Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.
No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era, by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)
A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)
A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.
