The Power by Naomi Alderman

This book is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.

Grant by Ron Chernow

Chernow writes a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of America’s most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

In Evicted, the author follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads.

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

A Washington Post reporter’s personal account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors’ assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

This book follows some remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and ambiguous future, struggling to hold on to one another, to their past, to the very sense of who they are.

Five-Carat Soul by James McBride

The stories in this book spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They are all told with McBride’s unrivalled storytelling expertise and scrupulous eye for character and detail.

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

This book explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.

Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor

Taylor’s last words offer a vocabulary for readers to speak about the most difficult thing any of us will face. And while the story is a deeply affecting meditation on death, it is also a funny and wise tribute to life.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

It is a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel and casts a spell on its readers as it relates the count’s endeavour to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, this book journeys through Mississippi’s past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story.