This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff (1989).  Kirkus Review praises Wolff’s novel by calling it a “jewel-like memoir of childhood in the 1950s. Despite the all-American props—Boy Scouts, cars, basketball—this boyhood unfolds light-years away from suburban heaven, offering instead a divorced mother and her angry son trying with little success to cut a piece of the American pie." Ultimately, the review defines Wolff’s work as “an honest memoir that puts a new spin on familiar boyhood rituals.”

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). The New York Times describes Shelley’s gothic masterpiece as a text “made up of three autobiographies, each one nested in another, like a set of Russian dolls — of the sea explorer Robert Walton, the scientist Victor Frankenstein and Victor’s creature. We begin at sea, with Robert, who has embarked on an expedition to the North Pole when he comes across Victor, battered and close to death. He has been hunting and trying to kill his creature, who has turned deadly. [Yet] it is the creature’s account, his eloquence, that lies at the heart of the book.” Shelley’s novel questions the moral obligations of scientific creation in a way that is as relevant to our time as it was to hers.

Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021). Library Journal describes the author of this riveting memoir and her unique perspective:  “as the daughter of an American father and a Korean mother, Zauner had an Oregon upbringing that was both typically American and undeniably Korean. From an early age, Zauner enjoyed her mother’s spicy, aromatic Korean fare; it wasn’t until adulthood that she realized that her mother’s unique way of expressing love was by preparing particular Korean dishes.” The review notes that “neither medicine nor Zauner’s nourishing cooking was able to save her mother’s life, but the journey to the end brought Zauner close to her Korean roots.”

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021). According to Library Journal,  “in his first novel since winning [the Nobel Prize for Literature] Ishiguro imagines a world in which artificial intelligence has advanced into a form of companionship and a potential mode of immortality. The book’s protagonist is Klara, an Artificial Friend with advanced observational capabilities. On sale in a shop, she is ultimately chosen by a family with a sick child, Josie. As Klara spends more time with the family, she comes to understand their collective hopes, dreams, and fears. Her objective processing of emotion slowly evolves into an understanding of the human condition. With restrained prose and vivid language, Ishiguro replaces the tired trope of whether computers can think with a complex meditation on whether computational processing can approximate emotion.” The reader is left to ponder what it is that makes us human.