Heartland

Sarah Smarsh, an American journalist, grew up in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s in a family of laborers caught in a cycle of poverty, and her memoir uses that childhood to examine social class in the United States. A fifth-generation wheat farmer on her father's side, she was raised largely by her grandmother on a farm west of Wichita. Smarsh moves between her family's story and the national policies that shaped it, arguing that belief in the American Dream helps hide the problem of class. As a framing device, she addresses an imaginary unborn daughter. It reached the final round of the National Book Award in nonfiction.

Sarah Jessica Parker chose it as a selection for ALA Book Club Central, saying Smarsh writes with authority and urgency about Americans born into poverty whom the country overlooks.