1. I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker (Penguin Press)

Ten weeks after the 2020 election, at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump insisted to Leonnig and Rucker that he had won. Rich with firsthand anecdotes, sharp insights, and narrative energy, this compelling account by two indefatigable Washington Post reporters depicts a delusional president – egged on by Rudy Giuliani, who many thought had been drinking too much. Perhaps most telling is their portrait of Trump wildly blaming everyone but himself for his declining popularity, including GOP leaders Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell — and Fox News for calling Arizona for Joe Biden and “stealing” his election.

2. Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley (MCD)

While the COVID-19 lockdown experience is apparently — hopefully — in the past for much of the world, Manaugh and Twilley remind us that quarantine as an effective strategy for dealing with contagious diseases, from cholera to Ebola, has evolved very little since its origins during the bubonic plague, known as the “Black Death,” over seven hundred ago. Writing with verve and a keen eye for detail, Manaugh and Twilley delve into the science of quarantine and explain its misuse as a xenophobic way to stigmatize and isolate those deemed “undesirable.” The authors recognize an often underappreciated aspect of quarantine: the toll of the tedium it imposes, and they smartly call for a “bill of rights” for the quarantined.

3. The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer by Dean Jobb (Algonquin Books)

In this detailed social history that reads like a thriller, investigative journalist Jobb vividly chronicles the atrocities of serial killer Thomas Neill Cream, a Canadian obstetrician who randomly chose vulnerable women, many prostitutes and pregnant women, and poisoned them with strychnine and contaminated medicine. Jobb captures the eerie first days of forensic detection, toxicology and Scotland Yard. Cream worked both sides of the Atlantic: after murdering women in Chicago and doing time in Joliet prison, he was pardoned and released, making his way to London, where he continued to poison women and was eventually tried and executed in 1892.

4. The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam (Scribner)

In this smart, witty and sharp novel, brilliant coder Asha creates an algorithm for a social networking site, called “We Are Infinite,” with her former high school crush Cyrus, now her new husband. The spiritual site becomes a global sensation and Cyrus becomes its face, and Asha realizes that she has built a platform for the world to worship her husband. Anam has created this premise to light a match for a rich satire, aflame with gender politics, culture clashes, and macho tech culture in an app that monetizes happiness and threatens the union that brought it into the world.

5. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

In Kitamura’s brilliant new novel, her keenly perceptive narrator is a temporary translator at an international court like The Hague, where an unidentified West African head of state – think Charles Taylor – who is on trial for war crimes (“ethnic cleansing”) asks her to be his interpreter. Kitamura has a gift for working in multiple registers, with her narrator, a young woman who is global and untethered, hearing and not hearing horrifying details of atrocities as she works with his defense team, and then in court. The claustrophobic Hague opens up as the narrator navigates the delicate balances in her vexed personal relationships, with Kitamura keyed into spoken and mnemonic language and the chasms in between.