‘ Rodham’

By Curtis Sittenfeld ( Random House; 432 pages; $ 28)

During a year as profoundly upsetting and chaotic as 2020, it’s natural to wonder how our country might have handled its events under a different president. In Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Rodham,” readers can fantasize about a country under the leadership of Hillary Rodham, following this alternative history down dozens of whatifs, starting with the first: what if Hillary hadn’t married Bill?

In a dizzying blend of fact and fiction, Sittenfeld presents a beautiful work of fiction that lets us, if only temporarily, escape from the existential dread of living in America this year.

‘ Make Russia Great Again’

By Christopher Buckley ( Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $ 28)

It’s been hard to laugh much since President Trump was elected. Christopher Buckley solved the problem with a pitchperfect sendup of vanity and pomposity in his novel “Make Russia Great Again,” a fictional memoir by a fictional White House chief of staff to Donald Trump. Buckley, a former White House speechwriter, skewers Trump and his cronies with deft and daft magic. Buckley’s comic take is also eerily prescient. As Mr. Buckley described it, “Herb, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, is wondering about inauguration day 2021, and it’s giving him chest pains. He’s imagining a tank pointing at the White House, and some forlorn lieutenant sticking himself up through the turret with a megaphone and saying, ‘ Mr. Trump? President Trump? A new president has been duly elected sir? You must come out.’ … We’ll see.”

‘ Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time’

By Ben Ehrenreich ( Counterpoint; $ 26; 326 pages)

Powerful books have powerful afterlives. I read Ben Ehrenreich’s “Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time” months ago. I admired it. I didn’t think it would haunt me. Then 2020 happened — racist police violence, a dreary, delusional presidential campaign and a pathogen the world’s most powerful nation proved incapable of halting. Ehrenreich’s meditation on arid America began to seem prophetic. “Desert Notebooks” is about deserts — about barrel cactus and jackrabbits and Castor and Pollux twinkling in an infinite sky. It’s also about what happens when human hubris bumps up against nature and time. From ancient

Mesopotamia to the 21st century Mojave, the desert reminds us that we and our works do not endure forever. And yet Ehrenreich also offers hope: in spring wildflowers, in new generations of explorers. The minute it’s safe to travel, I’m hitting the road to Joshua Tree, to Death Valley. I’ll be bringing “Desert Notebooks” with me.

‘ The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh’

By Candace Fleming ( Schwartz & Wade; 372 pages; $ 18.99; ages 12up)

This has been a year of reckoning. Semisiloed away at home due to COVID19, I have come facetoface with uncomfortable truths about our country, oddly echoed in a substantive, sobering and unsettling biography of Charles Lindbergh. Its meticulous detail interfered with my sleep. There, in the life story of a celebrated and controversial hero, I could see the best and worst of America packaged together. First to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in 1927, Lindbergh epitomizes American individualism and ingenuity — virtues in an idealized national narrative. But, in addition to aviation and environmentalism, Lindbergh also promotes sinister forces, shockingly evident today — white nationalism, antiSemitism and “America First” isolationism. He admires Hitler and dictatorship. He dislikes the messiness of democracy. Maybe kids will share my paradoxical takeaways: one, that history seems doomed to repeat itself, and two, that a return to dignity and decency might disrupt destructive repetition. Therein lies hope.