1. Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler (Viking)

Before the explosion of #MeToo, Fowler, a 25-year-old, entry-level engineer at Uber, recounted in a blog post the particulars of her sexual harassment and retaliation at the Silicon Valley startup. It went viral, and her memoir elaborates on that toxic workplace experience and how she was punished for exposing the corporate culture of sexism, harassment, racism, and abuse. Fowler enriches her account by describing how she overcame a childhood of poverty in Arizona to get herself to the Ivy League but rather than making herself the heroine of her own story, she keeps the light firmly on the larger picture.

2. The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter (Viking)

Millennials may be stereotyped as entitled, lazy, and shallow, but Alter turns this cliché on its head in her spirited, engaging book spotlighting a cohort of elected politicians whose lives were marked by events early in the 21st century, from 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis to the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Deriving her book’s title from a 2008 Obama primary speech, Alter features a few boldface names (presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and New York City congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example) and other Democrats such as congresswoman Lauren Underwood of Illinois, but she also points to Republicans such as Texas congressman and former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, elected when she was just 30 years old, who bucked her party on the climate change issue. Rather than writing a collection of individual profiles of these leaders, Alter goes for a more symphonic and thematic structure that supports her uplifting and optimistic argument about this generation’s transformative impact.

3. Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America by Stephanie Gorton (Ecco)

President Donald Trump mocks journalists and calls them “lowlifes” and “lightweights,” but during the Gilded Age, President Theodore Roosevelt more artfully decried the founder of the monthly McClure’s magazine, Samuel Sidney McClure, and star reporter Ida Tarbell as “muckrakers.” Gorton’s colorful history is effectively a dual biography of depressive McClure and relentless Tarbell for her exposé of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. In its heyday, McClure’s, which flourished from about 1893 to 1906, attracted the great writers of the period, including Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. Vividly recounting the rise and fall of McClure’s, Gorton highlights the magazine’s dynamism and its determined coverage of lynchings, corruption, and fraud during its brief reign.

4. Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (Scribner)

Adiga won the Booker Prize in 2008 for The White Tiger, a dynamic novel of India’s class struggle in the globalized world that was retrospectively narrated by a village boy. In Adiga’s deeply rewarding and suspenseful new work of fiction that unfolds over 12 hours, Dhananjaya Rajaratnam (who takes on the name Danny) is a undocumented immigrant from Sri Lanka who tries to blend into life in Australia, until one of his former housecleaning clients in Sydney is killed. The murder triggers Amnesty’s suspense, but Adiga’s gift for social observation and insight into the anxieties and afflictions of the immigrant experience elevate its richly rewarding mysteries.

5. Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

Culture clash. Sexual tension. Racial conflict. Add biochemistry to this mix. The result is Taylor’s compulsively readable debut novel, with Wallace, a restrained, black, gay graduate student from Alabama transplanted into the science lab of an unnamed Midwestern university. He works in a lab breeding four generations of microscopic worms and “herding desired chromosomes and wicking away the undesired ones until the sought-after strain emerged at last” while contending with racist and homophobic hostility. In this context of searching for superior genetics, Wallace’s traumatic past emerges as he embarks on a secret and explosive sexual relationship with a classmate and comes to terms with his enduring anguish.