Published by Vintage Books, 1997, 643 pages As publisher of The Washington Post from 1963 to 1991, Katherine Graham oversaw some of the century’s major stories in the US, such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. This autobiography tells her story, the story of a woman initially unsure of herself, who was thrust into a …
Category: Autobiography / Biography / Memoir / Autofiction
Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?: Jeanette Winterson
Published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape, 2011, 230 pages When she was 25, Jeanette Winterson wrote Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fictionalized account of growing up as an adopted child in a Pentecostal community and coming out as a lesbian. This book, written when she was 50, tells the same story, but this …
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The Girl with Seven Names—Escape from North Korea: Lee Hyeon-seo (with David Jones)
Published by William Collins, 2015, 304 pages This is an extraordinary story about a young North Korean woman who managed to get out of the country. Lee Hyeon-seo was born in Hyesan, a North Korean town near the Chinese border. Her father was in the military, and the family was comfortably off, partly because her …
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Telling Me My Stories—Fragments of a Himalayan Childhood: Kunzang Choden
Published by Bloomsbury, 2025, 273 pages “As I walk through each room, I immediately become immersed in reminiscences of my parents, my brothers, relatives, visitors and attendants, their lives and mine, their stories and the stories of those who lived here before us. Lives from the past can be invoked in each room and through …
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In the Hide—How the Natural World Saved My Life: Gordon Buchanan
Written with Will MillardPublished by Witness Books, 2025, 312 pages “When I was young, if you had granted me one wish, I probably would have chosen to be invisible. If I was invisible, I rationalized, then I could get as close as possible to the earth’s most elusive creatures. Moreover, I could comfortably evade all …
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Why Did You Come Back Every Summer: Belén López Peiró
Translated from Spanish by Maureen ShaughnessyPublished by Charco Press, 2024, 188 pages. Original version published in 2021. “So then, why did you come back every summer? Do you like to suffer? Why didn’t you just stay home? There, in Buenos Aires, dying of heat. Ah. No. That’s right—it’s because you couldn’t. You didn’t have anyone …
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Spirit Run—A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land: Noé Álvarez
Published by Catapult, 2020, 218 pages “We continue to slip in and out of society like ghosts in the night, connecting our hearts and minds with the land and the many tribal peoples who cross our paths every single day, carrying the heavy thread of the prayers of hundreds of individuals. We run through landscapes …
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Driving Over Lemons—An Optimist in Andalucía: Chris Stewart
Published by Sort Of Books, 1999, 247 pages. In 1988, Chris Stewart and his wife Ana bought an old, remote farm in Las Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Andalucía. This is the first book in his trilogy about living on their farm, El Valero. Chris, a former Genesis drummer, doesn’t pretend that living …
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Abid Hasan Safrani—Netaji’s Comrade-in-Arms: Compiled by Ismat Mehdi and Shehbaz Safrani
Published by Orient BlackSwan, 2023, 148 pages. “Abid Hasan Safrani...was a quiet revolutionary who kept himself out of the limelight even while being present at every vital scene and moment of the final phase of our freedom struggle...”—Sugata Bose, Foreword First of all, full disclosure: Ismat Mehdi is my aunt. So this book is personal …
Finding Me: Viola Davis
Published by HarperOne / Coronet, 2022, 293 pages. “Everybody has secrets. Everybody. I guess the difference is that we either die with them and let them eat us up, or we put them out there, wrestle with them (or they wrestle with us) until we . . . reconcile. Secrets are what swallow us.” In …
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