Futureface

Born to a white American father and a Burmese mother, journalist Alex Wagner grew up seeing herself as a futureface, a sign of a mixed-race future in which all races would blend. Her father's forebears had emigrated from Luxembourg and Ireland, and her mother left Rangoon in the 1960s to escape Burma's military dictatorship. When a cousin's offhand remark hinted at a new twist in the family story, Wagner set out to investigate her genealogy, travelling from Burma to Luxembourg and from ruined colonial capitals, where records were kept on banana leaves, to Mormon databases and genetic labs. Along the way she asks whether blood, land, race and identity should matter at all.

Barack Obama named it on his best of 2018 reading list on Facebook.