I'm still tweaking my "Ten Best" list, so I'll respond to the second part first. I was surprised to see that I read nine books published this year*, since my sense of myself is that I'm not very current and I don't have any authors I follow. I won't name all of them, just the more notable.
Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown: a hoot. Various fictional and factional aspects of Margaret's life. A good small "r" republican, I scratch my head about royalty and really, she was awful. This won the 2018 James Tait Black Prize for biography.
The Game: Harvard, Yale and America in 1968 by George Howe Colt: an account of a watershed year through an elite white male perspective, just as that was about to change.
The Henchmen of Zenda by K.J. Charles: This was a surprise to me. A self-pubbed romance? Not my thing at all. But it was recommended here and really, any fan of
The Prisoner of Zenda should give this subversive account a try. Tons of fun and not without insight; I could have done without the sex. Burning kisses are about as far as period romance should go.
Varina by Charles Frazier: By the author of
Cold Mountain, an account of the antebellum and immediately post-war South, through the prism of Jefferson Davis's wife. Evocative and informative with much to say about race.
*US publication;
Ma'am Darling was published in the UK last year.