1. The End of October by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Wright brings new meaning to “ripped from the headlines” in his prescient, engrossing work of imagination about a virus originating in Asia that sparks a global pandemic. Recognized for his meticulous and ambitious reporting that includes his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, the definitive account of the rise of al-Qaeda, and his investigation into Scientology, Wright this time chooses the novel form for this information-packed thriller. The “Kongoli virus” breaks out in an Indonesian refugee camp for Muslims with HIV, and its eerie spread forces citizens to shelter in place; closes schools, businesses, and the health care system; and leads to economic disaster. The plot is propelled by a heroic yet complicated World Health Organization epidemiologist who races for a vaccine.

2. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker (Doubleday)

In this fascinating case study/medical mystery, Kolker presents a brilliant, troubling narrative of a Colorado family with 12 children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. In surveying the tangle of medical theories that emerged in the 20th century, and chronicling such horrible behaviors as murder-suicide and sexual abuse, Kolker draws on extensive interviews to bring a dizzying array of characters in the Galvin family into clear focus. While scientists coolly study the Galvins’ DNA to advance prediction, treatment, and ideally prevention of schizophrenia, Kolker brings empathy and generosity to the family, particularly the children. “If their childhood was a funhouse-mirror reflection of the American dream,” he writes, “their story is about what comes after that image is shattered.”

3. The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress by Jennifer Steinhauer (Algonquin)

The photogenic Squad – unofficially led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – wins headlines, but New York Times reporter Steinhauer’s smart book focuses on the larger class of women who joined Congress in 2019, especially significant on the eve of the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s ratification. Steinhauer showcases less-heralded newcomers with unconventional backgrounds, like former CIA operative Abigail Spanberger, Navy veterans Mikie Sherrill and Elaine Luria, and Native American and former mixed martial artist Sharice Davids, recounting their challenges as they navigate the corridors of the Capitol and pursue their separate agendas. Ultimately, Steinhauer writes, “the 116th Congress may be less about the laws that are passed than the reinvigoration of an institution that many Americans have written off as dysfunctional and intellectually bankrupt – activated by a diverse group of women who are often in significant disagreement with one another about the political course of the nation.”

4. Little Family by Ishmael Beah (Riverhead)

In an abandoned airplane covered with foliage, at the edge of a town in an unnamed African country evocative of Sierra Leone, a small set of adolescents and a little girl take refuge in one another as they roam, pilfering and stealing to scrape by and create their own versions of home. Clearly informed by Beah’s own tortuous and traumatic coming of age experience as a child soldier, which he vividly chronicled in his 2007 memoir A Long Way Gone, Beah reimagines the past in this vivid and deeply affecting novel. He provides a nuanced sense of the corruption, greed, and inequality in this society and what it takes for the powerless to survive in an unjust world where seasonal rainstorms make the shelter leakier as the young people harden yet forge their little family.

5. Sea Wife by Amity Gaige (Knopf)

The promise of a family’s yearlong Caribbean sail hits the rocky shoals of thwarted ambition and conflicting ideals in Gaige’s gripping novel, propelled by the claustrophobic world of the boat, which eerily evokes life sheltering in place. With the psychological precision of her previous book Schroder, Gaige peels away the layers of deception in a marriage through alternating perspectives of the captain’s log of the husband, with his reverence for self-reliance, and his wife, a failed PhD candidate studying Anne Sexton, who reads his journal a month after his death of dengue fever. Gaige masterfully and suspensefully depicts a marital conflict playing out against an intense backdrop.