Attentive readers of Meave Leakey’s masterful memoir, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, will learn a few details about her personal life. She was recruited by the great Louis Leakey for paleontological research in Africa in 1965, after sexism prevented her from working as a marine biologist. After completing her Ph.D., she returned to Kenya in 1969 for good. She fell in love with Louis’ son, Richard Leakey, despite his obnoxious reputation and the fact that he was then in an unhappy marriage. They had two daughters, who spent “field season” in remote areas of Kenya hunting fossils with their parents and their collaborators. After Richard was named the head of Kenya’s wildlife conservation department to end a rampage of elephant poaching, Meave became head of the field research operation and spent much of her life apart from him, especially as he became more involved in politics. Years later, long after Richard had lost his legs in a plane crash, she donated a kidney to him. And so on.

But the main and most illuminating parts of The Sediments of Time are about the tedious, painstaking years spent hunting for the fossilized remains of our species’ precursors. Drawing on field notes, interviews and research papers, Meave recounts the work that led to some of her and her team’s greatest discoveries. She demonstrates the astonishing amount of knowledge that can be gained, for example, through meticulous examination of something as seemingly unimportant as a prehistoric baby tooth. She writes of the shoestring budgets paleontologists operate on, the competition for research grants and the need for significant discoveries to maintain funding—and of the collaborative nature of the field’s efforts despite the competition for money. She also hails the positive impact of new communication and digital technologies in the field.

Best of all, Meave and her co-writer, her youngest daughter Samira Leakey, write clearly and compellingly about what these discoveries mean. In a fascinating chapter inspired by the birth of her grandchildren, Meave explores the advantages for our species of having parents who live long beyond childbearing years. Other chapters concern the development of our most distinguishing features: walking on two feet, the amazing mobility of our hands and the size of our brains. Some readers may find this all goes too deep into the sands of time, but many more will find it a thrilling account.

“His story. My story. . . . It’s our story,” writes David A. Robertson about his father, Don. And so it is in Black Water: Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory, a family history embedded in a memoir that shimmers with love and pain.

As a child born in 1935, Don didn’t have official Indigenous status, despite his heritage. He spent nine months of the year camping with his family on their trapline in the far north of Manitoba, Canada. Then the Family Allowances Act of 1945 changed their way of life. The act provided financial support for every child with a permanent address, so Don’s family was forced to give up their trapline, except for brief spring runs. Don went to a public school, where he had to abandon his native language, Swampy Cree. He later devoted his educational career to ensuring that Indigenous people’s languages and culture were respected and preserved, earning the government’s support as he established programs across Canada. Black Water begins and ends with the story of the Black Water traplines that meant sustenance, survival and community for generations of Swampy Cree.

Yet Don and his European Canadian wife decided not to tell their three children that they were “First Nations kids,” believing that knowledge of their Swampy Cree roots would be a burden for them. This decision left their son David feeling like a puzzle with a missing piece. As a teenager with dark skin, Robertson grew up far from a trapline, in a mostly white neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba, denying he was “Indian” and laughing along with racist jokes. When his parents separated, he spent 10 years without his father, except for weekends and golf games. Hurt, angry and increasingly anxious about everything, Robertson eventually confronted and reconciled with Don. With that came the revelation of his Cree heritage. Many journeys to Norway House along Lake Winnipeg followed, revealing his family’s roots, his “blood memory” and stories to be passed down to his own children.

Claiming one’s heritage, learning where “home” truly is, is an oft-told tale, but Robertson infuses his story with a wisdom that binds his own discoveries to the common experience of sharing family legacies with future generations. Memory is a gift we owe our children, he says. Listen to your own storytellers and hold them close while you can.

Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, is an expert on how we use words to both reveal and hide ourselves from the people who mean the most to us. Her work grows from a love of words that came from her father, Eli Tannen. While her mother, Dorothy, was difficult and often manipulative, Tannen’s father was witty, intellectual and loving. Yet despite (or maybe because of) their close relationship, there were frustrating gaps in his story, which Tannen wanted to fill. Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey From World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow is her account of not only his extraordinary life but also her search for the truth behind his family, his work and his marriage.

Eli’s greatest joy was found in words. Raised in a Hasidic family in Warsaw, Poland, he arrived in America in 1920 at the age of 12 with little or no English. Within three years, he was fluent and had become a voracious reader. Upon his death at the age of 97, he bequeathed his daughter a tsunami of letters, journals, poems, interviews and handmade cards, all filled with his words. With all this source material, one would be forgiven for thinking that all Dr. Tannen had to do was transcribe it and arrange it in chronological order. However, instead of a neat road map, these relics were like pieces from different puzzles. Tannen had to evaluate and organize them in order to create meaning out of them.

As a result, Finding My Father is a beautifully constructed patchwork that Tannen has pieced together from her father’s words. A pattern emerges that reveals not one Eli but several frequently contradictory Elis: Eli the son, Eli the lover, Eli the husband, Eli the father, Eli the activist, Eli the friend. Somehow, all of these Elis add up to the singular and extraordinary Eli Tannen. Finding this Eli allows Tannen to see herself, her family and most especially her mother in a new and conciliatory light. Memory doesn’t only reconstruct the past, Tannen reminds us; it can also forge a new present.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics is a beautifully crafted, unblinkingly honest, often darkly funny lament for a loving family that never was. The author’s mother was a cruel and abusive narcissist, her father an enabler and Laveau-Harvie and her younger sister the casualties of their parents’ twisted way of inhabiting the world.

Their family home is in Okotoks, a rural area in Alberta, Canada, where an enormous ancient boulder called the Okotoks Erratic “dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.” Laveau-Harvie describes Okotoks and the Rocky Mountains that soar above it with wonder and grace. She movingly conveys the ways in which the landscape offered her solace as a child and inspires resolve as an adult. But to survive the trauma of her early years, she first had to leave—moving to France and eventually settling in faraway Australia. “When I could, I took to fleeing ever farther, a moving target working at making herself fainter in the cross hairs, while my sister stood her ground, solid in appearance and stern, modeling her life like play dough. Neither strategy was successful,” she writes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Vicki Laveau-Harvie discusses the long and winding path to publishing her stunning first book.

In 2006, Laveau-Harvie received a fateful phone call at her home in Sydney: Her elderly mother had broken her hip and was in the hospital, leaving her father alone in her parents' grand mansion. He was also, the author learned, timorous and frail as a result of his wife starving and isolating him. After being estranged from their parents for nearly 20 years, the sisters traveled to Okotoks in an effort to protect their father and procure the appropriate care for their mother.

Their six-year journey of navigating endless health care bureaucracy while revisiting familial pain makes for an engrossing and fascinating read, one that moves with the ebbs and flows of Laveau-Harvie’s supressed, impressionistic memories. She writes, “My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one.” Through this protective, gauzy “fog” beams the author’s light: an unflinching and empathetic memoir of the collision between past trauma and new outrage, dotted with precious moments of rueful levity and fleeting beauty.

Sara Seager has a hard time connecting with people. Despite a meaningful relationship with her father, she often feels a bit removed from others, a bit challenged by social norms. Instead, Seager feels at home when she’s gazing upward. The night sky has held her attention since she was a child and a babysitter took her and her siblings camping several hours away from their Toronto home. When she saw the stars, Seager was certain she’d discovered a new world.

As an adult, this continuing desire to discover new worlds propelled Seager’s professional life, but she remained less gifted in social relationships. So she was surprised when she found a connection with Mike, a fellow member of the Wilderness Canoe Association in Toronto. As the pair paddled the Humber River, Seager realized they were in sync. Off the water, their interests seemed divergent—he was an editor, she was an astrophysicist—but they complemented each other. He understood the day-to-day concerns of living, while she dreamed of grand possibilities. 

When Seager and Mike moved to Massachusetts for her academic career, she found herself torn between two loves: the stars and her growing family. Seager’s work as an astrophysicist was demanding, and Mike supported her stargazing. But when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Seager recognized the personal cost of searching the universe for planets that could sustain life. After Mike died, she was left to reconcile her thirst for discovery with her grief and the concerns that occupy everyday life.

In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, Seager shares a passion for the universe so deep that even this reviewer, a physics dunce, could grasp why she would spend her life gazing toward other planets. Analytical yet lyrical, Seager’s memoir is an examination of the parallels between searching for new life in the multiverse and starting over with a new life on Earth—the sort of connection only an astrophysicist might make.