Sexy Perimenopause Fiction

All Fours by Miranda July

The unnamed heroine of July’s gaspingly explicit comic novel plans a cross-country road trip, only to stop 30 minutes from home. There she lavishly redecorates a motel room and begins an odd but passionate affair with a younger man who works at a rental-car agency.

For fans of “Big Swiss” by Jen Beagin

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

In 1970s Philadelphia, an alien girl sent to Earth before she’s born communicates with her fellow life-forms via fax as she helps gather intel about whether our planet is habitable. This funny-sad novel follows the girl and her single mother as they find the means to persevere.

Black River by Nilanjana Roy

This brilliant, brutal and utterly affecting novel, about the murder of an 8-year-old child in rural India, uses the trappings of the mystery to examine deeper ills in the entire country.

For fans of “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka

Bluff by Danez Smith

Smith’s poetry balances a delight in the possibilities of language with an innate skepticism about its use in the world; here is a poet who nurses the tension between art and action and exhorts readers to acknowledge injustice while appreciating the chaotic nature of human existence.

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

After three teenagers are brought back from the dead, the magic-wielding band teacher who revived them gives them a series of tasks to stay alive. This is the first novel from a master of the short story, and it pushes our understanding of what fantasy can be.

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Grossman, who is best known for his Magicians series, is at the top of his game with this take on the myth of King Arthur, which resoundingly earns its place among the best of Arthurian tales. The novel follows a knight who helps lead a ragtag band to rebuild Camelot in the wake of the king’s death.

For fans of “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

The narrator of this smart and sneering novel of capital and its consequences is an unnamed Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City who becomes involved in a scheme to buy Hermès Birkin bags and scalp them to “trashy and unworthy” buyers. In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, the narrator seesaws between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

The eternal conflict between making art and selling out gets a fresh take in Senna’s funny, foxy and fleet new novel about a struggling mixed-race couple — she’s a writer, he’s a painter — in Los Angeles. The jokes are good, the punches land, and the dialogue is tart: You often feel you’re listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party.

For fans of “Erasure” by Percival Everett and “All Fours” by Miranda July

Literary Fiction With a Soupçon of Spy

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

An American agent infiltrates a commune of French environmentalists in Kushner’s philosophical rendition of the spy novel, which blends pointed comic observation with earnestness in vinaigrette harmony. You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you’re in the hands of a major writer, one with a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration.

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn

Blackburn’s first novel (after two inventive short story collections) is an experimental and disarmingly funny look at death and loss. Narrated by dystopian artificial intelligence machines, the story follows a woman who impersonates her brother by texting from his phone after his suicide.

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

In 1913, at a health resort in what is now Poland, a shy and sickly student discovers a terrible secret: Every year around the first full moon in November, a man, sometimes two, is torn to pieces in the nearby forest. This novel by the 2018 Nobel laureate, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, pits nature against the state and the social world, with a particular emphasis on gender.

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

A lowly servant girl in 16th-century Spain has a secret: There’s magic in her fingertips, perhaps the kind that anxious kings and other assorted schemers would kill for. The best-selling fantasist Bardugo infuses this new standalone novel with both rich historical detail and a heady sense of place and romance.

For fans of “Spinning Silver” by Naomi Novik and “Shadow of Night” by Deborah Harkness

A Film in Which I Play Everyone by Mary Jo Bang

The poems in Bang’s latest collection, her ninth, are full of pleasure, color, sound and light — but also torment.

For fans of “The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands” by Nick Flynn and “Exit Opera” by Kim Addonizio

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

Written in the months since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, these poems conjure memories of orange trees, lost family and brutal airstrikes with palpable grief and uncertainty. “Even our souls,” writes Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, “get stuck under the rubble.”

For fans of “The Country Between Us” by Carolyn Forché

Funny Story by Emily Henry

In this heartfelt and humorous romp, a librarian and a bartender move in together after their respective partners leave them for each other. Though they’re polar opposites — she’s introspective and insecure; he’s gregarious but emotionally guarded — they have an immediate connection. This book pulls out all of Henry’s signature stops: sparkling banter, thoughtfully rendered family trauma and a charming community of side characters.

For fans of “Georgie All Along” by Kate Clayborn and “Party of Two” by Jasmine Guillory

Ghostroots by ’Pemi Aguda

These stories, set in an alternate version of Lagos, Nigeria, in which supernatural phenomena make the impossible commonplace, unflinchingly explore complicated human emotions. Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision, they herald the arrival of a major voice in speculative fiction.

For fans of “Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

A pair of missing siblings at an Adirondack summer camp spark a reckoning about the powerful, wealthy and possibly wicked family whose house — and presence — loom over the lakeside idyll.

For fans of “The Fever” by Megan Abbott and “Saint X” by Alexis Schaitkin

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill

This globe-trotting novel by the author of “Netherland” chronicles the quest of a man named Mark Wolfe to find a mysterious soccer prodigy in West Africa and the unraveling of his workplace back in Pittsburgh. Mark shares narratorial duties with his colleague Lakesha Williams; their stories build into a study of greed and ambition that our critic called “populous, lively and intellectually challenging.”

For fans of “The Darling” by Russell Banks

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy — snappy dialogue, realistic relationship dynamics, funny meet-cutes and misunderstandings — and leaves behind clichéd gender roles and the traditional marriage plot.

Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham

In this impressive first novel, a Black campaign aide coolly observes as aspiring power players angle to connect with a candidate who more than resembles Barack Obama.

For fans of “Primary Colors” by Anonymous

The Hunter by Tana French

French’s moody, mesmerizing thriller — a sequel of sorts to “The Searcher” — paints a rich portrait of a rural community in western Ireland roiling with “unseen things,” where a Chicago cop has decided to retire.

For fans of “Case Histories” by Kate Atkinson

Sad Irish Millenial Fiction

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Rooney’s latest novel is about brothers, a successful barrister and a competitive chess player, who are mourning the death of their father and navigating the lingering bitterness between them. But its primary subject, as in all of Rooney’s work, is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it.

For fans of “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman and “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck

James by Percival Everett

In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.

Joy in Service on Rue Tagore by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon’s latest poetry collection continues his longtime trick of marshaling obscure references into fluent, fun and rollicking lyrics that lull you in with their musicality, then punch you in the gut with their full force once you decipher their meanings.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Based on a true story, this novel follows a dysfunctional suburban family decades after the father, a prominent businessman, is kidnapped from his driveway. His adult children lay out the ways they are screwed up by latent trauma, their father’s repression and the wealth that insulates them.

For fans of “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray and “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

A young Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering addict grieves his parents’ deaths while fantasizing about his own in Akbar’s remarkable first novel, which, haunted by death, also teems with life — in the inventive beauty of its sentences, the vividness of its characters and the surprising twists of its plot.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

A love triangle is at the heart of this novel, which is set against the backdrop of a North Dakota beet farm during the economic meltdown of 2008-9. It’s as much about the financial crash and environmental destruction as it is about the people most impacted by these devastations.

For fans of “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout

Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

The grandiose title is tongue in cheek — mostly. These witty, sexy, sometimes heartbreakingly personal lyrics demonstrate how ordinary life can be the stuff of poetry, and also, thrillingly, how poetry can be a vital part of modern life.

For fans of “Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry” by John Murillo and “Context Collapse” by Ryan Ruby

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2 by Emil Ferris

If you read Ferris’s original 2017 graphic novel, you can’t forget it: a beguiling, haunted hybrid of personal memoir, murder mystery and 20th-century time portal. This surreal and densely referential follow-up, drawn in Ferris’s signature cross-hatched style, continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes in circa-1968 Chicago as she wrestles with loss, sexual identity and a host of secrets.

For fans of “Feeding Ghosts” by Tessa Hulls

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

A modern take on the epistolary novel, this riveting mystery lets readers sift through texts, emails and WhatsApp messages alongside a true-crime journalist in an effort to discover the real story behind a series of occult deaths.

For fans of “Magpie Murders” by Anthony Horowitz

Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver

This deceptively powerful posthumous collection by a writer who died at 22 follows the everyday routines of Black families as they negotiate separate but equal Jim Crow strictures, only to discover uglier truths.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Hollinghurst’s latest brings readers deep into the trials and tribulations of Dave Win, an English Burmese actor confronting confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate over the course of his life, all tied together by Hollinghurst’s keen eye and affecting prose.

For fans of “NW” by Zadie Smith

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

In the latest queer romance from the author of “Red, White & Royal Blue,” Theo and Kit, two exes who haven’t seen each other since their disastrous breakup four years ago, find themselves on the same European food tour. The book is a sexy, sensory feast, weaving together luscious descriptions of petal-pink pastries, salted Negronis and lavender-strewn countrysides amid the inferno of their rekindled passion.

For fans of “The Day of the Duchess” by Sarah MacLean and “Yerba Buena” by Nina LaCour

Piglet by Lottie Hazell

Two weeks before her wedding, a cookbook editor at a London publishing house discovers that her fiancé is cheating on her. Determined to meet her family’s ridiculously high expectations, and hungry (in every sense of the word) for perfection, she forges ahead with plans for the wedding of everyone else’s dreams.

For fans of “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” by Aimee Bender and “Nightbitch” by Rachel Yoder

The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Written with sly and slicing grace, this far-future fable is set on spaceships stratified into rigid social hierarchies. A professor plucks a boy from the lowest level, called the Hold, to be equal parts educated by and exhibited to the faculty and other students. But what the boy and professor learn from each other changes them both, and could transform their worlds.

For fans of “The Saint of Bright Doors” by Vajra Chandrasekera

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

This bracing satire of clashing worldviews in Australia begins with a toxic haze settling over an Aboriginal town, where one resident believes he can fight climate change by replacing conventional transport with hordes of donkeys. The novel only gets stranger and funnier from there.

For fans of “Safe Haven” by Shankari Chandran

Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

A book in 10 parts, “Rakesfall” shifts wildly in structure and narration. Uniting all the threads is a kind of oscillating theme: Souls return over time, sometimes as two people, sometimes four or more, engaged with each other over the thorny question of how to endure fascism and kill kings.

For fans of “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Reboot by Justin Taylor

This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

For fans of “Beautiful Ruins” by Jess Walter

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

This collection of linked stories tracks the losers in the great American popularity contest: shoe gazers who are mostly short and unattractive, and cut from the herd. Tulathimutte is writing about alienation and skin starvation, a longing for the nonexistent touches of friends and the embraces of lovers.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

In this taut, remarkable novel set in 1960s Amsterdam, Isabel clings to her childhood home after the death of her mother, fixating on a broken china plate. When her brother brings his girlfriend into the house, Isabel is rude to the point of cruelty — until the novel’s psychological drama gives way to a love story of such intensity that it is easy to forget about the broken china.

Publishing World Thriller

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

This delicious follow-up to “The Plot” finds Anna Williams-Bonner basking in literary acclaim (and moola from her husband’s estate) — until pesky excerpts from a manuscript resurface and put questions of authorship, and the publishing world’s values, under the microscope.

Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner

This coming-of-age novel, overcast with the inconstant cloud of mental illness, maps the effect of a daughter’s volatility on her parents and younger sister — and probes what exactly it means for love to be unconditional.

The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Seventy-two migrants settle in a small Sicilian town in this polyphonic novel, translated into English by Alison Anderson. Sarr — who won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2021 — not only follows the newcomers, but also considers the inner lives of the villagers, whose reactions vary considerably.

Smoke Kings by Jahmal Mayfield

Can there ever be restitution for the harm done to generations of Black people in America? Mayfield takes the question to a provocative extreme in this thriller, which follows a group of four friends as they kidnap descendants of people who long ago committed racially motivated hate crimes.

For fans of “Friday Black” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

Mengestu’s brilliantly slippery novel centers on a journalist who is supposed to spend Christmas with his wife and young son in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives; instead, he ends up in Chicago investigating the criminal record of the man he assumes is his father.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but also those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.

For fans of “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor

Brief, blunt and exquisite, O’Connor’s debut is set in the fall of 1938 on a Welsh island with a population of 47, including the bright, restless 18-year-old Manod. Unsettling disruptions to the landscape include a whale corpse washed up on the beach and English ethnographers who enlist Manod’s help but woefully distort island life in their work.

What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

A best-selling author and mother of five wakes up from surgery to remove a brain tumor and needs to be reminded, again and again, how she has arrived at this point. Kinsella’s autobiographical novella is both devastating and, against all odds, devastatingly funny.

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

After a poorly planned abduction upends the lives of several young characters in a rural Irish town, Barrett shifts gracefully between the kidnappee, who’s being held in a basement by two unstable brothers, and his intrepid girlfriend, who sets out to find him.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

In her latest historical novel, Hannah shows the Vietnam War through the eyes of a combat nurse. But what the former debutante witnesses and experiences when she comes home from the war is the true gut punch of this timely story.

Hallucinogenic Historical Fiction

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

The Mexican writer Enrigue recasts the fateful meeting between Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs in this hallucinatory novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Moctezuma is fearsome yet depressed, often tripping on magic mushrooms, while the conquistadors grow increasingly anxious.

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

A story about losing love and losing in baseball and finding unexpected love despite all your mistakes, this story cuts to the heart of what it means to be human (and also, there’s soup).

For fans of “Evvie Drake Starts Over” by Linda Holmes

The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll

This history stretches from Hussein’s earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, tracking the dictator’s state of mind with the help of 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon,” Coll says.

All the Worst Humans by Phil Elwood

This memoir by a former public relations operative for the wealthy and the corrupt is greasy fun — stocked with scoundrels, cocktails and guns, and showing off the charm and quick wit that catapulted Elwood to the top of the sleazy, amoral world of high-end spin.

For fans of “Thank You for Smoking” by Christopher Buckley

All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld

A striking debut by a young critic who has been heralded as a throwback to an era of livelier discourse. Rothfeld has published widely and works currently as a nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post; her interests range far, but these essays are united by a plea for more excess in all things, especially thought.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten

Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.

The Black Box by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In his latest book, the Harvard scholar shows how African American writers have used the written word to shape their reality despite constraints imposed on them from outside, using the metaphor of the box to reflect ordeals withstood and survived since Africans were first brought to this continent.

Philosophical Family Memoir

The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson

The farm Robertson’s grandparents owned in Promise Land, Tenn., a town founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, serves as the springboard for this sensitive, often deeply personal exploration of utopianism in Black American thought and life.

The Bluestockings by Susannah Gibson

Before Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony or Virginia Woolf, there were the Bluestockings, a group of British women writers and thinkers who, as Gibson writes in this intimate social history, transgressed sexist conventions to educate themselves, produce books on a range of subjects and contribute to some of England’s liveliest salons.

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham

As recounted in this history of the 1986 space shuttle disaster, the tragedy was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error. Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the players involved even as he focuses on the relentless string of snafus that plagued the mission.

Circle of Hope by Eliza Griswold

As many American evangelical congregations moved to the political right over the past decade, Circle of Hope, in Philadelphia, became more progressive. With sensitivity and compassion, Griswold chronicles the church’s fateful decision to embrace a mission of racial justice, delivering, in her account of the crisis that followed, a portrait in miniature of our passionate, divided nation.

Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni

In this transcendent Holocaust memoir by a journalist and poet internee, translated by Paul Olchváry, the details of the concentration camps and their horrors are rendered so precisely that any critical distance collapses. Debreczeni’s account was published in 1950 and lay obscure for decades because of Cold War politics.

For fans of “Fateless” by Imre Kertész and “Night” by Elie Wiesel

Connie by Connie Chung

Cue the Sun! by Emily Nussbaum

From “Queen for a Day” to “The Real World,” “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” it’s all here in Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story of reality TV. With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, the New Yorker staff writer outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent pop-culture concoction that we love to hate, hate to love and just can’t quit.

For fans of “When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today” by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Do Something by Guy Trebay

Trebay is a veteran of the style wars: Prior to joining this paper, he did stints as a handbag designer, a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a model and a reporter at The Village Voice, chronicling a lost New York that was as gritty as it was glamorous. Trebay knew everyone; this memoir is indeed a who’s who of that vanished Gotham. But more than that, it’s a love letter to a city, a life and a family, and to beauty itself.

Every Valley by Charles King

King uses Handel’s “Messiah,” possibly “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as a hub whose spokes radiate outward to a host of key historical forces and personalities that characterize 18th-century Britain.

For fans of “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph” by Jan Swafford

Fi by Alexandra Fuller

In her fifth memoir, Fuller describes the sudden death of her 21-year-old son. Devastating as this elegant and honest account may be — it’s certainly not for the faint of heart — it also leaves the reader with a sense of having known a lovely and lively young man.

Sex, Drugs & Techno Memoir

Health and Safety by Emily Witt

Witt’s boyfriend, Andrew, started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns put an end to the underground party scene in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. “Health and Safety” — which braids that scene, Andrew’s breakdown and Witt’s work as a journalist during the first Trump administration — also encompasses a bigger breakdown, one that eroded the boundaries between their subculture and the world at large.

I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter

Painter, a historian and author who left academia to attend art school at the age of 64, highlights her original mind and irreverent wit in this collection, with reflections on Black American figures including Sojourner Truth, Martin R. Delany and Clarence Thomas, interspersed with artwork by Painter herself.

John Lewis by David Greenberg

Knife by Salman Rushdie

In this candid, plain-spoken memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here.

For fans of “Experience: A Memoir” by Martin Amis

Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson

Crediting the mentors who lifted her up on her path to success, this memoir by the Supreme Court’s newest justice is deeply personal and full of hope, and highlights a fairy-tale marriage to her college boyfriend.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fusing a meditation on the political potential of storytelling with intimate accounts of trips to Senegal, where he visits the former slave-trading center Gorée Island; South Carolina, to support a high school instructor under fire for teaching his prize-winning book “Between the World and Me”; and the West Bank, where he witnesses life under the Israeli occupation, Coates decries injustice and the Western media’s complicity in it.

The New India by Rahul Bhatia

An Indian investigative journalist, Bhatia watched in dismay as relatives, friends and fellow citizens embraced the increasingly extreme politics of his country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi. In this ambitiously reported account, he chronicles India’s turn toward authoritarianism and violence through the stories of ordinary people and public figures.

The New York Game by Kevin Baker

What makes New York baseball unique, the novelist and historian argues in this insightful, beautifully crafted narrative — which concludes with the end of World War II — is its role as a chronicler of cultural change. Whatever baseball’s roots in cow pastures and small towns, it came of age as an urban game.

For fans of “Summer of ’49” by David Halberstam

No One Gets to Fall Apart by Sarah LaBrie

In her affecting debut, the TV writer chronicles her mother’s descent into what would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia, while also exploring the through-line of mental illness that snakes through her family history. In an inner monologue that reveals snippets of bizarre behavior, LaBrie also worries about her own tenuous grasp on emotional stability, imagining her mother’s mental illness “making its way through her into me.”

The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz

This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels.

Salvage by Dionne Brand

Brand, a Trinidadian-born poet and novelist, wears her erudition lightly in this eloquent and witty book of essayistic meditations on English literary classics, teasing out the ways in which novels from Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” conceal within their pages the ravages of British colonialism for its Black and Indigenous subjects.

For fans of “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

Jamison, who has previously written stylishly about her experiences with addiction, abortion and more, here delivers a searing account of divorce and the bewildering joys of new motherhood, cementing her status as one of America’s most talented self-chroniclers.

Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild

The renowned sociologist returns with a sequel to her prescient “Strangers in Their Own Land,” a Trump country dispatch from the Deep South. This time, she takes stock of the financial and emotional struggles of an Appalachian coal mining town, where a caravan of white supremacists arrived to find new recruits shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win.

There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

Growing up on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib — a cultural critic and poet — was hugely influenced by LeBron James, but basketball was also a more personal utopia for him and his community, “our little slice of streetball heaven.”

For fans of “Shooting Stars” by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger

Undivided by Hahrie Han

When Han, a political scientist, learned that a mostly white and broadly conservative Cincinnati megachurch had resolved to fight racial injustice in its community, she decided to follow the story. The result is a sensitive study of admirable intentions, earnest action and the often painful price of real change.

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko

Two friends decide to walk the length of the Grand Canyon. What could go wrong? As this wildly entertaining book demonstrates, everything you can imagine, and then some. Fedarko takes us for a ride that’s often harrowing, frequently hilarious and full of wonderful nature writing.

For fans of “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed

When the Clock Broke by John Ganz

For this account of America in the 1990s, Ganz ditches the familiar narrative about a decade of relative peace and prosperity for a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today.

For fans of “Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980” by Rick Perlstein

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