BooksNonfictionMemoirChronic IllnessFood WritingHistory
Ed Yong, An Immense World
Pulitzer-winning science writer Ed Yong spent 2022 putting readers inside the sensory worlds of other species. The book shows how animals perceive reality through modalities humans lack, from electroreception in sharks to the ultraviolet vision of birds. Yong's previous pandemic coverage for The Atlantic earned him his Pulitzer; this volume takes that narrative skill into biology. For anyone who wants to understand how a dog's nose or a bat's echolocation constructs a different reality, Yong supplies the mechanisms without losing the wonder.
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal
Co-written with his son Daniel, Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal argues that trauma acts as an epigenetic trigger for illness, distinguishing 'big T' traumas like childhood abuse from the 'little t' traumas of everyday life. A Holocaust survivor himself, Maté examines how attachment dysfunction and environmental stress shape disease. The book has been read as a call to reexamine modern society's role in health, not as a victim-blaming exercise. Its 2022 release made it a fixture in trauma-focused reading lists.
Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom
A chronic illness memoir that arrived just as long COVID brought post-viral illness into public view. O'Rourke, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, documents the dismissal and marginalization patients face within Western medicine. The book interweaves her own medical appointments with interviews with doctors and other patients. Released in 2022, it became a critical reference for understanding why chronic illnesses remain underdiagnosed and how medical training fails to address complex, multi-system conditions.
Alice Wong, Year of the Tiger
Disability rights activist Alice Wong's Year of the Tiger is a mix of illustrations, transcripts, interviews, recipes, and prose that details her life as an Asian-American woman with progressive muscular dystrophy. The book pushes back against both the 'inspiring' and 'depressing' disability-memoir stereotypes, instead using satire and sincerity to expose lack of access to care and ableism. Wong's essays carry a lighter tone, but the frustration is pointed—she writes about the institutional changes overdue for disabled people.
Candice Millard, River of the Gods
Millard's narrative history of the search for the Nile's headwaters centers on Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, the Royal Geographical Society explorers who became 'venomous enemies.' But the book's pivotal figure is Sidi Mubarak Bombay, an enslaved man shipped from East Africa to India, without whom neither Englishman would have survived. Using diaries and letters, Millard reconstructs how colonial accounts erased Bombay's role. Published in 2022, it reframes a famous expedition around the man history forgot.
Louisa Lim, Indelible City
Part investigation, part memoir, Louisa Lim's Indelible City examines Hong Kong's status between British colonialism and present-day Chinese suppression. An award-winning reporter, Lim interviews residents to show how cultural identity is squeezed by both forces, dispelling myths about the city's past. The 2022 release came after years of protest and tightening control, making it a timely account of how Hong Kong's people navigate a 'knife edge' between freedom and belonging.
Naomi Duguid, The Miracle of Salt
Duguid's 2022 cookbook is a deep dive into salt's role in global food traditions, with techniques for sauerkraut, miso, pickles, and brined eggs. Each chapter pairs recipes with cultural context, covering salt across countries and continents. Though Duguid writes with the authority of her earlier books, this one stands on the breadth of preservation methods. The author's own immune issues prevent her from eating these dishes, but the book remains a reference for anyone studying fermentation and brining.
Romy Gill, On the Himalayan Trail
Romy Gill's 2022 cookbook brings Kashmiri and Ladakhi cuisine to a North American audience with more than 80 recipes. Gill, born in India and raised in West Bengal, writes that political uncertainty makes the region's food and culture increasingly hard to access. The book combines recipes with stories to preserve what she can of the area's culinary traditions. It's a rare English-language cookbook focused on Kashmir, filling a gap beyond the usual Indian restaurant staples.
Cynthia Shanmugalingam, Rambutan
A Sri Lankan cookbook designed, as its promo says, 'to deliver as much edible Sri Lankan joy as possible.' Shanmugalingam's 2022 release features photos and South Asian meals that don't follow the typical Indian-restaurant template. With few Sri Lankan restaurants in places like Ottawa, the book gives home cooks direct access to island recipes.
Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura, The Explorer's Library
The Explorer's Library, a two-book set released during the 2022 holiday season, combines the Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura teams' guides to weird and quirky places and foods. Both websites have grown to huge audience numbers.
Adriana Barton, Wired for Music
Barton's 2022 nonfiction book examines how music affects the nervous system, describing how it can help with pain, sleep, memory, and athletic performance. The author, a former journalist, explains how songs stimulate different brain regions and how that changes the body. Released in autumn 2022, it has become a useful text for understanding music as more than entertainment but as a tool for social connection and emotional regulation.
David McRaney, How Minds Change
McRaney's 2022 book on persuasion argues that people change their minds because they persuade themselves, not because someone wins a debate. He writes that creating rapport and empathy can cultivate an environment for self-persuasion, even for conspiracy theorists. The author uses his own Twitter thread on the subject as a starting point. In a polarizing year, the book explains why outrage doesn't shift opinions and what does.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet
The Quiet author returns with a 2022 book arguing that accepting sorrow and longing is necessary for healing and connection. Cain writes that unprocessed heartbreak risks being taken out on others and ourselves. For readers already familiar with her work, this one goes further into how melancholy and beauty interlace. The book shares emotional terrain with her earlier work, but here the focus is on turning grief into a way to bond rather than a private burden.
Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers
A 2022 guide for parents who want to raise kids capable of thoughtful consumption in the digital age. Bogart provides activities for each section, emphasizing that children absorb their parents' black-and-white thinking. The book encourages teaching context and the idea that interpretations can be temporary. Recommended by Sharon McMahon, it's a practical resource for helping kids see nuance rather than rigid binaries, even when parents themselves struggle with that.
Ella Francis Sanders, Everything, Beautiful
Ella Francis Sanders's 'Everything, Beautiful' challenges society's ideas of what can be considered beautiful. Sanders, who also creates custom food maps and logos, pairs her own illustrations with prose. She writes that beauty never needs to be grandiose, adding, 'On a good day the mundane can be made miraculous.'
Yung Pueblo, Lighter
Diego Perez, known as Yung Pueblo, turns from his earlier poetry collections to memoir-based prose in this third book. Lighter details his path through Vipassana meditation and the personal changes that helped him get in tune with his own needs. Released in 2022, it focuses on self-compassion, letting go, and emotional maturity as steps toward transformation. Pueblo's Instagram followers already know his typewritten aphorisms; here he gives them a longer narrative with direct life experience.
Mike Mariani, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us
Journalist Mike Mariani's first book takes the cliché 'what doesn't kill us makes us stronger' and turns it on its head. He profiles people who went through their own 'catastrophic experiences' — life-changing events — and shows that growth doesn't come from almost dying but from making meaning afterward. Mariani draws on his own experiences as well, concluding with the Stoic idea of amor fati: loving one's fate. The 2022 release offers a realistic alternative to forced optimism.
Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble
Newton's 2022 part-memoir, part-social-commentary traces her family's strange history, from a grandfather said to have married 13 times to a great-grandfather who killed a man with a hay hook. She investigates how intergenerational trauma and genetics carry forward, using her own ancestry as the case study. With at-home DNA tests in vogue, Newton's work is a caution against treating heritage as simple entertainment. The book asks what we owe the past and whether we can escape it.
Liana Finck, Let There Be Light
An illustrated retelling of Genesis with a female god and Abraham living in New York City. Finck's 2022 book uses irreverence and humor to re-weave biblical stories into questions about how we treat each other. The award-winning illustrations carry a whimsy that won't appeal to literal readers, but for those who don't take creation stories as fact, it's a creative take. Finck's version prompts reflection on the baggage we bring to ancient texts.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives
Gurnah's novel about German colonial rule in Tanzania was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2021 and got its North American paperback release in 2022. It follows four protagonists from the era of German occupation through independence, starting with Ilyas, a boy snatched from his parents by German troops. The story tracks the characters he loves and loses. It's a powerful portrait of East Africa in a period often overlooked in western historical fiction.
Andrea J. Buchanan, Five-Part Invention
Buchanan, previously known for a nonfiction book about her own spinal CSF leak, published her 2022 fiction debut spanning five generations of women. The novel traces how trauma is unwittingly passed down across generations, told through a haunting and beautiful narrative. For readers familiar with her medical memoir, this book moves into fictional territory while retaining her eye for how bodies carry history. It's a multi-generational family story that doesn't let the past rest.