Wry and robust memoir from the Conservative MP of - amongst other things - 'Plebgate' notoriety. Praised by voices on both sides of the political divide.
When the author's mother dies, leaving a strangely symbolic collection of everyday objects behind her, Wicha begins to sort through the belongings and constructs a minute, material history b... 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
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
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?
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
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
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
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 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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The novelist, historian and biographer morphs with supreme elegance into a memoirist, borne along by his gifts of intelligence, wit, culture and scrutiny.
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
"...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
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.
"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 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
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.
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
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