1. The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media – From the Founding Fathers to Fake News by Harold Holzer (Dutton)

As Holzer recounts in his fascinating, surprising, and engaging new book: When President Abraham Lincoln overheard a comment about the unreliability of the press, he injected that newspapers were indeed “reliable,” and added that “they ‘lie’ and then they ‘re-lie.’” Holzer, a National Humanities Medal winner and unofficial dean of all things Lincoln, extends his new book to focus on 19 presidents, from George Washington and John Adams to Donald Trump, and the journalists who covered them. He highlights their mutual distrusts, disputes, and truces, struggles over access, fake news and sanitized news, and, yes, their occasional collaboration. Holzer suggests that the essential tensions between presidents and the press remain, and he quotes a 19th-century abolitionist who said, “We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.”

2. Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (Riverhead)

Biss has distinguished herself as a gifted writer with an agile mind who interrogates the question of an individual’s relationship with and responsibility to society. In On Immunity, she considered the vaccination question, and in her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Notes From No Man’s Land, she grappled with racism so deeply embedded that it was almost invisible. Now focusing her gaze on homeownership and its value and place in a stratified, unequal society, Biss beckons readers into conversation in graceful segues between the quotidian details of buying a washing machine or selecting paint and social policies like redlining and theories involving racial, gender, and class politics of labor and domesticity.

3. Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains by Kerri Arsenault (St. Martin’s Press)

“Over decades, “Maine’s ‘Vacationland’ narrative has become as polished as the steely urn that holds my father’s ashes,” writes Arsenault in her impressive and compelling debut memoir. Her father had worked for 45 years as a pipe fitter in at the paper mill that, as Arsenault learned as an adult, dumped carcinogenic chemicals into the atmosphere and the Androscoggin River to the extent that the area became known as “cancer valley.” Beyond her family’s history and its French Canadian heritage, Arsenault blends inquiry into the science of environmental destruction, corporate malfeasance, and governmental red tape, and she raises important, resonant questions about the costs of prosperity in a book that is artfully written and punctuated by her lovely photographs.

4. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi (Knopf)

Gyasi brilliantly transitions from her breakthrough debut – the multigenerational, epic Homecoming – into a more intimate, psychologically insightful register in her wonderful sophomore novel involving the immigration of a Ghanaian family to Huntsville, Alabama, and the tension between science and faith. The family’s youngest, Gifty, in a high-powered Ph.D. program in neuroscience, studies lab mice to discern neural circuits leading to addiction and depression; the eldest dies of an opiate addiction; and their forceful mother, working as a home health aide, slumps into a depression. In this environment of racism, poverty, and addiction, the evangelical family pastor tries to help, and Gifty finds herself pulled between medicine and religion in a world tragically limited by prejudice.

5. Ruthie Fear by Maxim Loskutoff (W.W. Norton)

Loskutoff reimagines the conventional bleak and brawny novel of the Western mountains, mixing magic and realism in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, and introduces a strangely beguiling Ruthie Fear, abandoned as a toddler by her mother and left with her angry father. In the changing landscape, as chasms widen between rich and poor and between scientists in a mysterious lab and gun-toting “rednecks,” 6-year-old Ruthie and her dog, Moses, encounter a feathered headless creature with two spindly legs. She grows up to pursue this creature, seeing omens and signs. Loskutoff has written a big social novel with harrowing moments, one filled with empathy, surprises, and a compelling heroine.