David Schickler’s memoir, The Dark Path, is about a lifelong balancing act between God and sex. Does one cancel out the other? It opens with 10-year-old David staring at a pretty girl at Mass, a scene that emblematizes his twin obsessions. Religion comes naturally to David, who as a child is drawn to the quiet suburban woods behind his house, and to a dark path through the trees where he talks to God. But more earthly forms of love appeal just as much, as the young David charmingly inquires of each new crush, “Are you my wife?” (Luckily, not out loud.)

What begins as a cute story of boyish tension soon deepens into actual conflict. Witnessing the casual cruelty of teenage sex sends David careening toward the Church, especially during his college years at Georgetown. But the Jesuit brotherhood contains its own hypocrisies, and David is left stranded with neither God nor girlfriend to sustain him. The scenes depicting how his spiritual crisis leads to physical and mental collapse are searing and honest. We witness a loving heart laid waste by the collapse of its belief system.

Although this may sound grim, Schickler’s deft hand with dialogue, scene and humor maintains a light touch, and provides an interesting contrast to the dark night of the soul he undergoes. You can sense his screenwriter’s eye in the scenes set at the boarding school in Vermont where he goes to teach and has a nervous breakdown—his depiction of his students responding to him crying in class is priceless.

So this is a comic memoir, and yet its great strength is the simplicity and gentleness of the heart under examination. The balancing act between God and sex is mirrored by the equilibrium the book maintains between humor and despair. With The Dark Path, Schickler has written a spiritual memoir about love as the common denominator between religious and earthly passions.

Like most children, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák was vaguely familiar with her parents’ background as she was growing up, but didn’t know or understand many details. As in many immigrant homes, the adults discussed those details in what American-born Marianne regarded as “secret” languages—in her family’s case, mostly in Hungarian.

After her parents and other beloved older relatives died, Szegedy-Maszák decided to delve more deeply into the unknowns, aided by a cache of letters from her father to her mother during their difficult courtship. And what a rich story she tells in I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Aladár and Hanna Szegedy-Maszák and their families were people of extraordinary sophistication and stamina who survived persecution by both Nazis and Communists.

Hanna was a member of a hugely wealthy clan descended from pioneering Jewish industrialist Manfred Weiss, the Andrew Carnegie of Hungary. Most of the family converted to Christianity, but that didn’t help them with the Nazis and their vicious Hungarian allies. They survived, but in a way that aroused great resentment among fellow Hungarians: A Himmler aide forced them to sign over their fortune to the Nazis in exchange for being allowed to escape. Unwelcome in Hungary after the war, most went to the U.S., where they again thrived.

Aladár was a Christian, a highly regarded diplomat, who resisted Hungary’s alliance with Germany and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. When the Germans invaded, he was sent to Dachau. After liberation, he rose from concentration camp prisoner to Hungarian ambassador to the U.S. in an astonishingly short time. Then came the Communist coup in Hungary. Aladár tried mightily to persuade the U.S. to intervene, failed again, and spent the rest of his life in exile.

Their daughter tells their stories with beautiful sensitivity. She is loving but clear-eyed about their flaws and troubles. Her parents lived in middle-class comfort in Washington, D.C., but her father in particular was broken by his political and personal tragedies. Marianne grew up in a household darkened by his depression. Yet through it all, his deep love for his wife endured. Their daughter’s fine memoir highlights a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust and honors their memory.

“We’re just looking for the ghost town,” a stranger tells Justin St. Germain on the back roads of Arizona. St. Germain understands—maybe more than the stranger could appreciate. He is a haunted man. After his mother’s death, he moved from Arizona to San Francisco and rarely told new friends that she had been murdered when he was 19. He didn’t want to be defined by the tragedy. But now he can’t forget it, and Son of a Gun is his journey to make sense of it all.

The journey is also literal, as St. Germain returns to the scene of the crime. He interviews the detective, pages through old case files and reconnects with his mother’s former boyfriends. There’s something about the memoir that’s reminiscent of a dog sniffing around a backyard, determined and focused, following pure animal instinct to dig things up. Ultimately St. Germain’s journey is as much about himself as it is about his mother. It is about understanding how he arrived at his “new and clean” life in California after leaving behind such wreckage—not just the murder, but also emotional wreckage, domestic violence and poverty.

The book’s construction is pure elegance. By weaving the history of Wyatt Earp with his own story, St. Germain suggests meaningful parallels between the town of Tombstone and himself. Tombstone is defined by 30 seconds of violence that happened more than 100 years ago. St. Germain, too, is struggling against the inevitability of the past defining his present. As all of this unfolds, St. Germain manages to make the book feel like an old Western, a burlesque of violence strangely appropriate for his tale. By page 15 I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. Emotionally raw and beautifully written, Son of a Gun is a book you won’t soon forget.