Janice Nimura’s candid account engagingly captures Elizabeth Blackwell’s many contradictions, central to which was the condescension, and sometimes outright contempt, she showed her fellow women even as she sacrificed to open doors for them as the first woman to earn a medical degree in the US.

Robert Jones Jr.’s much anticipated debut novel, “The Prophets,” tells the story of two Black enslaved men who fall in love on a cotton plantation in Antebellum Mississippi.

After the death of her son, Ronan, to Tay-Sachs disease before his 3rd birthday, a journey she writes about in her previous memoir “The Still Point of the Turning World” (2014), Black finds herself living in the aftermath of unimaginable loss. In a new book, she refuses to usher the reader through the tidy, well-bordered stages of grief. Instead, she is rebuilding a life in ways that are messy, erratic, and devastating while finding moments of joy, strength, and resilience, a word she’s wrestled with.