FICTION

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead; 231 pages; $26). Hamid’s beautifully restrained novel centers on two young people who fall in love in an unnamed city riven with sectarian conflict — then are whisked across the world through mysterious doors.

— R.O. Kwon

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown; 263 pages; $26). In Greer’s funny and wise novel, a San Francisco author plots a solo trip around the world to summon a midlife reinvention. Disenchantment proves a stubborn companion.

— Carmela Ciuraru

Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan (Scribner; 438 pages; $28). Egan manages to surprise us again with her sixth book — not with structural innovations but with an unexpectedly straightforward narrative, a historical novel set primarily in Brooklyn during World War II. It’s an unusually well written, well researched, emotionally satisfying page-turner.

— Heller McAlpin

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central; 490 pages; $27). Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic, both sturdily constructed and beautiful.

— Anita Felicelli

A Separation, by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead; 229 pages; $25). Kitamura’s stylistic control creates an atmosphere of dreadful expectation in this novel about a writer who travels from England to Greece to find her serially unfaithful husband.

— Anthony Domestico

NONFICTION

The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui (Abrams ComicArts; 330 pages; $24.95). Bui’s haunting illustrated memoir is an epic account of her family’s wartime lives in Vietnam and their escape to this country in the late 1970s, as well as a tender tribute to her parents’ struggle to raise a family.

— John McMurtrie

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein (Liveright; 368 pages; $27.95). In his authoritative book about housing discrimination, Rothstein corrects the record, revealing that government bodies across the country enabled and supported segregation for much longer than most of us realize.

— Kevin Canfield

Dadland, by Keggie Carew (Atlantic Monthly Press; 415 pages; $26). Part memoir, part biography, part military history, Carew’s first book is also a lovingly unconventional elegy for a generation.

— Dawn Raffel

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Doubleday; 338 pages; $28.95). Grann’s revelatory book investigates a mysterious string of deaths on an American Indian reservation in the early 20th century.

— Gabriel Thompson

Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell (Doubleday; 737 pages; $35). In this deeply insightful biography, Farrell offers a bracing portrait of a man untethered from principle and ideology, driven throughout his life to win at any cost.

— William Howell