The Impeachers, by Brenda Wineapple (Random House). In 1868, Andrew Johnson, an avowedly racist Southerner, became the first President to be impeached. This absorbing account focusses on his Republican critics, led by the Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Their main charge was Johnson’s attempt to “violate a law made by the Congress,” but his real transgressions, they argued, were his opposition to granting political rights to black people and his increasingly erratic conduct. Wineapple ponders impeachment’s legal, political, and constitutional aspects, and also its essential meaning. Then, as now, she writes, the possibility of impeachment “implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small.”

Leaving the Witness, by Amber Scorah (Viking). Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in Vancouver, the author moved to China in her mid-twenties to convert people there. Instead, outside her bubble for the first time (Witnesses are discouraged from going to college and befriending nonbelievers), she experienced an awakening of her own. Scorah is a keen observer of Chinese culture, but her book is most remarkable for its intimacy. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who number eight million worldwide, are sometimes dismissed as oddball outsiders; Scorah, who now regards the group as a cult, makes that view impossible, inviting readers to experience, and confront, the grasp of a fundamentalist religion through the eyes of a former true believer.

Patsy, by Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright). Feeling that she has “never loved her daughter like she was supposed to,” Patsy, the protagonist of this novel, leaves her native Jamaica, propelled by a longing for her childhood friend Cicely. In the course of a decade, the narrative moves between Brooklyn and Jamaica, and between the inner lives of Patsy and her daughter, who is five when Patsy leaves. Patsy, having longed to be unencumbered by motherhood and free to express love for another woman, instead finds that life as a working-class immigrant woman precludes much of the autonomy she’d envisaged and experiences a new kind of isolation. The novel eloquently shows how a thwarted desire for independence can warp our relationships with others.

Life of David Hockney, by Catherine Cusset, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Other Press). According to the author, this book is a novel in which the facts of Hockney’s biography are padded with “intuition and deduction rather than actual invention.” Initially, the famous artist’s avatar, “David,” seems inert, too shackled by predestination and weighed down by narrative omniscience. But, as we near the present, the character becomes more vital, as though freed by a future that is still unknowable. Meanwhile, vivid scenes—a gay demimonde where “the true aristocracy was one of beauty,” or some terrible news delivered in a soft and “almost metallic” voice—combine with loving descriptions of Hockney’s canvases to create an engaging chronicle.