1. Like Wafers in Honey by Leah Eskin (Levine Querido)

In her poignant novel, Eskin draws from the shadows of history to vivify the dramatic life and work of Edda Servi Machlin, the immigrant New York suburban housewife who wrote the cookbook The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews. Richly imagined, in delicious prose, Eskin’s novel braids the story of Machlin’s acculturation to America in the Eisenhower years with that of young Stella Fortuna, who was forced to flee her Tuscan town when Nazis arrived to deport Jews. Brilliantly embedded into this shapely novel are more than 40 of Machlin’s recipes, which Eskin stylishly adapted for today’s cooks, equipment and sensibilities.

2. Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Celadon)

Boylan is done explaining and apologizing. Nearly a quarter-century has passed since the publication of her groundbreaking She’s Not There, in which she patiently chronicled her transition from “James” to “Jenny.” The distinctive and charming wit that made her first memoir a bestseller is present in Cleavage, but this memoir is further enriched by her wisdom, 36-year marriage to her wife, Deedie, sharp cultural analysis of gender relationships, activism and the indignities of aging.

3. Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth by Laurie Hertzel (University of Minnesota Press)

Hertzel’s family zigzagged across Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri, finally landing in Duluth, Minnesota, when her volatile father landed a teaching job. Laurie Hertzel, books editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 15 years, was the seventh of 10 children sandwiched into a two-story house. Hertzel vividly evokes those years, capturing both the cacophony and silences of her childhood, particularly the pain that informed life after her poetically inclined, “thin and gawky” oldest brother died in an accident, leaving both gaping holes and silence in the family.

4. Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights by Keisha N. Blain (W.W. Norton)

Activists and changemakers like Ida B. Wells and Madam C.J. Walker have won admiration for their hard-fought battles for human rights in America and around the world. Blain spotlights them as well as lesser-known grassroots activists who linked domestic racism and anti-colonialism, from the mothers of the Scottsboro boys to those activists in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean who used their social networks to agitate for human dignity and respect throughout the world.

5. The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston (Harvard University Press)

From a bud found in a packing crate from Brazil in 1818, Bilston tells the story of a rare and coveted variety of purple-marked orchid with a “pronounced crimson lip” associated with women’s sexuality and desire. Plant hunters embarked on dangerous expeditions in search of this flower, and through this lens, The Lost Orchid highlights how the international orchid trade and the hybridization of orchids led to their proliferation from the aristocratic to middle classes, in a frenzy that Bilston captures with great verve.