1. Between Everything and Nothing: The Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal by Joe Meno (Counterpoint)

Mohammed and Iyal fled Ghana separately and after hellacious years in a U.S. immigration prison, and having their asylum petitions rejected, joined forces in a Minneapolis bus station. They traveled north, through waist-high snow in a blizzard, and crossed the Canadian border. Meno, a gifted fiction writer and dogged journalist, connected with these young men to reconstruct their life stories and investigate American’s deeply flawed immigration system. Meno puts the men’s struggles in the larger context of a deeply flawed and exploitative global immigration system, delivering a powerful, nuanced perspective on a treacherous world for vulnerable people.

2. The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In the life of astronomer-turned-activist Frank Kameny, Cervini has found a fresh window into the history of the LGBTQ movement and the struggle for equality. Arrested for “lewd conduct” in a San Francisco restroom in 1956, Kameny lost his government job. He then launched a legal battle against discrimination and became an important and underappreciated advocate for gay civil rights. Cervini casts a wide net on the history of the LGBTQ struggle, extending it to include an array of important and intriguing events and individuals, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his “Sex Deviates” crusade.

3. Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why by Alexandra Petri (W.W. Norton)

Washington Post columnist Petri has won readers with her distinctive satirical perspective, and this collection’s cumulative power puts her talents on rich display. Petri is neither conventional nor reflexively counterintuitive, and it’s fun to see her mind work on such subjects as the reintroduction of the “Nazi, the Confederate, and the Measle” to their former habitats, ”“Chris Christie’s Wordless Screaming,” and “I’m Beginning to Suspect These Were Not, in Fact, the Best People.”

4. Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (Ecco)

Tropical storms, and a typhoon on the horizon: “We agreed it was an exciting time to be alive,” avers Ava, Dolan’s 22-year-old Irish teacher at a Hong Kong school for English-language learners, who falls into relationships with Julian, a British banker, and then Edith, an ambitious local lawyer. Negotiating the power struggles of these relationships provides Dolan’s excellent novel with its considerable suspense, but what really elevates it beyond so many debuts is the sharp language, droll tone, and keen perceptions of class that infuse it. And a plus for wit, as the question of whether a character is “a real person or three Mitford sisters in a long coat.”

5. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead)

Bennett’s wonderful debut, The Mothers, was set in contemporary Los Angeles and featured a Greek chorus of churchgoing older mothers. Her new novel expands to three generations and, stretching from the Jim Crow South to affluent Brentwood, reveals the depth of her talent. Bennett animates this engrossing novel with a mystery involving light-skinned identical twin sisters, one of whom disappears for a complete reinvention into a white person. She gracefully changes perspectives and voice, and contends not only with the complications of mother-daughter relationships, but also with tensions over identity, history, and colorism.