By David S. Reynolds | Penguin Press
Antebellum America was a rough-and-tumble proposition, with the dangerous and uncouth life of the frontier reflected in a fractious political scene in which violent language often crossed over into fistfights and worse. In this revelatory work of cultural biography, Abraham Lincoln emerges as a leader who embodied the wildness and exuberance of the era.
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Actress
By Anne Enright | Norton
This marvelously layered novel recounts, through a daughter’s eyes, the rise and tragic collapse of the midcentury Irish actress Katherine O’Dell. Ms. Enright’s matchless prose is the star of the performance, capturing the glamour and seduction of life under the stage lights yet darkening to deliver a sequence of devastating surprises.
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A Dominant Character: The Radical Science & Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane
By Samanth Subramanian | Norton
The Oxford-educated polymath Jack Haldane (1892-1964), a man of outsize personal charisma, published significant papers in nearly every branch of science, from genetics to cosmology. He was also a daring soldier, a popular writer and broadcaster, and a leading light in Britain’s Communist Party. A master biographer brings this original, impulsive and politically misguided figure into sharp focus in this rare account of intellect and temperament in action.
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Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
By Robert Kolker | Doubleday
Raising a flourishing family outside of Colorado Springs, Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to represent the 1950s American Dream itself. But as their children grew, six of the boys were beset by hallucinations and psychotic breaks with reality, some catastrophic. Mr. Kolker tells their real-life story—and shows what it meant for the scientific understanding of mental illness—with novelistic flair.
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Impostures: The Maqāmāt of al-Harīrī
Translated from the Arabic by Michael Cooperson | New York University
In the most audacious translation feat in recent memory, Mr. Cooperson brings an 11th-century Arabic masterpiece known for its linguistic variety and dexterity into a joyous medley of English styles, idioms and dialects, honoring the genius of the original while also showing off the astounding possibilities of the English language.
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Missionaries
By Phil Klay | Penguin Press
Mr. Klay’s bravura novel homes in on the ground-level consequences of American interference in Colombia’s ongoing civil war and tumultuous peace process. But the engrossing local conflict is only part of the book’s revelatory, panoramic portrayal of the remote yet interconnected ways that American-sponsored wars are waged across the globe.
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Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
By Jonathan C. Slaght | Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Like the work of John McPhee and Helen Macdonald, Mr. Slaght’s tale of pursuing a majestic raptor native to the Far East Russian woodlands marries science and adventure, a naturalist’s eye and a storyteller’s gift. If its glimpses of the region’s winged denizens delight, so do its portraits of the human outlaws and eccentrics who call the place home.
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1774: The Long Year of Revolution
By Mary Beth Norton | Knopf
This accomplished history doesn’t challenge the traditional account of the American Revolution, from the Boston Tea Party of 1773 to the outbreak of hostilities in 1775. What it does do, as no book before it, is re-create the past reality of a momentous year in all of its particularity—physical, social, political and emotional. Reader, you are there.
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Transcendent Kingdom
By Yaa Gyasi | Knopf
This scalpel-sharp novel by the author of “Homegoing” expertly dissects the messy subjects of exile, grief, racial identity and religious faith. Perhaps the themes sound overly familiar, but Ms. Gyasi stands out among her peers by exploring them in the service of universal questions—most of all: How can we find meaning in suffering?
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What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics
By O. Carter Snead | Harvard
Under American law, a person is defined largely by his capacity to formulate and pursue future plans of his own invention. But where does that leave those unable to make choices—the mentally impaired, those in extreme pain, children in the womb? This important work of moral philosophy argues that all of us are, first and foremost, embodied beings, and that public policy must recognize the limits and gifts that this entails.
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