New Memoirs

“One unmissable book is Patriot by Alexei Navalny (1976-2024), the memoir of the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner who was poisoned while campaigning in Siberia, made it to Germany for medical treatment and recovered, returned to Russia, was arrested, and was likely killed in a prison in the Arctic Circle. Navalny was a brave man, and despite the tragic end of his challenge to Putin, the memoir is very funny—in a dark, Russian humour kind of way. The tone is colloquial, as if he’s talking and joking with you. He makes fun of everything, including himself.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“There’s a connection with The Narrow Road to the Deep North because that book was also concerned with his father’s experience of being a slave laborer in the Second World War: he was an Australian captured by the Japanese…what holds this part memoir, part science, part history together is the personal thread. The book begins and ends with a kayaking accident the author, Richard Flanagan, has in a river in Tasmania. He is rescued, but only just. He describes this moment when he is floating above the river, looking down at himself. Is that death?” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Isabel Hilton, Journalist

“Whoopi Goldberg many of us know as a comedian and an actor—movies like Ghost and Color Purple. She is now also a talk show host. But I didn’t really think about her life and background too much. What was lovely about Bits and Pieces is that she’s talking about her mother and her brother, who she was close to, and who have both passed away. So, she’s talking about her grief, but it was such a hopeful, wonderful experience to listen to. She had such love and respect and holds them in a lovely place. She talks about her childhood, which wasn’t free of challenges. Her mother’s life was really difficult. She didn’t know that her mother was sent away for a mental illness for a while. When she returned, she had memory loss, she couldn’t really understand her relationship with her kids, but she faked it till she made it on some level. What I really enjoyed about this listening experience was that Whoopi sounded so natural. You can hear her laugh, you can hear her have these reactions—and she just sounds like she’s telling you a story and discovering the words as she goes along, which is unusual. It didn’t feel as if it was written, if that makes sense.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2024 (so far)

Michele Cobb, Publisher

“Susan Ito’s memoir tackles an important subject—how to know oneself when information key to one’s identity is deliberately withheld by law from a class of people. Ito is an adoptee who does not have the legal right to the files of her birth mother and by extension biological father. Ito is exploring this fundamental question of identity, who she is, who is her family, over the course of the decades that she spends tracking down her birth mother…Susan Ito has written a really compelling story. She moves through time so well! The book covers decades of her life as she searches for her birth mother, but the story never flags, each chapter moves the story forward, and the reader knows what’s at stake emotionally.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2024 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

May-lee Chai, Short Story Writer

“It’s a meditation on his parents, who are Vietnamese Catholics. They came to the United States and ended up in California, where they raised their two sons. It’s about the experience of being a migrant…It’s a very original approach to memoir, that encompasses history, drama and indeed contemporary politics—although not entirely frontally. It’s not just about migration, it’s also a meditation on memory and reality and ‘what is truth?’ But it situates those questions that we all share in a context of biculturalism, of displacement, and of relationship with the past.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Isabel Hilton, Journalist

“This is Safiya Sinclair’s first work of prose. She’s a poet. And you know that when you read it, because her prose is astonishing. This is a story of her upbringing in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica, and it exposes the subjugation under which she lives. The father is the god of the household. Women are tightly controlled in what they can wear, what they can do, who they can be. It explores her parents’ story and her experience of growing up in this environment, her breaking free, and the role of poetry in that. It’s lyrical, a completely delicious read. And it has had a lot of attention for the quality of the telling.” Read more...

Recent Nonfiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Suzannah Lipscomb, Historian

“I’m a big Patrick Stewart fan. Who isn’t? If you aren’t, I don’t know what your deal is. It’s pretty long, 17 hours or so. But just the thought of him reading—honestly when I saw that, I was like, ‘Yes! I want to listen to him tell me about his life for that long.’ And I wasn’t disappointed. He goes through his whole life and career in a relatively linear order. He talks about growing up in the north of England and his entry into stage work. He goes into Star Trek and all the things that he’s done in his career. There’s a lot of, ‘Here are the things that happened.’ But he’s very warm. He just has this really lovely way of talking about and reflecting on his life. It feels very inviting and inspiring. Also, as someone who loves Star Trek, it was really fun to hear some of the tidbits about that. But beyond that, he’s an interesting person, who is really generous with sharing where he came from and what has mattered to him throughout his life as an actor and an artist. Also, he’s such a good actor, he’s—obviously!—great at narrating. He’s just so charming.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2023

Laura Sackton, Journalist

“Just from the subtitle and description, we expected a harrowing story of the author’s imprisonment, and perhaps an indictment of censorship, but this memoir is also an erudite exploration of the power of literature, an appreciation of Arabic novels and texts, and a rumination on language. Rotten Evidence is also laugh-out-loud funny. Ahmed Naji’s distinctive voice is so strong in this book, thanks to Katharine Halls’ brilliant translation. Naji has an amazing ability to crack wise even in the face of oppression, pointing out the ironies of his captors’ illogic, pettiness, and lack of intellectual rigor as well as the indignities of prison life. That doesn’t sound at all funny, but Naji’s observations are witty and bold and sometimes just hilarious.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2024 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

May-lee Chai, Short Story Writer

“The author David Mas Masumoto discovers that he has a secret aunt, who had been made a ward of the state of California at age 12 in 1942 when the rest of her family was sent to incarceration camps. By the time he realizes she exists, the aunt is in hospice care and has been hidden away in a care facility for more than 70 years.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2024 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

May-lee Chai, Short Story Writer

“Matthew Zapruder writes poignantly of finding joy in the precision of poetry amidst the messiness of grief, parenting, and general stresses of modern life.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2024 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

May-lee Chai, Short Story Writer

“My father’s story is of a child who ate roots to survive, then uprooted himself for us, his children, to root ourselves in the West. It was a wonderful sacrifice, and it’s a tribute to him and to his generation. My father’s story is nothing special in that regard. It’s the story of millions of migrants who came and worked in Europe, were used as cheap labor, and then, later on, were victimized, bullied and used as scapegoats for all the troubles we have to this day…I try to be as authentic as possible, but obviously bits have to be fictionalized to gel with one another. Also, I wasn’t around in the 1930s where the novel starts, so this is my vision of how things happened. Was there really a bird flying across the sky? Most likely, yes, but I don’t know. It’s different from my own memories of my childhood. So it is a novel, if we apply the definition of the genre, but it is as authentic as a memoir.” Read more...

The best books on Algeria

Xavier Le Clerc, Novelist

“Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is the powerfully told, meticulously researched and deeply humane testimony of how Daniel Finkelstein’s family history was shaped by the brutality, war and totalitarianism of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships. The book connects the threads of the last century in a way that brings home just how recent its horrors were” Read more...

The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

“I did include the most beautifully written book about Xinjiang I’ve come across, not just during this year but ever, which is by a Uyghur poet. The repression in Xinjiang keeps seeming, finally, to be getting global attention, but then other crises come up and it gets shuffled to the back of people’s minds. There are reasons to try to keep bringing it to the front of them…It’s a very personal story, framed partly around looking back at get-togethers that he had with other artists and intellectual figures involved with film and poetry, and the way that the space for them to live kept on narrowing. They had to become more and more cautious. And then, some of them began disappearing into camps. He is intensely aware that he was one of the lucky ones who managed, along with his family, to get out at a time when the space was disappearing.” Read more...

The Best China Books of 2023

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian

“Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is a graphic novel that was adapted into a full cast performance. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to chat with the author and illustrator Maia Kobabe, who also narrated, and Nick Martorelli from Penguin Random House, who worked together with Maia on adapting it.It’s a fun story in many ways, because Maia is revisiting coming to terms with being non-binary a decade later. So having more time and more experience layered on top of that acceptance of self and this coming out of self is interesting. It allowed them to make some changes in the original text: not just to convert it to the audio format, but also to recognize a little bit of where they are today versus where they were when it was originally written.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2024 (so far)

Michele Cobb, Publisher

“The Scottish novelist and screenwriter John Niven—perhaps best known for cult favourite, Kill Your Friends—has just released a searingly honest account of his fraught relationship with his charismatic younger brother Gary, who took his own life in 2010. Their lives began in tandem and then diverged; while John made his way in the music business, and later as a writer, Gary worked manual jobs and dealt drugs in the small town they grew up in. But what might have been a grim story of descent, recrimination, and despair is, in Niven’s hands, a moving and even exuberant story that reflects the chaotic energy of their brother and the dark humour that he and his sister Linda forge from an otherwise harrowing situation.” Read more...

Notable Memoirs of 2023

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Kate Zambreno is a true writers’ writer; her books are always being recommended to me by other authors. Her latest, The Light Room, is billed as ‘a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty.’ The life of the mind finds intellectual trapdoors that can relieve the tedium.” Read more...

Notable Memoirs of 2023

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“The celebrity memoir that jumps out is Elliott Page’s Pageboy, which charts—among other things—his Hollywood career, coming out as gay, then his later gender transition. Page might be the most famous trans man in the world right now, and his thoughtful, non-linear account of confronting and later making public his identity is not only a glimpse into the Tinseltown lifestyle but a valuable addition to trans literature.” Read more...

Notable Memoirs of 2023

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“The late, great Janet Malcolm’s final book, Still Pictures, was released posthumously at the start of this year. It’s a memoir in essays, inspired by a collection of black and white photographs of her Czech refugee family found in a box (labelled ‘old not good photos’) in her attic.” Read more...

Notable Memoirs of 2023

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Bard professor and New Yorker writer Hua Hsu’s Stay True centres upon the death of a Berkeley classmate in a bungled armed robbery. The Pulitzer judges declared it an ‘elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.'” Read more...

Notable Memoirs of 2023

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Peter Brown, the historian often credited with creating the field of ‘late antiquity’, has a memoir out, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Born in 1935 in Ireland, this is a snapshot of growing up in the last days of the British Empire (his father worked in Sudan) and what it was like as an Irish Protestant in the UK, as well as a lot of details on Brown’s intellectual formation and influences. The memoir is nearly 700 pages but Brown is a beautiful writer, and he has nice, wry observations about all sorts of things. If you know someone who enjoys intellectual memoirs, this is a rather lovely one.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“This book kicks off in the time of COVID. You’ve got all these doctors not knowing what is going on. They’re from all over the country and they’re texting each other on this text chain. What struck me about this book is how well-written it is. It drops us into the fact that there are things which are broken in the American healthcare system. The doctor does a nice job of taking us through what’s happening, but also his career and his insider take on healthcare, which is really fascinating. It’s incredibly disheartening, but he is able to talk about mistakes that he has made and how important communication is with the patient. He really makes you feel something for the doctor within the system because, oftentimes, when you’re receiving healthcare, you’re just feeling frustration. It’s slow, no one is telling you what is going on. To get the doctor perspective was fantastic.” Read more...

Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)

Michele Cobb, Publisher

“This is a story of growing up in rural Wales. The impact of the closure of coal mines and deindustrialization in Wales has been profound and has left many towns and villages in a state of limbo. The industry that shaped their communities is no longer there—without a really definable new industry coming along. It’s a very specific experience and Angela captures it beautifully. Her parents own a takeaway. They’re one of many Chinese families dotted around the country who run takeaways. Several of her uncles are also running takeaways. Having a Chinese takeaway in rural Wales is a genre of experience all of its own. It’s inimitable. The book captures a lived experience, a slice of history. It feels like an important story that’s been told, and she’s told it very well. It’s a very moment-in-time book. It’s rooted in time and place and is very evocative of that time and place.” Read more...

The Best Food Books: The 2023 Fortnum & Mason Food And Drink Awards

Clare Finney, Cooks & Food Writer

“When I began writing—and planting—there was nothing but the newly sown grass and deep layers of rubble and waste in the garden. This barrenness and resistance of this ground expressed the grief I felt far more closely than a beautiful and pristine garden would have done. Even so, I wanted to see what could grow. It was a need really: to balance the repeated experience of loss with the persistence of life. I found that, with each plant that grew, I healed a little of that broken ground, both within myself and in the garden. In doing so, I discovered that it was the very imperfectness of the ground and the resilience of the wildflowers that made that growth possible…In this slow growing, the garden became a conversation, which is echoed in the structure of the book. It became a memoir in itself: recording memories of discovery, of time passing, childhood disappearing, my own ageing body, and the losses that I grieved.” Read more...

The Best Nature Memoirs

Victoria Bennett, Memoirist

“As a Black family in Providence, her parents had a hard time finding jobs. They were so poor they had no new clothes. There was abuse in the family, and abuse in the neighborhood. She talks about getting bullied at school, how her teachers mistreated her because she was Black and also poor. She didn’t smell good because she wet her bed. Her parents couldn’t help with that either, because they were so stressed. What she demonstrates is the deep stress of poverty, and how that stress creates more opportunities for abuse and for discrimination. It’s a harrowing read, but it’s also really inspiring because she talks about how hard she worked to figure out how to get out of it. She was the only one of her siblings who was able to get up and out. She’s really one in a million. This is not an example of how people should do it…If people could read this memoir, they would have a sense of camaraderie with her, of solidarity and love that maybe will expand their hearts so that they can start to take action in the United States to change things.” Read more...

The best books on Hunger in the United States

Mariana Chilton,

“Published on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, his book combines journalism, memoir and travel writing to tell the stories of the people caught up in the maelstrom as, to quote the author, ‘their world fragmented.’ One of the things about this book that really stood out to me was how it gives, vitally, an Iraqi-centred account. I felt that I was getting a 360º perspective of the situation, rather than stereotypes. It’s a powerful book.” Read more...

The Best Travel Writing of 2024

Shafik Meghji, Travel Writer

“This is about a family that is divided. One sister spends most of her life in Taiwan and the other spends most of her life on the mainland. It’s a very personal story. It’s a memoir and family history, driven by the author’s interest in figuring out the things that the family didn’t talk about. There’s a bit of the historian-as-detective in this book, as she tries to work out what was going on when her aunts were young…The women in the story are special and they’re not just passive agents. But there is a high degree of luck, which is something that also figures in this. The author herself, in some ways, was lucky. She benefited from having a relative who could help her get connected to the outside world, even though at an earlier point, you would have said, ‘How unfortunate to have a family whose members were disconnected that way.’ That captures something important about China and the China story.” Read more...

The Best China Books of 2022

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian

“It is a devastating story. It’s a memoir of her marriage and the death of her husband by assisted suicide. Listening to the audio version embodies why author memoirs are so popular and so powerful as audiobooks. You hear her telling this story. It’s an intensely personal story. She’s a professional in the way that she holds herself together as she tells this story, but as the listener, you hear—she can’t help but have in her voice—the emotion and the many feelings that she had as she went through this incredible experience with her husband.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2022

Robin Whitten, Journalist

“Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of an enlightened paragon of recovery—which would have made it fiction, anyway—I decided to do something I hadn’t seen in addiction memoir: fashion an unreliable, often ignorant, sometimes even deranged narrator, who seems to have no idea how much he’s betraying his hypocrisies and self-deceptions. (Towards the end of the project, I read Ditlevsen and—although slightly disappointed to discover I hadn’t been as innovative as I thought—the success of her experiment encouraged me to think I was on the right track.) Then there’s my book’s ending and its ambivalent relationship with redemption—which I won’t say any more about, in case anyone’s interested enough to read it and find out what I mean, but which I think makes it a little different from other addiction memoirs. Although I don’t mind if the book’s called an addiction memoir, in the course of writing it I came to think that wasn’t quite right. I drew as much on another tradition: memoirs about loss of faith…In fact, drugs are absent from most of the book’s action, which is about my sometimes difficult childhood as the son of an evangelical preacher, growing up (or failing to), the catastrophe of losing my faith in my teens—and then my desperate search for salvation elsewhere. Drugs were just the most destructive of the several wrong places I looked; others were literature and women, or the fantasies I projected onto them.” Read more...

The Best Addiction Memoirs

Matt Rowland Hill, Memoirist

“Also important to be aware of is what’s going on in China’s Xinjiang province. No Escape by Nury Turkel is the memoir of a Uyghur (now American) human rights lawyer and tells the story through his eyes.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Spring 2022

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“Act Like You Got Some Sense is a guide to parenting, told through stories that impart lessons Foxx learned about parenting, often by failing as a parent. I would especially recommend this book to mothers, who in my experience hold themselves to (or are held to) much higher standards than fathers. They know it’s impossible to be perfect, yet they still always feel like they’re failing. The main message of this book is that you’re inevitably going to fail, but it’s okay: the most important thing you can do as a parent is show up and be present. If you do that, your children will ultimately forgive your screw-ups. Foxx takes a jokey approach.” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Many of the short chapters are addressed to Strong’s young cousin, Owen, who dies of brain cancer just as COVID starts spreading in New York City…This Will All Be Over Soon is a short book by a highly emotional person who often provides a blow-by-blow account of her feelings. Strong describes having a lot of anxiety and depression which make it difficult for her to get perspective on her emotions.” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Reading This Much Is True is like hanging out with an aunt who’s had a little too much to drink and is letting it all hang out. I thought it was fantastic. At one point, she says, apropos of nothing, ‘I’ve always felt that smoked salmon was an essential ingredient of any social occasion. But it must, like a woman, be moist.'” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Burke is the activist and community organizer who coined the phrase ‘Me Too’ while working with Black women and girls to heal from sexual assault. Her book tells the story of how she came to the key insight of that work: you can’t empathize with others unless you empathize with yourself. “ Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“What I liked most about Will was Smith’s self-awareness and self-analysis. He’s very upfront about how his emotional limitations motivated him to become a celebrity. He foregrounds his growth and change as a person, even recounting some of his therapy sessions. He shares insights about what made him a celebrity and kept him a celebrity.” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“***WINNER of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best autobiography*** It has a real freshness to it. She talks about being Asian American in a way we haven’t quite heard before. She digs into the personal to get to her political points, and that keeps it really lively. She is so honest and clear, and not afraid to be self-deprecating. There’s plenty of autobiography in the mix here, so I was really glad it made it to our final five” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

Marion Winik, Journalist