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
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
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
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 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
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.
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.
This montage weaves together memories from Bergman's childhood and adulthood with all their subtle parallels. Film-like, dream-like and beautifully crafted, this self-portrait is startlingly... read more
From the publishers of Luncheon magazine, a chic collection of stories, reminiscences and recipes grounded in HC's childhood in Ireland and his time in the Basque country and France, with Pe... read more
Simms and Medd were part of the mass-release of Allied prisoners when Italy surrendered in 1943. Their escape story - and the bravery and kindness of the Italians who helped them on their ... read more
My theory and practice is to say yes to life and then I'll see how I manage along the way. Part memoir, part manifesto of a fiercely independent spirit; intelligent and lyrical.
Born into a farming family in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham, the author fled with his older brother following the Chinese invasion in 1959. He has spent many years in the UK and the U... read more
MS is an outstanding literary voice in contemporary Russia: here she creates a portrait of three Russian-Jewish generations sifted from the detritus in a late aunt's flat. This book is diff... read more
This intensely lyrical and radical 'memoir' of the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland was written in the last years of WW2, but only published in 1977. The long-overlooked Modernist novelist an... read more
"I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller's cane, and the pilgrim's staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the wave... read more
A memoir by the Egytian woman who set up an independent book shop with a friend and her sister in 2002 - ten years later it had grown to include ten shops and 150 employees. Full of the nois... read more
Often hilarious and certainly astonishing, this is the novelist's memoir of growing up in Sheffield in the 1950s. His father, an insecure bully, adopted a toup?e, which functioned as an inst... read more
A memoir of life as a small girl in Rabindranath Tagore's famous cultural community in the 1930s, by one of India's foremost literary figures. Translated from the Bengali. (Originally due fo... read more
Slim but far-reaching memoir of the author's brush with suicide, framed as the consequence of familial trauma and isolation. Superbly written, this bears honourable comparison with William S... read more