A Fatal Inheritance recounts the discovery of how cancer can be passed down through genes, providing a compassionate look at families forever changed.
The absorbing Carson McCullers is the first to paint a full portrait of the author, showing acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn at the height of her powers.
Challenger proves Adam Higginbotham is a master chronicler of disasters, piercing through politics, power and bureaucracies with laser-sharp focus.
Audrea Lim’s magnificent, provocative Free the Land illuminates how American ideas about land ownership contribute to social injustice.
Novelist, essayist, humorist and critic Sloane Crosley shows a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide.
Antonia Hylton’s Madness offers an unsparing reckoning with history as it excavates an infamous mental hospital for Black patients.
Brandon Keim’s awe-inspiring Meet the Neighbors exhorts us to consider that all animals, from dolphins to salamanders, are just as capable of thinking and feeling as we are.
In her memoir, Slow Noodles, Cambodian writer Chantha Nguon survives the terror of the Khmer Rouge and keeps her family recipes intact.
Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.
Amanda Montell explores our cultural and cognitive biases and their perilous consequences in the funny, compassionate The Age of Magical Overthinking.
Wright Thompson reckons with the culture of the Mississippi Delta and the murder of Emmett Till in his brilliant, probing history, The Barn.
The Other Olympians doggedly chronicles the lives of pioneering trans athletes and the historically fraught 1936 Olympic Games.
The Slow Road North is Rosie Schaap’s magnificent love letter to Northern Ireland, the region that offered her solace and community while she was reeling from grief.
Gripping and groundbreaking, The Unclaimed investigates the Americans who are abandoned in death and what they tell us about how we treat the living.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s captivating There’s Always This Year is a powerful meditation on place and community.
In Calling In, veteran feminist activist Loretta J. Ross powerfully argues that we must give up cancel culture to reclaim our shared humanity.
As readable as a novel, Bernadette Atuahene’s Plundered unspools the intricate story of how a nearly-bankrupt Detroit unconstitutionally overtaxed homes in poor Black neighborhoods.
Sweet but never saccharine, Sarah Perry’s collection of essays about candy, Sweet Nothings, is a book worth savoring.
Rich Benjamin reckons with his family’s exile from Haiti in his vivid, novelistic memoir, Talk to Me.
David Gessner explores the life and death of an owl on the lam in his animated, endearing The Book of Flaco.
Reading at times like a legal thriller, Michelle Adams’ The Containment sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system.
Ruth Franklin’s thoughtfully probing The Many Lives of Anne Frank illuminates the “kaleidoscope of meanings” ascribed to the titular author and her foundational work.
