Gordon-Reed won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). Onuf is a leading Thomas Jefferson scholar. Their ground-breaking reinterpretation of the life and philosophy of Jefferson – the third US president – “explores the roles he played” and the self he fashioned. They emphasize the “empire of his imagination – “created out of the books he read, the music he played… the people he loved and admired, his observations of the natural world, his experiences as a revolutionary, his foreign travels, his place at the head of a society and a government, his religion, and his role as one who enslaved other men and women”. They cover his Virginia origins, his years in Paris and his thinking on slavery, race and Christianity. This fascinating study reshapes our perception of Jefferson. (Credit: Liveright)