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.
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
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 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 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
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.
The extraordinary woman who wandered the world gathering herbal lore settled in a cabin in the New Forest for three years in the 1950s, where she raised her children.
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
The great novelist returns to poetry - where his career began - to consider migration, borders and displacement, from his childhood in Sri Lanka to Canadian rivers and Bulgarian Orthodox chu... read more
Born in 1833, Watt was a servant from the age of nine; later, she sold her husband's catch from door to door. After the death of most of her male relatives at sea, she was cared for in the C... read more
Gorer met Fran?ois 'F?ral' Benga, the great Senegalese dancer, in the interwar artistic community of Paris in 1934. This is a re-issue of Gorer's remarkable account of their travels around W... 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
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
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
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 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
"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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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