Translated from French by Sophie LewisPublished by Les Fugitives, 2019, 190 pages. Original version published in 2017. “[B]ut now it’s over, my novel is damaged, the world is damaged, I too am deeply wounded, something has happened here, something real, but everything can still begin, everything can begin again, I firmly believe it... “I must …
Category: Autobiography / Biography / Memoir / Autofiction
The Measure of a Man: Sidney Poitier
Published by Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins, 2001, 272 pages. “... I decided that I wanted to write a book about life. Just life itself. What I’ve learned by living more than seventy years of it. ... “I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the …
Hidden Lives—A Family Memoir: Margaret Forster
Published by Penguin, 1995, 320 pages. This is a family memoir: by tracing the lives of her grandmother, mother and herself, Margaret Forster looks at how things have changed for working-class women in the UK. This book brings to light the hidden lives, lives often considered too unimportant to be documented. Forster’s grandmother, Margaret Ann, …
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My Life in Middlemarch: Rebecca Mead
Published by Broadway Books, 2014, 309 pages. “Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does …
Suraiya Hasan Bose—Weaving a Legacy: Radhika Singh
Published by Tarapress, 2019, 176 pages. Suraiya Hasan Bose—Weaving a Legacy: Radhika Singh “Suraiya Hasan Bose is a name inscribed into the craft map of Andhra Pradesh. It speaks of a lifetime of passion and commitment to the cause of handloom from pre-Independence India to the present day.” This book pays tribute to Suraiya Hasan …
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Walking with Ghosts—A Memoir: Gabriel Byrne
Published by Picador, 2020, 224 pages. “How many times have I returned in my dreams to this hill. It is always summer as I look out over the gold and green fields, ditches foaming with hawthorn and lilac, river glinting under the sun like a blade. When I was young, I found sanctuary here and …
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The Powerful and the Damned—Private Diaries in Turbulent Times: Lionel Barber
Published by WH Allen, 2020, 480 pages. From 2005 to 2020, Lionel Barber had what he called “the best job in the world”: editor of the London Financial Times. This is Barber’s account of those years and his close encounters with the great and the not-so-great (or good!). As editor of a major newspaper, Barber …
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Of Water and the Spirit—Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman: Malidoma Patrice Somé
Published by Penguin, 1994, 311 pages. “The story I am going to tell comes from a place deep inside of myself, a place that perceives all that I have irremediably lost and, perhaps, what gain there is behind the loss. If people forget their past as a way to survive, other people remember it for …
Small Memories—A Memoir: José Saramago
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull CostaPublished by Harvill Secker, 2009, 200 pages. Original version published in 2006. José Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in Portugal. The village has a charter that dates back to the thirteenth century, “but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes …
We are Displaced—My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World: Malala Yousafzai (with Liz Welch)
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019, 224 pages.Review by Mohan Raj A longer version of this review was originally published in The Book Review, Vol XLIV, No. 2-3, Feb-Mar 2020. Reproduced with the permission of The Book Review Literary Trust. Displacement──within and across countries──of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is …
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