Year 2020

Memorial by Bryan Washington (Riverhead) When we first meet the young couple at the heart of Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Mike, a chef, has just told Benson, a daycare worker, that

Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley (Scribner) You have that just right: Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future by James Shapiro (Penguin Press) Although William Shakespeare lived long before England’s unruly colony tossed

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House) New York Times journalist Wilkerson gained national fame (and an NBCC award) for The Warmth of Other Suns, an

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson (Harvard University Press) Gateway to the West. Point zero for Lewis and

This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope by Shayla Lawson (Harper Perennial) “The color of this book is Grace Jones / strapped into an electrical

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty (Knopf) Maggie Doherty’s group biography The Equivalents offers a thoughtful look at the underexamined

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter (Random House) The Price of Peace is an ambitious, lucid biography of the

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador) Is it better to read a few books many times, or more books only once? Replace

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright) Forensic and poetic, The Dead Are Arising is a sweeping account of Malcolm X’s