In many ways, Aeham Ahmad is an ordinary man. The son of Palestinian refugees, he grew up in Yarmouk, home to 160,000 other Palestinians in Damascus. His father, a musician blind since childhood, bribed and wheedled young Ahmad into practicing the piano for hours at a time. His talent grew steadily, but only later did he develop a profound love for music.

Ahmad achieved his dreams at a young age. Still in his 20s, he and his father built a thriving business selling musical instruments and giving lessons. He married a strong, intelligent woman, and together they brought a sweet boy into the world. But in June of 2012, the Syrian civil war made its way to Yarmouk, and all those dreams crumbled beneath the weight of the bombs, mortars and bullets fired by both the Syrian Army and the different militias fighting against them.

In The Pianist from Syria, Ahmad tells the story of his family’s terrible deprivations during the civil war. His losses are profound, and it was truly miraculous that he and his family were finally able to escape to safety in Germany. Yet the true hero of this story is Ahmad’s music. Pushing his piano into the bomb-ruined streets of Yarmouk, Ahmad and his impromptu choirs sang out songs of protest, mourning and hope. He rejected the jingoism of both the Syrian government and the militias. Instead, his music illuminated the horrors of war, while celebrating the simple dreams of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. His songs were truly subversive, because they served no faction. Soon a YouTube and Facebook phenomenon, Ahmad became an increasingly marked man.

Written in an open, honest style, The Pianist from Syria is a testament to the resilience and beauty of ordinary people with simple dreams.

“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” writes author Katharine Smyth at the beginning of her debut, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. For Smyth, that book is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and it’s the prism through which she examines the death of her beloved father and the surprising turns that grief can take.

Though it’s categorized as a memoir, what Smyth accomplishes defies the genre. Her story is an intimate exploration of the domestic drama that unfolded in her own family, in which she was the sole child of a larger-than-life alcoholic and a long-suffering mother who stood by his side. Smyth takes us through her childhood in New England, where summers on the coast were the backdrop to the special bond between daughter and dad, to the tumultuous home life of her teen years, to the rhythms and routines of hospital and hospice care during her father’s later years. In her intimate memoir, however, she also weaves in a biography of Woolf, literary analysis of Woolf’s masterpiece and meditations on the nature of marriage, family and loss. Readers with a passion for Woolf will find the reading experience enriching, but even those with a cursory knowledge of her work will be able to glean the major themes that resonate in Smyth’s interpretation of it.

The memoir is a quiet book; its private tragedies are the consequence of a slow physical and emotional decay at the hands of her father’s disease. Still, Smyth’s prose pulsates with intensity, and its lyrical qualities make it a moving one. Grief and its disconcerting effects take center stage. “It’s writers like Woolf, their refusal to give in to popular ideas about bereavement, who have helped me to accept the nature of this misery,” Smyth writes. With her first book, Smyth is able to give that comfort to a new generation of readers as well.

“My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter,” writes Stephanie Land in the opening line of her insightful, moving memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Land was planning on attending college and becoming a writer when she became pregnant with her daughter, Mia. After her short relationship with the baby’s father became abusive, Land found herself a single mother with virtually no support network. She depended on food stamps, childcare assistance, part-time work as a housecleaner and occasional charity from friends. When she took her first housecleaning job, she quickly realized, “They don’t pay me enough for this.”

Nonetheless, she persevered, despite the fact that black mold in her studio apartment repeatedly sickened both Mia and herself. “Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.” Land learns to appreciate what little she has while observing the lives within the homes she cleans, giving them nicknames like the Loving House, the Cat Lady’s House and the Porn House. She realizes that despite her clients’ relative wealth, “they did not seem to enjoy life any more than I did.”

Like Tara Westover in Educated, Land sees education as her salvation. Determined to break free from sickness, poverty and bad luck, she uses a combination of grants, loans and jump-off-the-cliff risk to ultimately pursue her dream of studying creative writing at the University of Montana. 

While books like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Alissa Quart’s Squeezed present heart-wrenching overviews of poverty in America, Land combines her raw, authentic voice and superb storytelling skills to create a firsthand account from the trenches. Readers will be left wanting to hear more from this talented new voice, and no doubt, she’s got more stories to tell.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.