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