Seek answers with January's book of the month

Happy new year! 

This is a time when we’re not just looking back, but also throwing forward – wondering about what’s to come for us this year and in the years after. So here’s a question: what do you do when you know the answer about what’s coming?

That’s a query at the center of our first book of the month for 2026, Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families And The Search For A Cure by Jennie Erin Smith. 

In this story, Smith follows a neurologist in Colombia who stumbles on a set of local families who carry a terrible genetic curse that they cannot shake: early-onset dementia that robs people of their brains and eventually their bodies. Family members who are affected—and there are thousands upon thousands of them across the country—are basically flipping a coin to see if this devastating condition will arrive in their early 40s and change their lives. 

Many of us have close-up experience of Alzheimer’s, and are desperate to see treatments and cures that work to delay or block the symptoms. Smith traces the families as they take part in an extensive and pioneering research study that hopes to find an answer. She follows the primary researchers, both in Colombia and elsewhere, and gets close to the people taking part in the study. She joins their world, to the extent that at one point one of them even moves into her apartment!

Released last spring, Valley of Forgetting been on a number of best-of-the-year lists for good reason. The New Yorker said it “captures the courage of those who dedicate their own suffering to science in pursuit of a precarious hope" and Publisher’s Weekly said it was “a poignant depiction of a community in crisis.” They’re both correct. 

The Colombian Alzheimer’s study has been covered before, especially in newspapers and magazines, but not with this level of care or emotional depth. What emerges is a carefully-observed and open-hearted book; detailed and precise, but deeply human and very moving at the same time. It’s not necessarily an easy read, but I was gripped throughout—even though I knew more or less where the story was headed. 

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