Before Walt Disney World paved Orlando with parking lots and erected glittering idols to commercialism, lush orange groves carpeted central Florida. Children were entertained not by a grinning rodent wearing a bow tie and white gloves but by playing among the glossy green leaves and sweet-smelling blossoms, or by chasing after the mosquito fogging trucks that arrived every evening in the summer. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull’s exquisite memoir, Through the Groves, carries readers back to a time when citrus, not Disney, was king in Florida, even as she reveals the fissures in her life beneath those fragrant orange blossoms.

As a young child, Hull spent her summers riding shotgun with her father, who was an inspector for a citrus grower. They bounced through the rutted aisles of the orange groves, car antenna whipping through the leaves and knocking fruit into the car. She met the growers and those who worked for them, whose bodies had been ravaged by years of close contact with pesticides. “I had never seen such a reptilian assemblage of humanity,” she writes. “Their faces cracked when they smiled. Cancer ate away at their noses.” During one of those rides, when she noticed her father screwing the cap back onto a bottle that was different from the Pepto-Bismol bottle he often drank from, Hull realized that her father was abusing alcohol.

Hull’s mother, who looked like “Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” had dreams of being a journalist. But when the family moved to Sebring, Florida, her mother instead started teaching elementary school. Hull’s father’s drinking eventually drove a wedge between him and his wife, and Hull and her mother moved in with family in St. Petersburg. She recalls the opening of Disney World around this time and its effects on the region, writing, “I hated it before it ever opened. . . . It was front-page news; it was practically a religious holiday in Florida.” As she grew up, Hull learned to navigate the streets of St. Pete and to live life on her own terms. During her first year at Florida State University, she awoke to her attraction to women, and her mother accepted and embraced her. Hull left college to become a rep for Revlon, and instead of oranges, the back seat of her car was crowded with “six-foot-tall beautiful women made of cardboard.”

As Hull walks out of the Florida groves and into her adult life, she can clearly see the shadows they cast on her world. In her closing chapter, she shares a valuable gem of wisdom that reveals her vulnerability and ours: “Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father’s windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.” Through the Groves captures the ugliness and the beauty of growing up in a Florida now long gone.

A stigma continues to exist around blindness, even though blind people are a vital part of society as writers, actors, engineers, artists and more. Blindness has reliably appeared at or near the top of the list of “most-feared disabilities” in polls and surveys for decades, a fact Andrew Leland relays in his debut book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. Through eloquent prose, Leland vividly details his experiences with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a genetic disorder that has slowly caused his vision to deteriorate and will eventually result in total blindness. Because he still has some sight, he is able to “perceive everything with a paradoxical double vision: through sighted eyes, and through blind ones.”

“There are very few blind people who live their lives carrying around the constant feeling of aggrieved sadness and tragedy.” Read our interview with Andrew Leland.

Providing a raw and honest depiction of what it is like to straddle two worlds, Leland lays his feelings and the realities of his condition out on the table, in particular the impact of RP on his personal interactions. Along the way, he chronicles the backstory of how he discovered he had RP, the genetic aspects of the disease and a general history of blindness. Other chapters focus on topics such as both low- and high-tech sight-assisted gadgets for blind people, national blindness organizations and their differing philosophies, blind activists (including folks from the Disabled Students’ Program at UC Berkeley) and medical therapies for blindness (such as the gene-editing tool CRISPR, gene therapy and wearable technology). Leland interviews myriad people with varying levels of blindness to get diverse perspectives, interspersing their accounts with statistics and expert commentary.

The Country of the Blind does not leave readers with a sense of sadness—quite the opposite. By mixing reality checks with wit, Leland’s prose exudes hope and authenticity. As he movingly writes, “As I lose my vision, I want to cultivate this picture of blindness—in Oscar [his son], and Lily [his wife], in myself, and in the world—of a blind person who’s an active protagonist in his own life.”

In her memoir, Lara Love Hardin puts a human face on painfully personal crimes—like the 32 counts of identity theft she commits against her community in order to fund her drug addiction. The Many Lives of Mama Love grips you as suddenly as any psychological thriller, leaving you breathless as Love Hardin evades the consequences of her crimes until, eventually, there’s nowhere left to run. During her yearlong incarceration, the women Love Hardin meets in cell block G are vastly different from her—a former upper-class soccer mom with a successful business—yet she finds similarities and common ground with her fellow inmates in her struggle with sobriety. The title itself is perfectly apt, encompassing Love Hardin’s status as a devoted mother who fights to remain in her children’s lives as well as the way she provided stability and understanding to younger inmates, who nicknamed her ”Mama Love.”

With its behind-the-scenes look into incarceration, The Many Lives of Mama Love provides a largely unknown perspective that is absolutely crucial to understanding our country’s prison system. As she relates her grueling firsthand experiences behind bars, Love Hardin folds in commentary on prison reform that is compelling, persuasive and timely. Her journey through the most tumultuous years of her life—from her harrowing time locked away to her release; from the desperate attempts to maintain her freedom and parental rights to her rise as one of the most successful ghostwriters on the literary scene—is the embodiment of endurance and fortitude. The vulnerability and authenticity of her story is only rivaled by her portrayal of the hard-fought self-awareness that comes from finally facing oneself. Readers will experience the lows and highs of addiction, incarceration and rehabilitation as Love Hardin assembles the pieces of her shattered life into something beautiful again in this gritty and inspiring chronicle. 

In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the area of China where most Uyghur people and other Muslim ethnic minorities live, state campaigns ostensibly against terrorism and religious extremism have expanded surveillance into every aspect of life. Tahir Hamut Izgil’s beautifully written memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, describes how he carved out a life writing, making films and participating in a remarkable community of Uyghur poets and intellectuals while enduring systematic repression, as well as the circumstances that led to his family’s flight from China in 2017.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is one of the only firsthand accounts available of the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people by the Chinese government. In clear and relentless detail, Izgil recounts how state suppression of Uyghur religious and cultural practices escalated from lists of banned names, to Qurans collected by the government and burned, to police checkpoints on every corner and boarded-up shops abandoned by the disappeared.

In one of the book’s most profoundly terrifying scenes, Izgil and his wife, Marhaba, receive a call asking them to report to the police station to get their fingerprints taken. At the station, they are directed into the basement where, in a hallway across from blood-stained interrogation chambers, they form a line with hundreds of other Uyghurs from their neighborhood. One by one, they are required to give not only their fingerprints but also blood samples, recordings of their voices and elaborate facial scans, all of which will presumably be added to a vast surveillance database. Well-founded rumors suggested that the selection of who would be arrested and disappeared next was performed by an algorithm using this database.

Izgil’s writing is vivid, made even more so by the inclusion of a few of his haunting, startling poems, each expanding on a moment from the previous chapter. Although the level of detail in the narrative sections can be disorienting, that disorientation effectively conveys the difficulty of navigating constantly changing laws and contradictory bureaucratic processes. Readers can also rely on translator Joshua L. Freeman’s introduction to provide context both for Izgil’s life and for the situation of Uyghur people in China.

Throughout the memoir, Izgil’s stories about his friends, family and community are suffused with love. This palpable love makes it beyond heartbreaking how little could be communicated about his plans to leave China with Marhaba and his daughters without putting those he would leave behind in danger. Although he would almost certainly never see them again, he left without saying goodbye even to his parents.

That is the violence of disappearance and displacement: millions of people removed from their communities, families abruptly and permanently broken apart. Knowing that there are so many stories we will not ever hear, it feels essential to pay attention to the words of those like Izgil who manage to make it out.