In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen such as J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, the “Phantom Terror,” roamed—many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the relatively new FBI took over. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide cases but the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including an American Indian agents in the bureau. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all. London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing. After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.

A bighearted and moving debut about a wry retired schoolteacher whose decade-old secret threatens to come to light and send shockwaves through her small Texas town. Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first day of school at Billington High. A few months into her retirement—or, district mandated exile as she calls it—Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days. The annual picnic is coming up, but that isn’t nearly enough since the menu never changes and she had the roles mentally assigned weeks ago. At least there’s Ellie, who stops by each morning for coffee and whose reemergence in Mary Alice’s life is the one thing soothing the sting of retirement. Mary Alice and Ellie were a pair since the day Ellie moved in next door. That they both were single mothers – Mary Alice widowed, Ellie divorced—with sons the same age was a pleasant coincidence, but they were forever linked when they lost the boys, one right after the other. Years later, the two are working their way back to a comfortable friendship. But when Mary Alice’s sister arrives on her doorstep with a staggering piece of news, it jeopardizes the careful shell she’s built around her life. The whole of her friendship with Ellie is put at risk, the fabric of a place as steadfast as Billington is questioned, and the unflappable, knotty fixture that is Mary Alice Roth might have to change after all.

From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel spanning the 1990s and present day, about a young writer and the community he builds in New York City, and his lonely life 30 years later when an unexpected injury lands him at the local queer senior center. Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street. Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take. Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.