Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heartland | 2018 | Sarah Smarsh | Buy |
Sarah Smarsh published Heartland in 2018 to widespread acclaim. The memoir became an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by President Barack Obama. It also received the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize.
The book looks at Smarsh’s upbringing on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, where she was raised by a teenage mother in a family of carpenters and farmworkers. Rather than treating rural poverty as a simple backdrop, Smarsh uses her personal story to examine how economic policies and class attitudes in the United States pushed families like hers deeper into hardship over decades. The result is a memoir that is personal and political at the same time, offering a perspective on working-class life that is rarely given this kind of sustained attention in American publishing.