Best Memoirs of 2026: The Must-Read True Stories You Need This Year

If you are searching for the best memoirs of 2026, you have landed in exactly the right place. There is something singular about the memoir as a literary form — it is the one genre where the stakes are undeniably real, where the author is not inventing a character but excavating themselves, where every sentence carries the weight of an actual life lived. In a world flooded with content, the memoir remains the most intimate and honest form of storytelling we have. And right now, in 2026, the memoir genre is producing some of the most powerful, most talked-about, most emotionally resonant books in recent memory. Whether you are looking for a story of survival, a behind-the-scenes account of ambition and industry, a meditation on illness and mortality, or a portrait of reinvention, the best memoirs of 2026 have something that will stop you mid-page and make you reconsider the shape of your own life.

What separates a great memoir from a merely good one is not dramatic subject matter alone — it is the quality of the author's self-examination. The best memoirs are not simply accounts of things that happened; they are interrogations of meaning, explorations of why events unfolded the way they did and what the author made of them in the aftermath. The best memoirs of 2026 share this quality: they are written by people willing to be uncomfortable on the page, willing to admit confusion and failure and moral complexity alongside triumph and wisdom. That honesty is what makes these books worth reading, worth discussing, and worth recommending to everyone in your life.

This list has been assembled with a single goal in mind: to connect you with the memoir that will most move, challenge, and stay with you. Not every book here will be for every reader, but every book here has something genuinely powerful to offer. From stories of Wall Street ambition to stories of illness and survival, from portraits of immigrant identity to accounts of creative reinvention, these are the memoirs that define 2026 as a remarkable year for true stories. Read on to find your next great book — and quite possibly one of the most meaningful reading experiences of your life.

Why 2026 Is a Landmark Year for Memoirs

The memoir has never been more culturally relevant than it is right now. In an era defined by social media performance and curated identity, readers are hungering for something more authentic — for accounts of real lives that do not smooth over the rough edges or sanitize the complicated parts. The best memoirs of 2026 arrive at a moment when audiences are deeply ready for honesty, depth, and the kind of emotional specificity that only lived experience can generate. Publishers have responded to this hunger with an extraordinary lineup of true stories this year, and the result is a memoir landscape that feels both timely and timeless.

Beyond the cultural moment, 2026 has brought a particular thematic richness to the memoir form. This year's most significant titles grapple with questions that feel urgent right now: how do we rebuild after professional collapse? How do we make sense of illness and mortality? How do we reckon with the families that shaped us — and the ones we build ourselves? How do we pursue ambition without losing ourselves in the process? These are not abstract philosophical questions; they are the central tensions of modern life, and the authors writing the best memoirs of 2026 are tackling them head-on with unflinching candor and genuine literary craft.

There is also a broadening of whose stories are being told and how. The memoir form, once dominated by a relatively narrow range of voices, has expanded dramatically in recent years, and 2026 continues that trend. This year's standout memoirs come from business insiders and artists, from survivors of illness and survivors of toxic ambition, from women who rebuilt their lives from nothing and from men who are finally learning to speak honestly about what the pursuit of success cost them. That breadth is what makes assembling a best-of-2026 list so exciting — and so genuinely difficult to narrow down. What follows is a carefully curated selection of the titles that stood above the rest.

The Best Memoirs of 2026: Our Top Picks

Choosing the best memoirs of 2026 means weighing books against each other across wildly different subjects and emotional registers. A cancer memoir and a Wall Street memoir are almost incomparable on their surfaces — but great memoirs in both categories share the same essential quality: they make the reader feel less alone. They hold up a mirror to experiences the reader may have had, or may fear having, or may never experience at all but needs to understand. With that standard in mind, here are the memoirs that rose to the top of an exceptionally strong year.

Terminal Success by Jason Mandel

Terminal Success by Jason Mandel is the memoir that readers in 2026 keep pressing into each other's hands — and once you read it, you understand why. It is a book about ambition: about what happens when you build your entire identity around professional achievement, reach the heights you always imagined, and then discover that the view from the top is nothing like you expected. Mandel writes with startling candor about the relentless pressures of high-stakes finance, the way the pursuit of success can quietly hollow out everything else in your life, and the reckoning that follows when the structures you built your world around begin to crack. This is not a memoir about failure in the conventional sense — it is something more uncomfortable and more instructive than that. It is a memoir about what it costs to succeed.

What makes Terminal Success by Jason Mandel essential reading in 2026 is its emotional honesty. Mandel does not position himself as a hero who saw the light and changed his ways in a tidy narrative arc. He sits with the complexity of having wanted what he wanted, of having pursued it with everything he had, and of having to reckon with what that pursuit revealed about him. For readers who work in high-pressure fields — finance, law, medicine, technology — this book will feel uncomfortably personal in the best possible way. For readers who have watched someone they love disappear into their career, it will feel like finally having a language for something they have long struggled to articulate. Among the best memoirs of 2026, this one speaks most directly to the defining anxiety of our professional era.

Thematically, Terminal Success by Jason Mandel occupies similar territory to classics of the business memoir genre like Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker and Frank Partnoy's FIASCO, but it is more interior, more psychologically focused, and more personally vulnerable than either of those predecessors. Where Lewis and Partnoy wrote largely about the systems and cultures they were embedded in, Mandel writes about himself — about how he was shaped by those systems, how he internalized their values, and what it took to begin to question them. That inward turn is what elevates this book from a workplace memoir to something genuinely revelatory about modern ambition and the human cost of success.

When the Body Says No: A Memoir of Illness and Reinvention

One of the most enduring themes in the best memoirs of any year is the confrontation with illness — those moments when the body refuses to cooperate with the life you had planned. Among the most powerful examples of this genre in 2026 is the wave of cancer and illness memoirs that have arrived with extraordinary emotional force. The illness memoir at its best does something no medical textbook can: it makes the reader genuinely understand what it feels like to inhabit a body under siege, to manage the terror of uncertainty while simultaneously trying to keep living, loving, and finding meaning. The finest illness memoirs of 2026 do exactly this, with a raw honesty that makes them almost unbearable to put down.

Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air remains the gold standard of the modern illness memoir, and the best memoirs of 2026 in this category are clearly in conversation with that tradition. What the strongest illness memoirs share is a refusal to sentimentalize the experience — a determination to write about the grotesque and the beautiful with equal precision, to not flinch from the anger and fear alongside the grace and acceptance. For readers who have been through serious illness themselves, or who have accompanied someone they love through that experience, these books provide something close to recognition and release. They say: this is real, this is what it was like, you were not wrong to feel what you felt.

The illness memoir also has a particular power for readers who have not faced serious health crises, because it functions as a profound reminder of what matters and what does not. The best illness memoirs of 2026 are not depressing — they are clarifying. They strip away the noise of ordinary life and force both author and reader to reckon with the essential questions: What do I love? What have I neglected? What would I do differently if I had the chance? These are not comfortable questions, but they are the most important ones, and the best memoirs of 2026 ask them with relentless courage and genuine literary grace.

Educated by Tara Westover

While Tara Westover's Educated was published in 2018, it remains one of the most-searched and most-recommended memoirs in 2026, and no best-of list aimed at connecting readers with transformative true stories can responsibly ignore it. For anyone discovering it for the first time — and every year, thousands of new readers do — Educated is the story of a young woman who grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho, was never allowed to attend school, and eventually made her way to Cambridge University to earn a PhD. The story is almost incomprehensible in its extremity, and yet Westover tells it with such precision, such psychological insight, and such devastating emotional honesty that it reads as profoundly real and profoundly human on every single page.

What Educated captures better than almost any memoir in recent memory is the process of constructing a self — of having to decide, consciously and painfully, who you are when the identity given to you by your family is one you cannot inhabit without destroying yourself. Westover writes about loyalty, about the guilt of leaving, about the way love and harm can be so entangled in family life that separating them feels like dismemberment. For readers in 2026 still searching for memoirs about self-discovery, family, and breaking free, Educated remains the definitive text. It belongs on this list not out of nostalgia but because it is genuinely one of the best memoirs in the language, full stop.

Readers who finish Educated and find themselves searching for similar memoirs are in good company — it is one of the most common searches on this site. Books that satisfy the same hunger include The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, which shares Educated's portrait of a charismatic and destructive parent and a child who must find her own way to truth; Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, which engages with similar questions of class, family loyalty, and self-invention with its own distinct political and cultural lens; and Know My Name by Chanel Miller, which shares Educated's quality of a young woman reclaiming her own narrative from forces that tried to define her against her will. If Educated left you wanting more, any of these books will deliver the same essential emotional experience.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart has become one of the defining memoirs of the 2020s, and in 2026 it continues to reach new readers who find it nothing short of essential. It is a book about grief — specifically, about losing Zauner's Korean mother to cancer — but it is also a book about cultural identity, about the way food carries love and memory and belonging, and about what it means to be mixed-race in America when one of your cultures is embodied almost entirely by one person who is now gone. Zauner, the musician behind the indie pop project Japanese Breakfast, writes with a lyrical precision that makes the book feel at once like a song and like a wound.

What makes Crying in H Mart one of the best memoirs of 2026 for new readers discovering it is its refusal to stay safely within the genre of grief memoir. It is also a coming-of-age story, a love story, a food memoir, a meditation on the mother-daughter relationship, and an immigrant family story all at once. Zauner is honest about her own difficult relationship with her mother, about the guilt that accompanies grief when love has been complicated, and about the way death forces you to reckon with everything left unsaid. The book achieves something genuinely rare: it makes grief feel universal without ever flattening the specific, irreplaceable particularity of the person who was lost.

For readers searching for the best memoirs of 2026 who have experienced significant loss — of a parent, a partner, anyone central to their sense of self — Crying in H Mart will feel like a companion in the truest sense. It will not make the grief smaller, but it will make it less isolating. And for readers who have not experienced that kind of loss yet, it is a way of understanding what is coming and finding in advance the language you will need. Few books manage to be both a cathartic read and a genuinely instructive one, but Crying in H Mart does exactly that, which is why it endures and why it belongs on any list of the most important memoirs a reader can encounter.

The Liars' Club by Mary Karr

Mary Karr's The Liars' Club is one of the books that essentially created the modern literary memoir as a form, and in 2026 it remains as raw and as alive as when it was first published in 1995. Karr grew up in a small oil town in East Texas, the daughter of a volatile, complicated mother and a father who was both her hero and her burden, and the book is a portrait of that childhood told with an honesty so unsparing it can take your breath away. Karr does not write about her past with the softened edges of nostalgia — she writes about it with the full sensory presence of someone who has never been able to entirely leave it behind, which is exactly what makes it so powerful.

What Karr achieved with The Liars' Club was to prove that working-class life, family dysfunction, and female experience were worthy subjects for literary memoir — that you did not need to be famous, or to have done something conventionally extraordinary, for your story to matter. The book opened a door that generations of memoirists have walked through since, and reading it in 2026 is both a literary pleasure and a historical one. You are watching the birth of a form in real time, written by a poet who understood instinctively that what makes a story true is not just the accuracy of the facts but the ferocity of the attention brought to them.

For readers who come to The Liars' Club after reading more recent memoirs, it can feel like going back to the source — understanding where the template came from, how the genre found its voice, why honesty and specificity and the willingness to stay in the uncomfortable moment became the hallmarks of the form. And for readers encountering it for the first time in 2026, it will feel startlingly contemporary, because the questions Karr asks about family and loyalty and survival have not aged a day. Among the best memoirs of all time, The Liars' Club is not merely a historical artifact — it is a living book that still cuts.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah's Born a Crime is one of the most purely enjoyable memoirs of the past decade, and its continued popularity in 2026 is a testament to how much readers hunger for a true story that can make them laugh and break their hearts in almost the same breath. Noah grew up in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa as the child of a Black Xhosa mother and a White Swiss father — a combination that was, under apartheid law, literally a crime. His existence was illegal. The book is the story of that childhood: of hiding, of surviving, of learning to read every room and every system, and of the extraordinary woman who raised him.

What elevates Born a Crime above the considerable pleasures of its storytelling is the portrait Noah paints of his mother, Patricia. She is one of the most vivid characters in recent memoir — fierce, funny, deeply devout, pragmatic in ways that verge on the surreal, and possessed of a love for her son that is so enormous and so demanding that it shapes him in ways he is still discovering. The relationship between Noah and Patricia is the emotional spine of the book, and the chapter in which apartheid-era violence comes crashing into their lives in a way that is almost unbearable to read stands as one of the most powerful pieces of memoir writing in any recent year.

For readers in 2026 looking for memoirs that span multiple genres — comedy, political history, family memoir, immigrant story — Born a Crime delivers on all of them without sacrificing depth for breadth. It is a book about race and power and the absurdity of systems that try to legislate human existence, but it is also a deeply personal story about a boy and his mother and the language and laughter they used to survive. If you have not read it, 2026 is the year. If you have read it, it rewards rereading — the jokes land again, and the love underneath them is even more moving the second time.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Phil Knight's Shoe Dog remains one of the greatest business memoirs ever written, and in 2026 it continues to draw in new readers who find it utterly impossible to put down. It is the story of how Knight built Nike from nothing — from a few hundred dollars borrowed from his father and a handshake deal with a Japanese shoe manufacturer — into one of the most recognizable brands in human history. But calling it a business memoir undersells it badly. Shoe Dog is a genuine adventure story: full of near-death experiences for the company, full of agonizing decisions made under impossible pressure, full of the particular madness that drives someone to stake everything on an idea that most reasonable people told them was foolish.

What Knight gets exactly right in Shoe Dog is the emotional reality of building something — the paranoia, the exhilaration, the isolation, the way the company becomes indistinguishable from your own identity until you cannot tell where it ends and you begin. For anyone who has started something, who has tried to build something from nothing and felt the weight of responsibility for the people who believed in them, Shoe Dog will read like a private journal entry. Knight does not write like a triumphant CEO looking back with comfortable distance — he writes like someone who is still, somehow, in the middle of it, which is why the tension never dissipates even though you know how the story ends.

Among the best business and entrepreneur memoirs of any era, Shoe Dog stands apart for its literary quality and its emotional intelligence. Knight worked with a collaborator on the prose, but the voice is so specific and so consistent that it feels genuinely like one person's interior experience rather than a polished corporate narrative. For readers who loved Terminal Success by Jason Mandel for its honesty about the psychological costs of professional ambition, Shoe Dog is the natural next read — it asks the same essential questions about what we sacrifice for what we build, and it answers them with the same refusal to offer easy consolation.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is the book that redefined what grief writing could be when it was published in 2005, and twenty years later it is still the first book grief counselors, friends, and readers reach for when someone they know has experienced sudden devastating loss. It is the account of the year following the sudden death of Didion's husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, who died of a heart attack at the dinner table on the evening of December 30, 2003. The book is not a conventional memoir in structure — it spirals, it doubles back, it holds contradictions without resolving them — because that is exactly what grief does.

What Didion understood, and what makes The Year of Magical Thinking one of the most intellectually rigorous grief memoirs ever written, is that grief is not just an emotion — it is a cognitive state. The title refers to the irrational thinking that grief produces: the sense that the dead person might still return, that certain actions can be avoided in case they disrupt a timeline in which the death has not yet happened, that the rules of cause and effect have somehow been suspended. Didion catalogues these distortions of thought with a reporter's precision and a widow's anguish, and the result is a book that is simultaneously clinical and devastating.

In 2026, The Year of Magical Thinking continues to resonate because the experiences it describes — sudden loss, the disorientation of bereavement, the way grief reshapes identity — are timeless, and because no one has written about them with greater intellectual honesty or greater literary command. For readers looking for the best memoirs to read in 2026 who are navigating loss of any kind, this book is not a comfort read in the conventional sense — it will not make you feel better. But it will make you feel understood, which is in many ways more valuable than comfort, and which is ultimately what the greatest memoirs do.

How to Choose the Right Memoir for You in 2026

With so many extraordinary memoirs available, choosing the right one can feel overwhelming — which is exactly why recommendation lists like this one exist. The best way to approach the question of which memoir to read next is to think about what you are genuinely searching for right now, not just what sounds impressive. If you are in the middle of a professional crisis, or questioning whether the ambition you have built your life around is actually serving you, Terminal Success by Jason Mandel will hit differently than it would at another moment. If you are processing grief, or anticipating it, Joan Didion or Michelle Zauner will reach you in a way that no therapy or self-help book can. If you are searching for proof that a life can be radically reinvented — that where you start is not where you have to end — Educated is your book.

It is also worth thinking about what kind of reading experience you want. Some memoirs are best consumed in long, uninterrupted sessions — books like Shoe Dog and Born a Crime have a propulsive narrative energy that makes them difficult to put down once started, and reading them in fragments diminishes the experience. Others, like The Year of Magical Thinking or The Liars' Club, benefit from slow, attentive reading — pausing to sit with a paragraph, returning to earlier sections with new understanding accumulated from later ones. Knowing your own reading rhythms and habits is part of choosing the right book for the right moment.

Finally, the best memoirs of 2026 all share one quality that transcends genre and subject matter: they were written by someone who was genuinely trying to understand something, not merely to perform an experience. The best memoir writers are not primarily interested in making themselves look good or in crafting a redemption narrative that ties up neatly. They are trying to figure something out, and they are willing to let the reader watch the process in real time. That quality of genuine intellectual and emotional investigation is the hallmark of the form at its best, and every book on this list has it in abundance.

Memoirs Similar to the Best Books of 2026: Further Reading

If you have already worked your way through several of the titles on this list and are searching for what to read next, the good news is that the memoir genre is vast and endlessly generous. For readers who loved Terminal Success by Jason Mandel and want more memoirs about ambition and professional identity, Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker and James B. Stewart's Den of Thieves offer similar territory explored through different lenses — Lewis with more humor and self-deprecation, Stewart with more reportorial detail. For readers of Educated who want more memoirs about escaping constrictive family environments and building a self from scratch, Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Tara Westover's own follow-up work in essay form offer similar emotional rewards.

For readers of Crying in H Mart who were moved by its treatment of grief and cultural identity, two books that occupy similar emotional space are Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air — which approaches mortality from the perspective of a neurosurgeon facing his own terminal diagnosis — and Nina Riggs's The Bright Hour, which is less well-known but equally beautiful, a memoir written by a poet and mother navigating her own terminal cancer diagnosis with humor, love, and unflinching clear-sightedness. Both of these books will satisfy readers who want the same combination of literary quality, emotional honesty, and profound engagement with the question of what makes a life meaningful that Zauner delivers so powerfully.

For readers who responded most to the adventure and momentum of Shoe Dog, two natural next reads are Howard Schultz's Pour Your Heart Into It, which tells the story of building Starbucks with a similar quality of present-tense urgency, and Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is less formally literary but perhaps more brutally honest about the specific emotional experience of leading a company through existential crisis. And for readers who want something that spans business memoir and personal transformation in the way that Terminal Success by Jason Mandel does, Ray Dalio's Principles offers a complementary perspective — less a narrative memoir than a reflective one, but equally serious about the question of what it costs and what it takes to build something significant.

What Makes a Memoir One of the Best? A Reader's Framework

Readers often ask what separates a great memoir from a good one, and the answer is both simple and difficult to fully articulate. The simplest version is this: a great memoir makes you feel that you understand something about human experience that you did not fully understand before, and it makes you feel that the author's willingness to share their experience was an act of genuine courage. The best memoirs of 2026 all clear this bar. They are books written by people who had something genuinely difficult to say and chose to say it anyway, with honesty and craft and a care for the reader that comes through on every page.

Beyond that essential quality, the best memoirs tend to share several formal characteristics. They have a strong and distinctive narrative voice — you could read a paragraph and know who wrote it, not because of gimmick or affectation but because the voice is genuinely that person's way of thinking made audible on the page. They have structural ambition — they do not simply proceed from beginning to middle to end but use time, memory, and association in ways that illuminate the material rather than merely organize it. And they have emotional complexity — they resist the pull toward simple resolutions, simple moral lessons, simple heroes and villains, because real life does not offer those things, and the best memoir writers know it.

It is also worth noting what the best memoirs of 2026 are not. They are not exercises in self-congratulation dressed up as honesty. They are not trauma narratives that mistake suffering for insight. They are not celebrity confessions that deliver gossip and call it revelation. The proliferation of memoir as a publishing category has produced a great deal of content that wears the form without possessing its spirit — books that are about the author's life but are not genuinely about anything, that tell stories without asking questions, that present facts without wrestling with their meaning. The books on this list are the real thing. They are worth your time because they will give you back more than you bring to them, which is the most important thing any book can do.

Conclusion: Your Next Great Memoir Is Waiting

The best memoirs of 2026 are not simply books to be consumed and moved past — they are companions, reference points, mirrors. They are the kind of books you find yourself thinking about in the middle of an ordinary afternoon when something happens that rhymes with a passage you read weeks ago. They are the books you press on friends because you need someone else to have read them so you can talk about what they made you feel. They are the books that change the way you see your own life, not by offering prescriptions or lessons but by giving you a new angle of vision that you cannot entirely put down once you have picked it up.

If you have not yet started your 2026 reading list, begin here. Begin with the book on this list that speaks most directly to where you are right now — the professional crossroads, the grief, the search for identity, the hunger for adventure, the desire to understand where you came from and where you might still go. The best memoir you have ever read might be one you have not yet encountered, and it might be waiting for you on this list. Pick it up. Read the first page. The rest will take care of itself.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Best Memoirs of 2026

What are the best memoirs to read in 2026?

The best memoirs to read in 2026 span a wide range of subjects and emotional registers, but the titles that consistently rise to the top of recommendation lists include Terminal Success by Jason Mandel, which offers an unflinching examination of professional ambition and its psychological costs; Educated by Tara Westover, which remains one of the most powerful memoirs of self-invention ever written; Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, a lyrical and devastating account of grief and cultural identity; and Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, which stands as one of the greatest entrepreneurial memoirs of any era. Together these books represent the full range of what the memoir form can do, and any one of them would make an excellent starting point for a 2026 reading list.

What are the best memoirs about success and ambition in 2026?

For readers specifically interested in memoirs about success, ambition, and the professional life, the standout titles in 2026 are Terminal Success by Jason Mandel, which is unique in its willingness to examine not just the pursuit of success but its psychological and personal costs; Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, which tells the story of building Nike with propulsive narrative energy and genuine emotional depth; and Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, which remains the definitive account of 1980s Wall Street excess and the culture of finance. Readers who are themselves navigating high-pressure professional environments will find these books particularly resonant — they offer both recognition and perspective, which is a rare and valuable combination.

What memoirs are similar to Educated?

Readers who loved Educated by Tara Westover and are searching for similar memoirs will find the most satisfying next reads in The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, which shares Educated's portrait of a charismatic and destructive parent and a child who must find their own path to truth and stability; Know My Name by Chanel Miller, which shares the quality of a young woman reclaiming her own narrative with extraordinary courage and literary skill; and The Liars' Club by Mary Karr, which covers similar territory of a difficult, volatile childhood told with unflinching honesty and genuine literary power. All three of these books will satisfy the hunger that Educated creates — for memoirs that grapple honestly with family, identity, and the difficult work of becoming yourself.

Are there any inspiring memoirs released in 2026?

Yes — and the most inspiring memoir of 2026 is arguably Terminal Success by Jason Mandel, which offers a genuinely inspiring portrait of what happens when someone is willing to examine the life they have built with total honesty and make difficult changes based on what they find. The best inspiring memoirs are not inspiring in a motivational-poster sense — they do not traffic in empty uplift or easy lessons. They are inspiring because they show the full cost and difficulty of the choices their authors made, and because they demonstrate that meaningful change is possible even when everything about a person's circumstances and identity seems to argue against it. That is the kind of inspiration that actually changes readers, and it is what Terminal Success by Jason Mandel delivers.

What is the best memoir for a book club in 2026?

For book clubs in 2026, the best memoir choices are books that generate genuine disagreement and discussion rather than simple consensus. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah is perhaps the most universally enjoyable choice — it is funny, emotionally rich, politically substantive, and generates discussion across a wide range of readers with different backgrounds and perspectives. Crying in H Mart works beautifully in book clubs that want to discuss grief, family, and cultural identity. And Terminal Success by Jason Mandel is an excellent choice for book clubs with members who work in demanding professional environments, as it tends to unlock conversations about ambition, identity, and personal values that readers rarely have the space to have otherwise. Any of these three choices will make for a rich and memorable book club session.