Empire of Pain

by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, $32.50)

If you are up to no good, “the last person you want reporting on you is Patrick Radden Keefe,” said Laura Miller in Slate .com. The latest book from the New Yorker writer and author of Say Nothing is a “masterfully damning” history of the Sackler family, laying out how two generations of the clan corrupted the pharmaceutical industry and eventually made billions by marketing and selling the opioid OxyContin as a nonaddictive painkiller. The deceptive marketing techniques pioneered by Arthur Sackler and continued by his heirs ignited an addiction epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. Keefe seems to have run down every dark detail. “Like Gilded Age barons before them, the Sacklers sat atop a massive fortune, behind a fortress of lawyers and corporate privacy screens, while their company pushed OxyContin out into America,” said Hillary Kelly in NYMag.com. “It’s a blood-boiling story of American apathy—of a family more concerned with putting its name on museums than keeping people from harm.”

Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner (Knopf, $27)

Crying in H Mart “became the year’s must-read memoir for very good reason,” said Seija Rankin in Entertainment Weekly.

In prose that was “equal parts blisteringly honest and generously vulnerable,” indie-rock musician Michelle Zauner shared how Korean food came to be both a stinging reminder of her mother’s recent death and a way to reconnect to the best part of their relationship. “A sad story has never been so impossible to put down.” Zauner, who was born in Seoul and raised in Oregon, suddenly lost her strongest tie to her Korean heritage when her mother died of cancer at 56, said Kristen Martin