1. Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)

In her magnificent Horse, Brooks returns to the Civil War era evoked in her 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning March, which reimagined Union Army Chaplain March, the fictional father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Brooks now expands her vision, following the hoofprints of racial conflict and terror from the antebellum border states to contemporary America. At the center of this polyphonic novel is the relationship between a real champion racehorse, sire of a generation more, named Lexington for his birthplace in Kentucky, and his groom, the enslaved Jarret. Through an aspiring artist from the North who visits the plantation and paints the horse and “Black Jarret, his groom,” Brooks braids together centuries of racial injustice through to the present and the understanding that racism is embedded into horse racing and radiates through contemporary life. More than horse racing, Horse is a novel of race.

2. American Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals by David Hackett Fischer (Simon & Schuster)

For this monumental work of history, Fischer begins with an inquiry into, as he writes, “what happened when Africans and Europeans came to North America, and the growth of race slavery collided with expansive ideas of freedom and liberty and rule of law in the European and mostly English-speaking colonies that became the United States.” Aided by the growth of historical databases, regular trips to Africa, and extraordinary devotion to this endeavor, Fischer’s inquiry focuses on the paradox of slavery and the ideals of liberty, well as the positive, enduring influence that both free and enslaved Africans had on American ideals. This volume will surely stand as an important reference for years to come.

3. Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos (Knopf)

Closer to Charlotte’s Web than Animal Farm, Gaydos’ memoir of her years as a farmhand in New York and Vermont is a gorgeously written account of her experience as a single woman paid by the hour who barely made it over the poverty line, choosing to make her money off nature where there is plenty to eat. “This is compensation for the crude work of training life into channels of fecundity,” she writes. Gaydos threads pigs through her narrative, and unlike crops, “the pig is something closer to a far-off verdant world, a sign of the earth’s pull toward splendor.” Pigs, Gaydos writes, “grew into symbols of fertility, good fortune even, as the seasons mounted.” Propelling her memoir to its compelling end is her own vision, of reaping and sowing, of “faith in the continuance of things” which is part of the “flowering of the earth, its bloom and attendant rot.”

4. Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Her witty, wry essay collections, for example I Was Told There’d Be Cake, bring to mind I Feel Bad About My Neck, and with this sly, perceptive, and hilarious novel, Crosley channels Nora Ephron’s gift for keying into the zeitgeist of the moment. With the DNA of Ephron’s romantic comedies, Crosley’s universe is revved up, upended by the cult of wellness, Instagram, and transactional relationships. At the center of this propulsive novel is reluctantly engaged Lola, who seems to be running into a series of old boyfriends coincidentally until she realizes that this is part of a grand plan, and the novel hurtles toward its surprising and satisfying conclusion.

5. Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby (Liveright)

Poet and environmental activist Brorby’s lovely memoir puts a contemporary spin on Brokeback Mountain and The Laramie Project, as he recounts his childhood in the tiny town of Center, North Dakota, which Brorby depicts as a contradictory place of glorious wildlife and grassy prairies with a harsh social climate that prized masculinity, refrained from emotion, and bullied and harassed him for seeming effeminate. Brorby poignantly evokes his relationships with his accepting sister and grandfathers, as well as his initial rejection by his parents. As he wrestled with his identity, Brorby’s active commitment to the environment grew as he protested the Dakota Access Pipeline and came into his own.