Martha Anne Toll

Aarti Shahani reports on Silicon Valley for NPR. But, as she details in her memoir, she's also from a family that followed a contorted, painful path to citizenship.

Sarah Broom's childhood house is the fulcrum for her memoir about her large and complex family. But perhaps more important, it stands in for the countless ways America has failed African Americans.

Even if we weren't in need of another road-trippy-addiction memoir, Peter Kaldheim's book recounts his very human efforts to swim to shore with compassion and gratitude.

Margarita Liberaki's novel, first published in 1946, follows three young women growing up in the Athens countryside alongside a colorful cast of family members, secret-keeping servants and local boys.

Author Massoud Hayoun has Moroccan, Egyptian and Tunisian heritage — and is also Jewish. He weaves in his family history with the politics that shaped their lives, including European oppression.

Gregory Spatz is both a creative writing professor and a fiddler, which gives depth to these stories about high-end stringed instruments and the people who play, love and sometimes steal them.

As Lorene Cary tells the story of her Nana and the stress and sadness all too common for caregivers, it's her recounting of her upbringing and ancestry that is most engaging and captivating.

Author Anna Merlan's recitations are chilling, as are her warnings that fringe beliefs tend to go mainstream — and how their rise is seen against a resurgence in nationalism and white supremacy.

Writer and gallery owner Jean Frémon inhabits artist Louise Bourgeois as if she herself were writing this novel-cum-memoir, opening up our understanding of both the artist and her art.

There is a universality to Édouard Louis' story — the child's longing for acceptance contrasted with the mature son's painful journey to understand why his father behaved as he did.

In Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman's debut, she doesn't shrink from the systemic issues of an unfair economic system, but her personal story, with its unexpected twists, makes this memoir memorable.

Stephanie Allen's novel creates a microcosm of America in 1919 in the form of a travelling medicine show, packed with people from all walks of life, trying to get along in the show's close confines.