This list of the 10 best fiction and nonfiction books was compiled by editors and reviewers for The Washington Post.

1. ‘Colored Television’ by Danzy Senna

Senna’s shrewd comedy is about a biracial woman named Jane Gibson who is struggling to sell her ambitious second novel. Even when Jane really wants to sell out and cash in, she never abandons her sense of irony or her determination to resist being the tragic star of somebody else’s tale. It’s an exceptionally assured novel about a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it.

2. ‘James’ by Percival Everett

Everett’s sly response to “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” both honors and interrogates Mark Twain’s classic, along with the nation that reveres it. Told from the perspective of the enslaved James, this is a book haunted by a little boy’s innocence but no longer corralled by it.

3. ‘My Friends’ by Hisham Matar

On April 17, 1984, an angry demonstration swelled outside the Libyan Embassy in London. Suddenly, from the embassy’s windows, shots were fired into the crowd. A British police officer was killed, and 10 demonstrators were wounded. In “My Friends,” a Libyan man named Khaled who was present at that fateful moment describes how he came to spend his adult life in England, pining for home.

4. ‘Playground’ by Richard Powers

Powers delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence. The Washington Post’s critic Ron Charles wrote, “I can’t think of another novel that treats the Earth’s plight with such an expansive and disorienting vision.”

5. ‘This Strange Eventful History’ by Claire Messud

Messud’s latest novel was inspired by a 1,500-page memoir written by her paternal grandfather, who was born in what was once French Algeria. After a lifetime of reflection, Messud has imagined how three generations of a fictionalized family, the Cassars, rode the geopolitical waves from World War II into the 21st century.

6. ‘The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World’ by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Abrahamian explores “special economic zones,” the “fractured atlas” of places that help the international rich bend globalization to their advantage, often by making it possible to do business within a country without being subjected to its laws.

7. ‘I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition’ by Lucy Sante

Since childhood, the writer Lucy Sante — formerly Luc Sante — knew she was transgender. This memoir is a two-tier narrative, bouncing between her experience of her transition in 2021 and the details of her entire life. An acclaimed writer of essays on art and culture as well as the cult classic “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” Sante here writes about the sometimes paralyzing cost of trying to live two different lives: as a man or a woman, but also as a human being and a writer.

8. ‘Question 7’ by Richard Flanagan

Flanagan, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, has produced a kind of philosophical fantasia, a highly original weaving together of a half-dozen essayistic narratives about the sad, wondrous world we live in. From memories of the author’s childhood in a poor and extended Catholic family in Tasmania to an account of how Leo Szilard, father of the atomic bomb, discovered the kernel for his speculations about nuclear chain reactions in H.G. Wells’s novel “The World Set Free,” Flanagan keeps readers enchanted while boldly wrestling with the social, political and moral complexities of modern history.

9. ‘V13: Chronicle of a Trial’ by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert

Coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 killed 130 people. Starting in September 2021, a trial weighed the guilt of 20 men accused of participating in those attacks. The inimitable French journalist, memoirist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère attended the proceedings nearly every day of their 10-month duration to write weekly dispatches for a magazine. This book-length account reveals the full convolutions of suffering. C

10. ‘When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s’ by John Ganz

Ganz revisits the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot to find the roots of our current moment. He argues that the 1992 presidential election cycle was a circus — and a warning that the establishment ignored at its peril. Perhaps most recognizable, enduring and damning was a new political style, a brazen commitment to courting scandal and spectacle.