1. Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell
“To read this biography with an eye only toward the parallels between the two presidents would be lazy and unfair, a disservice to Farrell’s nuanced scholarship. But the context here is unignorable. The similarities between Nixon and Trump leap off the page like crickets.”
– Jennifer Senior (New York Times)
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2. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
“Tinti knows how to cast the old campfire spell. I was so desperate to find out what happened to these characters that I had to keep bargaining with myself to stop from jumping ahead to the end … a master class in literary suspense.”
– Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
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3. What It Feels Like When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
“None of the stories resemble one another, exactly, but they manage to form a book united not only by theme and by setting, but by Arimah’s electrifying, defiantly original writing. It’s a truly wonderful debut.”
– Michael Schaub (NPR)
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4. No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts
“Watts writes about ordinary people leading ordinary lives with an extraordinary level of empathy and attention.”
–Jade Chang (New York Times Book Review)
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5. American War by Omar El Akkad
“El Akkad’s formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time.”
–Jeff VanderMeer (Los Angeles Times)
