BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
The shelves of Biography are the ultimate leveller: here, those who have transformed history lie side-by-side with contemporary storytellers exploring both unique and universal aspects of human experience. It's an esoteric bunch - and we bring you the best of it!
Below you will find our selections of the best new biographies and memoirs, and an array of our favourite biographies of all time.
Ghost Stories
Siri Hustvedt
The Migrants
Christopher de Hamel
Jan Morris
Sara Wheeler
This is Also a Love Story
Sally Hayden
London Falling
Patrick Radden Keefe
Being Old...and learning to love it!
Prue Leith
Another World
Melvyn Bragg
Leaving Home
Mark Haddon
Bloody Dangerous
Colin Bell
Walking Shadow
Greg Doran
Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal
Robin Ince
En Route
Peter Fiennes
George Orwell
Robert Colls
The Smallest Restaurant In Paris
Rachel Khoo
Overnight
Dan Richards
My Neighbour, The Dictator
Tari Lang
Like a Cat Loves a Bird
James Bailey
Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life
Samar Yazbek
Ambivalence
Brian Dillon
How to Kill a Language
Sophia Smith Galer
Famesick
Lena Dunham
Baldwin: A Love Story
Nicholas Boggs
The Leopard in my House
Mark Steel
Bird School
Adam Nicolson
The Spirit of Stone
Wyl Menmuir
Enough Said
Alan Bennett
Said the Dead
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
BIG DUNC
Duncan Ferguson
Electric Spark
Frances Wilson
Thirst
John Robins
What Have I Done?
Ben Elton
Bookish
Lucy Mangan
Death of an Ordinary Man
Sarah Perry
Life in Spite of Everything
Victoria Donovan
Strangers
Belle Burden
Called by the Hills
Anuradha Roy
Notes to John
Joan Didion
Two Women Living Together
Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
Underfoot in Show Business
Helene Hanff
All or Nothing
Michael Wolff
Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Honoured
Naz Shah
Hungry
Katriona O'Sullivan
A Hymn to Life
Gisèle Pelicot
Pathemata
Maggie Nelson
Pathfinding
Kerri Andrews
Strong Roots
Olia Hercules
Vocal Break
Lauren Elkin
Children of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
The Eyes of Gaza
Plestia Alaqad
Gertrude Stein
Francesca Wade
The Heart-Shaped Tin
Bee Wilson
Homework
Geoff Dyer
The Colour of Home
Sajid Javid
Feeling Fabulous
Ruth Langsford
If Only You Knew
Lulu
This Dark Night
Deborah Lutz
A Wilder Way
Poppy Okotcha
Year of the Rat
Harry Shukman
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
Barbara Demick
The Loves of My Life
Edmund White
Please Live
Lana Estemirova
William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
Philip Hoare
Between Two Waters
Pam Brunton
The Great Good Places
Margaret Drabble
Half-Bads in White Regalia
Cody Caetano
In Green
Louis D. Hall
Joyful, Anyway
Kate Bowler
Manchester must dance
Mike Pickering
Peach Street to Lobster Lane
Felicity Cloake
The Shetland Way
Marianne Brown
This Is the Door
Darcey Steinke
Ways of Telling
Xandra Bingley
The Wilder Way
Eva zu Beck
Wolf Moon
Arifa Akbar
The Illuminated Man
Christopher Priest and Nina Allan
Maternity Service
Emma Barnett
My Next Breath
Jeremy Renner
The Oak and The Larch
Sophie Pinkham
She Seems Fine to Me
Kimberley Nixon
Young Once
Nigel Planer
All the Best for the Future
Greg James
The Flower Bearers
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
The Hour of the Wolf
Fatima Bhutto
Keeping the Dream Alive
Joanna Cherry
Lessons from a Default Parent
Lou Beckett
Ghost Stories
Siri Hustvedt
Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt’s most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster.
Jan Morris: A Life
Sara Wheeler
She was the twentieth century. Who wouldn’t want to write her biography?
When Jan Morris joined the 1953 Everest expedition and was first to get news of the ascent back to London, she became the most famous journalist in the world. So began a glittering career covering the Eichmann trial, interviewing Che Guevara and scooping the story of Suez collusion. Morris transitioned in the early seventies and documented the experience in Conundrum.
Here, renowned travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler uncovers the complexity of this twentieth-century icon to reveal a mosaic of contradictions. This is a portrait of an astonishing life, and a scintillating story of longing, travel and never reaching home.
Walking Shadow: Love, Loss and Shakespeare
Greg Doran
A compelling blend of memoir, travelogue and investigation, Walking Shadow sheds new light on the past while Doran himself emerges from the darkness of loss.
After the death from cancer of his husband, Antony Sher, Greg Doran stepped down from his role as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and inspired by the surprising history of the company’s own copy, he set out to see how many of these important volumes he could find.
Walking Shadow relives the months leading up to Sher’s death, told via the two men’s raw and loving diaries, and maps Doran’s quest to track down folios worldwide.
Love Divine
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee
An Englishman's Commonplace Book
Roger Hudson
Blood Knots
A Boy at the Hogarth Press & A Parcel of Time
Richard Kennedy
Period Piece
Gwen Raverat
The Road to Waterloo
Ronald Welch
Ensign Carey
Ronald Welch
Terms & Conditions
Ysenda Maxtone-Graham
84, Charing Cross Road
Helene Hanff
Cider With Rosie
Laurie Lee
A Countryman's Spring Notebook
Adrian Bell
A Countryman's Summer Notebook
Letters to Michael
Charles Phillipson
Another Self
James Lees-Milne
Basil Street Blues
Michael Holroyd
The Blue Field
John Moore
Blue Remembered Hills
Rosemary Sutcliff
Boy
Roald Dahl
Brendon Chase
The Cherry Tree
Adrian Bell
A Classical Education
Richard Cobb
Conundrum
Jan Morris
Corduroy
Adrian Bell
A Countryman's Autumn Notebook
Dawn Wind
Rosemary Sutcliff
Escape from France
Ronald Welch
First Light
Geoffrey Wellum
Frontier Wolf
Rosemary Sutcliff
Giving up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel
Going Solo
Roald Dahl
Hons and Rebels
Jessica Mitford
The House of Elrig
Gavin Maxwell
I Was a Stranger
John Hackett
The Lantern Bearers
Rosemary Sutcliff
Lark Rise
Flora Thompson
Mr Tibbits's Catholic School
Ysenda Maxtone-Graham
Portrait of a Marriage
Nigel Nicolson
Over to Candleford & Candleford Green
Flora Thompson
My Grandmothers and I
Diana Holman-Hunt
Said the Dead
Doireann Ni Ghriofa
From the author of A Ghost in the Throat, an unforgettable book - both history and ghost story - that will leave you gasping by its final page.
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE.
A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds -- past and present, imagined and real, fact and fiction -- to make something new and lasting: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.
Famesick
Lena Dunham
In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.
Sleepless
Marie Darrieussecq
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Baek Sehee
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
Do No Harm
Henry Marsh
Zami
Audre Lorde
Stories of the Sahara
Sanmao
Know My Name
Chanel Miller
Down Below
Leonora Carrington and Marina Warner
A Heart That Works
Rob Delaney
Inferno
Catherine Cho
King Kong Theory
Virginie Despentes
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Sontag
Benjamin Moser
Things I Don't Want to Know
Deborah Levy
Super-Infinite
Katherine Rundell
An Apartment on Uranus
Paul B. Preciado
There's Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib
How to End a Story
Helen Garner
Masquerade
Oliver Soden
On Chapel Sands
Laura Cumming
Who Killed My Father
Édouard Louis
Free
Lea Ypi
Wild Thing
Sue Prideaux
A Voyage Around the Queen
Craig Brown
