1. Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman (Spiegel & Grau)

In his arresting account, Friedman, a Toronto-born journalist who lives in Jerusalem, reconstructs a magical, spontaneous concert tour in the 1973 Yom Kippur War when 39-year-old singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who was at a low point and considering retirement, performed for Israeli troops on the front lines in the Sinai Desert. Locating Cohen’s 45-page personal account of the experience as well as his notebooks of the period and finding those who had experienced the concerts, Friedman reconstructs this little-known yet profoundly influential historical footnote. “Sometimes an artist and an event interact to create a spark far bigger than both: art that isn’t a mere memorial to whatever inspired it,” he writes, “but an assertion of human creativity in the face of all inhuman events.”

2. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins (Knopf)

In her Pulitzer Prize- winning Imperial Reckoning, Harvard historian Elkins exposed the last days of British colonialism in Kenya. Now, in this sweeping, ambitious chronicle, she extends her commanding investigative and interpretive powers around the globe to include India, South Africa and Palestine. Elkins convincingly makes the case that the British Empire, with its principles cloaked in uplifting paternalism, was built on violence.

3. Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power by Greg Bluestein (Viking)

Bluestein, political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a familiar face on MSNBC explaining Peach State politics, focuses on the hard-fought U.S. Senate elections that sent modern Democratic pathbreakers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to Washington. A great storyteller, Bluestein draws on his experience, detailing how Stacey Abrams’ grassroots campaign extended, energized, and mobilized the party’s liberal base. Challenging conventional wisdom that Georgia’s changing demographics were the key to success, Bluestein highlights the talented candidates and their smart campaign strategies that prevailed over not only the challenges of COVID-19, but also extremism and determined efforts to overturn the presidential election.

4. French Braid by Ann Tyler (Knopf)

Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler introduces the Garretts – mismatched parents and three discontented children – in 1959 on a summer vacation, and over the course of this novel spanning 50 years she delves into three generations of this American family. Emotions are repressed, not articulated. Passions are thwarted and frustrated. Connections fail. Tyler’s distinctive empathic spirit infuses her 24th novel, evoking the inner lives of these very different characters and imbuing it with an elegiac quality evocative of her teacher, the late Reynolds Price.

5. Here Lies by Olivia Clare Friedman (Grove)

In her vividly imagined debut novel, Friedman has hurtled to 2042 and an increasingly totalitarian Louisiana in which the government has banned burials, shuttered cemeteries, and mandated cremation. A 22-year-old woman, tormented because her mother who has died of ovarian cancer cannot be buried, bonds with a younger woman, and together they connect with burial rights activists who share their mission. Friedman’s novel poses questions about the replacement of traditional expressions of grief and the possibilities of women to reimagine the future.