Through a sequence of illustrated chapters and reflective sections, the author traces her parents’ lives in Vietnam, their escape after the fall of South Vietnam, and the family’s resettlement in the United States.

A first-person account of growing up between Chinese folktales and American life, where family history and mythic stories intertwine with recollections of childhood.

Set in Nazi-era Germany, the novel follows a young girl who acquires books and navigates life in an adoptive household while war encroaches on daily routines. The narration comes from Death, offering an outside, occasionally amused perspective on civilians, loss, and the act of reading.

A series of personal essays by George M. Johnson that trace growing up as a Black queer youth in the U.S., linking autobiographical scenes to direct address to younger Black queer readers.

Lucy Grealy recounts her life before and after a childhood diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma, describing the medical treatments that altered her face and the social and emotional consequences that followed.

An anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole embedded in the South Vietnamese army, recounts life after the fall of Saigon while living among a South Vietnamese exile community in the United States.

A memoir of a childhood spent in unstable, often impoverished circumstances, told from the author's adult vantage. The account focuses on a family marked by vivid highs and dangerous lows: parental idealism and promises alongside episodes of neglect and homelessness.

A contemporary Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles is repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century, where she encounters ancestors and must navigate slavery's social and moral realities to survive and return to her own time.

Janet Mock recounts her path to womanhood from childhood through young adulthood, focusing on the realities of growing up transgender and multiracial in Hawaii and negotiating family, community, and medical systems.

A linked-memoir of personal essays in which the author recounts growing up Vietnamese American, arriving as a refugee, and navigating family, race, and literary ambitions.

Lulu Miller interweaves a personal memoir about grief and depression with the life and work of 19th-century fish taxonomist David Starr Jordan to probe how humans try to impose order on a chaotic world.

A neurosurgeon and writer confronts a diagnosis of advanced lung cancer and records the transition from clinician to patient. The book links scenes from medical training and surgical practice to reflections on meaning, identity, and what makes life worth living when time is suddenly limited.