1. A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Crown)

The literary decks have been cleared for the arrival of former President Obama’s memoir scheduled for Nov. 17, and bookstores are counting on it to be a mega-bestseller. In her New York Times review, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes it as “nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid,” and Jennifer Szalai observes that Obama strikes an “almost mournful” tone in his narrative which is “deliberative, measured and methodical.”

2. Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Farmer, a medical anthropologist and physician and former MacArthur fellow, captures in wrenchingly vivid detail the explosion of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Co-founder of the international health care organization Partners in Health, Farmer profiles many victims, survivors, and heroic medical professionals treating patients in exploited Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and details his frustration with the international health system’s priority of containing the outbreak over treating the suffering. With his keen appreciation of history, Farmer explains how the region’s past colonial rule, conflicts, and slave trade weakened its ability to respond to Ebola.

3. The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State by Declan Walsh (W. W. Norton)

A former correspondent for The Guardian and the New York Times’ bureau chief in Pakistan until he was mysteriously expelled from the country in 2013, Walsh paints a panoramic view of Pakistan in these fascinating profiles of nine very different people who provide wildly varied perspectives on the nation founded in 1947. Ranging from one who trained mujahideen fighters in the war against the Soviet Union and then was kidnapped by the Taliban decades later to a human rights activist, the “most famous cop in Karachi,” and a liberal politician assassinated for supporting a persecuted Christian woman. Weaving these individual stories together, Walsh’s book provides an account of the dramatic, volatile and fascinating Pakistan struggling with its internal religious and ethnic conflicts and power dynamics.

4. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (West Virginia University Press)

The rich and varied stories in Philyaw’s debut collection elevate Southern Black girls and women beyond their traditional church pews with a wonderful velocity. Philyaw confidently mixes quotidian details; in one story, a narrator tells of her mother’s affair with a pastor and also imagines God as a fat Black Santa eating peach cobbler. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is a National Book Award finalist, a recognition that should win Philyaw the readership she deserves.

5. The Lost Shtetl by Max Gross (HarperVia)

In this imaginative novel, a tiny Polish village, miraculously overlooked by the Nazis during World War II, is isolated from modern life and culture until a young wife, unable to bear her husband another moment, flees and the rabbi dispatches the town putz to bring her back. The narrator of Gross’ witty novel is a nameless townsperson who often speaks in the collective “we,” and the embrace of Yiddish expressions throughout evokes associations with the literary tradition of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and more recently Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. With warmth and charm, Gross spins a resonant and poignant tale of village life complete with gossip and matchmakers.