From medieval medical tools and methodologies to modern analyses of health care access for women and marginalized groups, our scholars bring context and new connections to a topic that is both contentious yet necessary to daily life and humanity's existence.

This month, explore how connections are formed, maintained and shared with letters and science authors. In this collection of books, our authors and scholars mine their own families as their inspiration for memoirs, poetry, fiction and analyses.

Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. We're hoping to read more fiction this summer, so our July selections include novels from faculty in the Department of English and Department of Chicana/o/x Studies as well as graduates of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.