Memoirs & Journals

Though fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the fab four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture. Their ...

17A Keong Saik Road recounts Charmaine Leung’s growing-up years on Keong Saik Road in the 1970s when it was a prominent red-light precinct in China...

Bridget Christie is a stand-up comedian, idiot and feminist. On the 30th of April 2012, a man farted in the Women’s Studies Section of a bookshop a...

Business in North Korea: a paradoxical and fascinating situation is interpreted by a true insider. In 2002, the Swiss power company ABB appointed F...

Anthony Bourdain, life-long line cook and bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential, sets off to eat his way around the world. But being Anthony B...

In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebeca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. A Field Guide to Getting ...

From the teenager in provincial Russia in 1875 to his premature death in Germany in 1904, Chekhov wrote over 4,500 letters to a range of correspond...

In this remarkable memoir of love, loss and literature, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin turns her eye to another fascinating literary life: her...

A Life's Work is Rachel Cusk's funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. An education in babies, books, breast...

In 1956, Sudan gained independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended into civil war and conflict. When the 198...

In 1930s Luang Prabang, the beautiful and demure Kham-Phiou was much admired. On a New Year's Day, the life of the aristocratic young woman changed...

When Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. In A Manual for Heartache she describes ho...

When Hisham Matar was nineteen years old he came across the Sienese School of painting for the first time. In the year in which Matar's life was sh...

This is a personal and philosophical account of schizophrenia that aims to raise awareness of mental health issues. The personal aspect of the book...

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man...

Raja Shehadeh is the most celebrated Palestinian writer working today. To his surprise, when researching his family history, he discovered a great ...

translated by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown The harrowing true story of one man's life in--and subsequent escape from--North Korea, one of the w...

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the wo...

Celebrated in his prime, forgotten in his final years, only to be championed anew by our greatest contemporary authors, Richard Yates has always ex...

John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half h...

Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties ...

Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identi...

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk’s marriage of ten years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the ...

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the comput...

Maya Angelou's volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also know...

All Points North is part-memoir and part-excursion. Charting the rugged and uneven terrain of a writer's formative years - from tax problems to pro...

Twenty years ago, in a series of mysterious, incandescent writings, David Seabrook told of the places he knew best: the declining resort towns of t...

What does it mean to lose your roots within your culture, within your family? And what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely p...

Bright and carefree, Zitkála-Šá grows up on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota with her mother until Quaker missionaries arrive, offerin...

In 2003, a young woman leaves home without telling her family that she is not coming back. She spends the next six years moving from house to house...

illustrated by David Polonsky A timeless story rediscovered by each new generation, The Diary of a Young Girl stands without peer. For both young r...

Rosa Bonheur was the very antithesis of the feminine ideal of 19th-century society. She was educated, she shunned traditional 'womanly' pursuits, s...

From the graphic destruction of war-torn Vietnam to her tumultuous romantic affairs, in the second volume of her diaries, Sontag is profoundly cand...

In late 1944, the Allies invaded the Japanese-held Philippines, and soon the end of the Pacific War was within reach. But for the last 150 American...

translated by Ivan Morris As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersper...

The weekly column Ask a North Korean, published by NK News, invites readers from around the world to pose questions to North Korean defectors. By w...

Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continu...

They called him the 'angriest black man in America'... Celebrated and vilified the world over for his courageous but bitter fight to gain for milli...

Life in McIvor Street, Broadmeadows was unpredictable. Cally Egan grew up expecting and experiencing the best and worst of her 1960s Australian wor...

Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way o...

One of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat explored the interplay of words and images throughout his car...

Cool, talented and transgressive, Jean-Michel Basquiat's life is just as fascinating as the work he produced.Delve into 1980s New York as this vivi...

Packed with witty career advice for budding entrepreneurs, this Star Wars self-help book is full of brilliant business advice and funny quotes from...

This novelty Star Wars book is full of wise words and sage advice from the galaxy's leading rebel, Princess Leia, and many other brave, confident c...

Dare to dissent. Fight for what you believe in. Change the world for the better-and do it all in a lacy collar. Let the "notorious RBG" teach you t...

Move from apprentice to master with assertiveness advice from the Star Wars galaxy's most powerful leaders, including Darth Vader, Palpatine, and S...

Be the best you can be and make no apologies! Whether you want the confidence to take on a challenge or the voice to speak up and right a wrong in ...

Pursue a more mindful life with words of wisdom from esteemed Star Wars mentors Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Luke Skywalker. A balanced mind. Inner ca...