Pieces together three generations of a family, moving between Italy and England, in an attempt to understand what roots and home might mean. Subtle, charming memoir.
A spare and engaging chronicle of the summers spent in a small cabin on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland with her partner, who did the illustrations.
A selection of Jarman's writings on Prospect Cottage and the plants in its strange and consoling garden. His light, iridescent prose gives the strangest sense to the reader of being able to ... read more
Forster is always undoing, and no less so in this account of the remote princely court of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, where he visited and worked as private secretary to the Maharajah in the ea... read more
A memoir of youth in Henan province and the liberating power of the pen, by a prolific Chinese writer still relatively little known in this country, despite a festoon of international prizes... read more
Born in 1914 in Czernovitz in what is now Ukraine, the author was successively a citizen of Austro-Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union as the bloody tides of the C20th swept to and fro bef... read more
Witty, tangential, self-deprecating, Amis's autobiography is not a chronological procession of memories but a frenzy of footnotes, asides, literary zigzags through time and space. It's funny... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
The repeated confusion of the author's name with that of Naomi Wolf became ever more disturbing as 'Other Naomi' slid deeper into alt-right conspiracy theories during the pandemic. Klein fol... read more
The author and her brother spent a decade at sea; at sixteen she made it ashore in New Zealand, effectively abandoned by her parents. A startling and riveting memoir.