In her affecting debut, the TV writer chronicles her mother’s descent into what would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia, while also exploring the through-line of mental illness that snakes through her family history. In an inner monologue that reveals snippets of bizarre behavior, LaBrie also worries about her own tenuous grasp on emotional stability, imagining her mother’s mental illness “making its way through her into me.”

For six years, Yuan Yang, a journalist, followed four very different young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order” — a country changing dramatically into an industrial superpower. The result is a moving work of reportage that toggles between global and personal.

Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan. But in this measured, comprehensive biography of the 40th president, he explores the legacy of the Reagan years to ask whether they paved the way for Donald J. Trump, whose rise led Boot to abandon his embrace of the right.

This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels.

Sciutto’s absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship takes readers from Ukraine in the days before Russia’s invasion to the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese jets flying overhead raise tensions across the region. The author also shows how the battles are waged not just on the ground and in the air, but also in undersea communication cables, across satellites in outer space and over the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.

Brand, a Trinidadian-born poet and novelist, wears her erudition lightly in this eloquent and witty book of essayistic meditations on English literary classics, teasing out the ways in which novels from Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” conceal within their pages the ravages of British colonialism for its Black and Indigenous subjects.

A feat of immersive fieldwork, this account by an anthropologist, nearly seven years in the making, shines needed light on the lives of human smugglers, many of them fleeing the same violence and poverty as their clients, who ferry migrants across the southern border.

Jamison, who has previously written stylishly about her experiences with addiction, abortion and more, here delivers a searing account of divorce and the bewildering joys of new motherhood, cementing her status as one of America’s most talented self-chroniclers.

The renowned sociologist returns with a sequel to her prescient “Strangers in Their Own Land,” a Trump country dispatch from the Deep South. This time, she takes stock of the financial and emotional struggles of an Appalachian coal mining town, where a caravan of white supremacists arrived to find new recruits shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win.

For those who believe that the narrative of Black prima ballerinas begins and ends with Misty Copeland, Valby’s rich, prismatic portrait of the five dancers who formed the core of the Dance Theater of Harlem’s inaugural 1969 class offers a joyful and spirited corrective.

Growing up on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib — a cultural critic and poet — was hugely influenced by LeBron James, but basketball was also a more personal utopia for him and his community, “our little slice of streetball heaven.”

When Han, a political scientist, learned that a mostly white and broadly conservative Cincinnati megachurch had resolved to fight racial injustice in its community, she decided to follow the story. The result is a sensitive study of admirable intentions, earnest action and the often painful price of real change.