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.
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
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
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
From the library of Marguerite Littman.
Skelton’s first volume of memoirs covers her youth, war years in Cairo and Athens and marriage to Cyril Connolly; full of gossip and insights int... read more
A collection of essays on the student revolutions of 1968, from the Sorbonne to Berlin, Czechoslovakia Columbia University and the LSE. Spender’s poems are still in print but most of his o... 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
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
Turkel was born in a Chinese 're-education' camp, and finally got to the US where he trained as a lawyer, specialising in Uyghur activism. This is his account of China's horrendous oppressio... read more
Recollections of a long career upstairs and downstairs at Blenheim, Mount Stewart and elsewhere.
Unfortunately this has been delayed until January 2023.
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
Written during lockdown, this is a book by a writer on top of his game. The ostensible subject is endings, last things, work produced in 'late style'... But, this being Geoff Dyer, it's abou... read more
A memoir about silence, from the mysterious things the adults didn't talk about during his childhood, to the vast silences of the Arctic that have occupied so much of his own adult life as w... read more
LCW's 1947 memoir of her life as a gallerist; at the Wertheim Gallery she showed a swathe of English Modernist artists - Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Cedri... read more
All of Lowell's autobiographical writings, almost none of which have been published before, unearthed from the Harvard Archive. Youth, his mental illness, glimpses of Plath, Eliot, Pound, Be... read more
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.
"...It was on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs Protheroe's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim...". Every adult and every childs needs to have Thomas's words and image... 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 toupée, which functioned as an ins... 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
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
A slim but energetic reminiscence about the gardens the Bannerpeople have made as a couple: they are now three years into making their fourth, at their Elizabethan manor house in Somerset. E... read more
Grant is a distinguished actor with a fine narrative voice in his memoir - Withnail of course is here, but also his 40-year marriage to Joan Washington, and his aching grief at her death in ... read more
The novelist, historian and biographer morphs with supreme elegance into a memoirist, borne along by his gifts of intelligence, wit, culture and scrutiny.
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
Gyari died in 2018 after a decade as chief negotiator with China over the status of Tibet. His account will be indispensable to anyone wishing to understand that country's modern history.
From the engaging author of Lady In Waiting, whose late flowering as a memoirist and author of a pair of deliciously silly thrillers make her a pin-up for so many.
Neutral for fifty years in his work for the BBC, now he tells us what he thinks and thought about all those prime ministers, presidents, elections and scandals.
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
Privilege and pain play out in this scintillating memoir that bounds across society's uplands, trips into alcoholism, and bravely clambers onto the wagon of recovery and the making of a new ... read more
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.
Clark worked for several months as 3rd assistant on the film The Prince and the Showgirl that starred Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe - this is a reissue of his famously entertaining jou... read more