1. The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask (St. Martin’s)

Occasionally books come along that subvert the quotidian and provide a jolt that reshapes thinking on something as basic as street addresses, and this debut investigation by North Carolina-born London lawyer Mask is one of them. She discovers that addresses can lift people out of poverty by facilitating credit access and voting rights, but that most households, from Kolkata, India, to parts of rural America, don’t have one. As she travels the globe, she uncovers stories about Martin Luther King boulevards as well as Nazi ghosts in Berlin. In her witty, clear, beguiling, and forceful investigation, Mask argues that street addresses are about power – “the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.”

2. Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation’s Capital and Redeem a Christian America by Lauren R. Kerby (University of North Carolina Press)

Kerby takes an anthropological approach in her engaging and illuminating guide through the world of Christian heritage tourism. A religious studies scholar at Harvard Divinity School, Kerby travels through the subculture of these packaged tours, interviewing tour operators and tourists and coming to see the purpose of these trips as “restorative nostalgia.” Kerby details how, through historical artifacts, monuments, and inscriptions, the tours convey that the Founding Fathers, the Bible, and Christianity are inextricably linked in American nationalism.

3. The Ancestor by Danielle Trussoni (Morrow)

In a mashup of genres – gothic horror, mystery, thriller, and scientific speculation – with best-sellers like Angelology, Trussoni has created her own distinctive, smart and sly style evident in her rewarding new novel. The gripping narrative stars Alberta (Bert) Monte, who inherits an estate in the Italian Alps and, in her journey to claim the eerie castle, learns that that her family is “tainted” with a history of abduction and lore of an abominable beast. As Bert taps into this pulsating vein of her family history, the flow may lead back to Trussoni’s remarkable debut, Falling Through the Earth, her memoir about her father, a “tunnel rat” during the Vietnam War, and the continuing heartbeat of the past.

4. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, trans. from the Korean by Jamie Chang (Liveright)

The eponymous housewife and mother in Korea’s bestselling novel of 2016 has endured patriarchal oppression since childhood until she snaps in an assertion to her father-in-law. This episode, explained as evidence that she is “not well,” leads to a psychiatrist who recognizes the toll of this rampant sexism on her yet is unable to validate her suffering or experience. Cho’s quick-reading novel is punctuated with figures and footnotes that bolster her argument that Jiyoung’s experience is not extraordinary but rather common in Korea and underscores the prevalence of sexism around the world.

5. Miss Aluminum by Susanna Moore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

While she came of age on Oahu, which she brilliantly evoked in her debut novel. My Old Sweetheart, Moore’s new memoir focuses on her years in New York and Los Angeles after leaving Hawaii. She endured Hollywood abuses and eked out a living on a tiny paycheck, but flourished because of a set of remarkable and generous women who sustained her. Her Honolulu neighbor Alyce Kaiser, whose husband was aluminum magnate and property developer Henry Kaiser, encouraged her to break free from the island and provided chic clothing and connection, and Hollywood hostess Connie Wald, as well as Joan Didion, was a source of support and inspiration in Moore’s distinctive quest for stability.