Anywhere but Here, Simpson has been untangling family dynamics with exquisite precision, and she sustains that inquiry in her seventh work of fiction. Kaleidoscopic in vision, Simpson has a gift for evoking the yearning, anxieties, and thwarted ambitions of young people. Commitment features a 1970s Los Angeles family with a mother so depressed that she is institutionalized, leaving three siblings to raise themselves as unique individuals, with Simpson committing to bringing them through the rocky shoals of youth to adulthood.

5. A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung (Ecco)

A premature baby born to immigrant Koreans and adopted by a white couple in rural Oregon, Chung wrote the bestselling All You Can Ever Know, a memoir about her finding her identity. Now she has written a poignant, sorrowful elegy for her adoptive parents, who lived paycheck to paycheck without decent medical care, leaving her full of remorse and guilt across the country as the pandemic raged and she was unable to help them.