Lab Girl

Hope Jahren, a geobiologist, largely alternates chapters about her life with chapters about plants, using aspects of plant biology as metaphors for her life. Her memoir runs from a childhood in rural Minnesota, where she played in her father's college laboratory, through studies at the University of Minnesota and Berkeley to building laboratories at Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. At its core is her friendship with Bill, a gifted and wounded man who becomes her lab partner and follows her from post to post. Jahren also takes on funding pressures, sexism in science and, briefly, her own struggles with mental health. Among its honors is the autobiography award of the National Book Critics Circle.

Former Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly picked it for a Books CEOs Will Be Reading This Summer feature.