May memoirs are full of reckonings. Below are ten compelling books for those looking to explore journeys of identity and belonging through another’s eyes.

Fury by Kathryn Heyman

A roadmap of recovery and transformation, this is the story of becoming heroic in a culture that doesn’t see heroism in the shape of a girl. At the age of twenty, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.

Coming from a family of poverty and violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create or live a decent life, how to have hope or expectations. But she was a reader. She understood story, and the power of words to name the world. This was to become her salvation. Read our bookseller’s review

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

An exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance. With humor and heart, Michelle Zauner tells of growing up as the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, her ‘Koreanness’ began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Zauner was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and spurred her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

As Beautiful As Any Other by Kaya Wilson

When Kaya Wilson came out to his parents as transgender, a year after a near-death surfing accident and just weeks before his father’s death, he was met with a startling family history of concealed queerness and shame.

As Beautiful As Any Other weaves this legacy together with intimate examinations of the forces that have shaped Wilson’s life, and his body: vulnerability and power, grief and trauma, science and narrative. In this powerful and lyrical memoir, he makes a case for the strength we find when we confront the complexities of our identity with compassion. Read our bookseller’s review

Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles

After deciding not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, try to adopt a baby through foster care. Knowing that the system aims for reunification with the birth family, they open their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate and prepare them to welcome a child into their family – even if it most likely means giving that child up. After years of starts and stops, the phone call finally comes: a three-day-old baby girl, in urgent need of a foster family.

An extraordinary account of love and belonging, Stranger Care shares Sentilles’ discovery of what it means to take care of someone beyond our immediate kin: not just a vulnerable infant, but also the birth mother who loves her too. Read our bookseller’s review

I Am a Girl from Africa by Elizabeth Nyamayaro

When severe draught hit her village in Zimbabwe, Elizabeth Nyamayaro, then eight, had no idea that this moment of utter devastation would come to define her life’s purpose. Unable to move from hunger, she encountered a United Nations aid worker who gave her a bowl of warm porridge and saved her life. This transformative moment inspired Nyamayaro to become a humanitarian, and she vowed to dedicate her life to giving back to her community, her continent and the world.

Grounded by the African concept of Ubuntu – ‘I am because we are’ – I Am a Girl from Africa charts Nyamayaro’s quest in pursuit of her dream from the small village of Goromonzi to Harare, London and beyond.

Mother and I by Ianto Ware

After his mother’s death, Ianto Ware revisits his childhood home in suburban Adelaide, where his mother – a single parent, lesbian feminist, and ardent socialist – waged a four-decade war on her conservative neighbourhood, primarily through the medium of gardening.

Driven by humour, insight and love, this is part family memoir, part history of working class life, and part homage to suburban eccentricity. Mother and I: The History of a Wilful Family celebrates the force of character that defies conformity and the love that prevails against bigotry.

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen by Krissy Kneen

In her 2010 memoir, Affection, Krissy Kneen introduced readers to her unique family and the towering matriarchal figure of her grandmother. Stern, domineering, fiercely loving, Lotty Kneen-born Dragica-was always tight-lipped about her early life and family history. She rebuffed curiosity and forbade her from taking the trip back to the old country that might have satisfied it.

When her grandmother died recently, Kneen finally felt at liberty to explore the questions that had nagged at her for so long. She sets out with a box containing her grandmother’s ashes, intending to trace the old woman’s early life in Slovenia and Egypt. Along the way she uncovers extraordinary stories and identifies as best she can the places where Lotty’s restless, demanding spirit will be at peace. Read our bookseller’s review here.

Raceless by Georgina Lawton

In Georgina Lawton’s childhood home, her Blackness was never acknowledged; the obvious fact of her brown skin, ignored by her white parents. Over time, secrets and a complex family story became accepted as truth and Lawton found herself complicit in the erasure of her racial identity. It was only when her beloved father died that the truth began to emerge. Fleeing the shattered pieces of her family life and the comfortable, suburban home she grew up in, at age 22 Lawton went in search of answers.

Raceless is both the compelling personal account of a young woman seeking her own story amid devastating family secrets, and a fascinating, challenging and essential examination of modern racial identity.

The Women’s Doc by Caroline de Costa

When Caroline de Costa first started in medicine, being an unmarried mother was frowned on, cane toads were used for pregnancy tests, and giving birth was much riskier than it is today. Her funny and poignant stories of bringing babies into the world show that, while much has changed, women still work hard and it remains a bloody business. A birth plan is no guarantee of a normal birth (whatever that is).

Men have always wanted to control women’s bodies, and de Costa has been instrumental in giving Australian women of all backgrounds the opportunity to resist, and to choose when and how they have babies.

The Most I Could Be by Dale Kent

Raised in an aspirational Australian working-class family of Christian Scientists in the 1960s, Dale Kent embarked on a lifelong struggle to fulfil the desire of many women of her generation – to be the most she could be. Despite discrimination and self-doubt, she escaped her controlling family and established an international career as a historian of the Florentine Renaissance.

But she failed to liberate herself from the crippling views of women, love and sex she had internalised in childhood. Craving independence and sexual fulfilment, Kent left her child with her husband and started afresh in the United States on an academic road trip that took in Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton and the National Gallery of Art.

The Chief Witness by Sayragul Sauytbay & Alexandra Cavelius

A shocking depiction of one of the world’s most ruthless regimes – and the story of one woman’s fight to survive. Born in China’s north-western province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime: being Kazakh, one of China’s ethnic minorities. In prison, Sauytbay was put to work teaching Chinese language, culture and politics, in the course of which she gained access to secret information that revealed Beijing’s long-term plans to undermine not only its minorities, but democracies around the world.

This rare testimony from the biggest surveillance state in the world reveals not only the full scope of the Chinese Communist Party’s tyrannical ambitions, but also the resilience and courage of its author.