Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi, 224 pages.
I reread this during the final committee discussions we were having early in 2019. This is a provocative and engaging book about the state of affairs in Israel and the surrounding Palestinian territories from a man who has been a soldier, a reporter, and the co-director of the Muslim Leadership Initiative at the Shalom Hartman Istitute, and who is the author of 2013's Like Dreamers. 
In a series of letters addressed to "Dear Neighbor," Halevi, an American-born Israeli who moved to Israel in the early 1980s, attempts to explain his, the Israeli, side of the story to his Palestinian neighbors, feeling that the inability to hear each other or to acknowledge each other's humanity is a large part of the continuing problem. Halevi presents his arguments for Israel's right to exist and balances this against what he sees as intransigence on the Palestinian side. His letters are unlikely to sway anyone firmly committed in their beliefs, but he does a good job of explaining the timeline, at least as seen through Israeli eyes.

Melmoth

Melmoth by Sarah Perry, 271 pages.
I read this for a committee I was on in 2018. Well I read most of it in 2018 and then finished it in 2019. There's a being out of legend that causes one (or tries to convince one) to wander in despair for time without measure. Melmoth is that character's name and it first appeared in 1820 in Gothic novel. In this story / version, Melmoth had been mentioned in certain biblical tales and other legends and stories that our protagonist finds in the library while she is researching. She soon meets someone who has interacted with Melmoth and soon our protagonist is herself in danger.
It was a good book, but a lot of it has faded from my memory and I am here at the end of the year with some 100 books to still blog about so . . .
That's what I recall and there's no time now to go back and find out.more about it. Sorta scary, good pacing, interesting plot.

The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy / Tim Pat Coogan 276 p.

This is hard to evaluate since I've read almost nothing else about the famine aside from novels, and not very many of those, in fact.  Coogan, a veteran journalist (the Irish Times, I think?) believes that most previous scholarship has been far too kind to the English, presumably because no serious person wanted to make the IRA even angrier than they already were.  Coogan takes the gloves off and calls the famine genocide, including the Geneva convention definition as an appendix.  At the same time, he is very careful to make distinctions among the players: the first famine Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, was ineffective but tried to ameliorate the problem.  The second, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, was far worse, not least because he left the purse strings in the hands of Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Trevelyan is on record as saying that the famine would deal effectively with the problem of excess population in Ireland, thereby clearing the land for highly profitable cattle rather than potatoes (and the poor buggers who farmed them.)  Challenging reading which assumes a good bit of prior knowledge of the land, the people, and their history.

N.B.  The Quakers earn a lot of praise from Coogan - efficient, hard-working, compassionate, and not interested in converting anyone from Popery in exchange for a meal.