Memoir

Memoir

Personal & Family Memoir

Memoirs about families: the ones we are born into and the ones we try to understand. In Educated, Tara Westover grows up in a survivalist family in Idaho and teaches herself her way to Cambridge. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls looks back on a brilliant, chaotic and often hungry childhood with unforgettable parents. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal follows a collection of Japanese netsuke through his family's history, from Paris and Vienna to Tokyo. Moving, sometimes difficult reads, and favourites with book clubs.

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Memoir

Travel Memoir

Three classics of travel writing, each a different way to cross the world. In A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor walks from Holland towards Constantinople in the 1930s, through a Europe about to disappear. In Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger crosses the Empty Quarter with the Bedu. In The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux rides trains from London across Asia and back. Rich in places, people and history, these books suit armchair travellers and anyone planning a long journey of their own.

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Memoir

Illness & Recovery Memoir

Memoirs written from inside illness. Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air is the story of a young neurosurgeon who learns he has terminal lung cancer and asks what makes life meaningful while he still has time to live it. Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon, winner of the National Book Award, combines his own experience of severe depression with history, science and interviews with many sufferers. Honest, deeply human books for patients, families and caregivers, and for anyone who wants to understand what illness does to a life. See Memoir and Health & Medicine for more.

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Memoir

War & Conflict Memoir

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Memoir

Professional Memoir

Memoirs from inside a working life. James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small turns a young vet's rounds in the Yorkshire Dales into warm, funny stories. Katharine Graham's Personal History tells how she came to run The Washington Post and what it meant to publish the Pentagon Papers and report on Watergate. Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air is written by a neurosurgeon who became a patient. Each shows what a profession demands of the people in it: good reading for anyone thinking about work, vocation and what a career is for.

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