All that remains of the Osnabruk synagogue is a small pile of stones and some chickenwire: a space of oblivion in the German city explored by Cixous, whose Jewish mother came from there.
A memoir by the half-Italian, half-Latvian writer about returning to Riga, to her childhood there and to her murdered Jewish father, told through the careful piecing-together of memory, docu... read more
A strange and magical memoir of growing up in prosaic England with Anglo-Burmese parentage. Teak trees interweave oaks; myth and imagery chase each other through the author's odyssey through... read more
Those who read Clare's Something of His Art, about J S Bach, or The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal (or others) will know that Clare is a writer of exquisite sensibility and nuance. He i... read more
A marvellous debut from a young man of complex literary and musical parentage: birds of a feather, sins of the father, on and off the rails (the cenotaph too, memorably) - and a magpie calle... read more
In this inspired recreation of her parents' hopes and lives, MW has created a vivid memoir of post-war childhood and adventure in Cairo, Italy and London.
Of the 50,000 Jews who were sent to concentration camps from Salonika, only 2,000 returned. The author is one of them. This manuscript from 1948 is presented by his grandson.
SK's father was Bernat Klein, a Yugoslav Jew who came to Britain after WW2 and became a successful textile designer - Chanel, Dior & Balenciaga were amongst his clients. He lived in a moder... read more
A curator of fashion at the V&A for most of her working life, CW uses her experience and sensitivity to clothes to explore how, in her own family's life, the secrets of clothes measure out t... read more
He left his young family in the '60s for sex, drugs, and enlightenment with the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; he would reappear from time to time, bringing chaos in his wake.
From London in the Swinging Sixties to a hippie retreat in the Outer Hebrides: she and her partner travelled - slowly - by horse and wagon. She gave up music, disillusioned with the pop indu... read more
Ruthlessly funny memoir of working front of house: the great deception of ease, of luxe, calme et volupte , of lamplight and conversation, while, behind the swing doors, rages a very differe... read more
A memoir of the artist and of the author's friendship with him, part biography, part art criticism. Their friendship and this book cover the latter part of Guston's life, when his late work ... read more
A beguiling work of auto-fiction - a juggling act that Carrère refined in Limonov, The Kingdom etc. He begins a ten-day retreat, lit by the sun of literary success, but desperate matters in... read more
From the back yard of a rough childhood to the fine gardens he has created professionally, Hamer shares the restorative consolations of the natural world and horticulture.
Her life in disarray, La Stibbe returns to London for a sabbatical and lodges with Deborah Moggach. As ever she's funny, but there is pathos and pain here too.
A riotous memoir of attempting to mount a Bacon exhibition in the last days of the USSR; apparatchiks, honey-traps, the KGB - has the author's liver ever recovered?
A comic masterpiece of a memoir: the subject, chiefly, is the Irish filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst, who once described himself as tri-sexual - "the Army, the Navy and the Household Cavalry"..... read more
CC is the distinguished Australian publisher who founded Virago. Her forebear was transported for seven years for stealing a piece of hemp, but managed to prosper in Australia. He returned t... read more
In 2011 Taseer was kidnapped in Lahore by Taliban-affiliated gunmen; only a few months earlier his father, the governer of the province Punjab, had been murdered. It is thought that Taseer w... read more
An entertaining and affecting memoir of the great pianist's youth and early training, which began in a suburb of post-war Liverpool. Told with candour and simplicity.
The Chinese-born novelist moved to Britain and then to the US. Her memoir glints with her fascination with the West as well as her nostalgia for the East.
The author's investigation of her family's history and her own identity was sparked by the arrival of an anonymous postcard bearing four names that arrived over forty years after those four ... read more
A memoir by this most communicative classicist about her own experiences of suicide, and how she found consolation and understanding of herself and her family through close readings of clas... read more
From a trunk of diaries and letters, the author constructs the lively story of her mother, Celia Paget, and her sister. Lovers and friends included Orwell, Koestler, Camus, Sartre and de Bea... read more
A love hotel on Japan's Inland Sea, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, 1930s' physics: a mesmerising memoir of his parents by the author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Brought up in North Carolina in the Jim Crow era, AT won a postgraduate scholarship to Brown University, worked at Warhol's Factory and volunteered for Diana Vreeland. He went on to become e... read more
Reading this 'novel' is like going to stay with an old uncle, one with lots of stories to tell but nobody to tell them to. Little Keith - as Hitchens used to call Amis - has been waiting for... read more
In 'How To Be A Woman' Moran thought she had life, work and feminism licked. This new book tells how the picture has changed for her, and how tricky it is to be a super-duper middle-aged wo... read more
First of a beautifully published pair of LL's famous memoirs: in this we have his lyrical evocation of a childhood in rural England during the years after WW1. Lovely clothbound edition from... read more
The second volume of a beautifully published pair of LL's famous memoirs, in which the young man leaves his beloved village of Slad for London and then walks and busks his way around Spain.... read more
In February 1938 Georg Klaar, a Jewish lad of seventeen, went to his first ball in Vienna, staying until the band's last waltz. A month later came the Anschluss. The ensuing years brought ch... read more
Wry and robust memoir from the Conservative MP of - amongst other things - 'Plebgate' notoriety. Praised by voices on both sides of the political divide.
He has been making documentaries in Westminster for fifty years, and filmed the last ten Prime Ministers. Here he shares insights and some of the confidences given to him by his subjects whe... read more
The spark for this remarkable memoir was a scribbled list of paintings that belonged to the Parisian author's great-grandparents - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Tiepolo etc - of which she knew nothi... read more
The remarkable story of the author's Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and republished for decades under a fal... read more