• The Best Hiking Memoirs - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
  • The Best Hiking Memoirs - A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  • The Best Hiking Memoirs - The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
  • The Best Hiking Memoirs - The Rings of Saturn by W.G Sebald
  • The Best Hiking Memoirs - The Salt Path: A Memoir by Raynor Winn

The Best Hiking Memoirs, recommended by Gail Simmons

Accounts of journeys on foot capture the imagination; partly this is a function of the satisfaction of following a linear journey from start to finish, and partly it is a quality inherent to walking itself—a freeing of the mind. Gail Simmons, who follows an old English pilgrimage route in her book Between the Chalk and the Sea, selects five hiking memoirs that celebrate the liberation that comes from putting one foot after another.

  • The Best Memoirs: The 2022 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist - A Little Devil in America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
  • The Best Memoirs: The 2022 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist - Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin
  • The Best Memoirs: The 2022 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist - A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha by Rodrigo Garcia
  • The Best Memoirs: The 2022 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist - A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
  • The Best Memoirs: The 2022 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist - Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes by Albert Samaha

The Best Memoirs: The 2022 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist, recommended by Marion Winik

Autobiography is evolving; increasingly we find the field dominated by 'genre-fluid' books that plait memoir together with strands of cultural criticism, history, journalism or even poetry. Here, Marion Winik, the memoirist and critic, talks us through the five books that have been shortlisted in the National Book Critic's Circle autobiography category—and describes the face of memoir in 2022.

  • The Best Nature Memoirs - Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home by Amanda Thomson
  • The Best Nature Memoirs - Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas by Jamaica Kincaid
  • The Best Nature Memoirs - Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
  • The Best Nature Memoirs - Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy
  • The Best Nature Memoirs - Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

The Best Nature Memoirs, recommended by Victoria Bennett

Nature is intrinsic to our experience of being alive and reading about it allows us to connect not just with the natural world but with ourselves. Here Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers, a memoir of grief and creating an apothecary garden, recommends five other nature memoirs, highlighting personal and reflective prose by writers including Lauret Savoy, Mary Oliver, and Jamaica Kincaid.

  • The Best New Celebrity Memoirs - Will by Will Smith and Mark Manson
  • The Best New Celebrity Memoirs - Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement by Tarana Burke
  • The Best New Celebrity Memoirs - This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes
  • The Best New Celebrity Memoirs - This Will All Be Over Soon: A Memoir by Cecily Strong
  • The Best New Celebrity Memoirs - Act Like You Got Some Sense: And Other Things My Daughters Taught Me by Jamie Foxx and Nick Chiles

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs, recommended by Sharon Marcus

While it’s easy to dismiss celebrity memoirs as offering cheap, voyeuristic thrills into the lives of famous people we like the look of, when they’re done well, they can give insight into challenges we all grapple with as human beings. They can also be very funny. Sharon Marcus, professor of literature at Columbia University and author of The Drama of Celebrity, recommends the best new celebrity memoirs.