Memoir

A war reporter bravely faces death – but not from sniper fire

2 March 2024 9:00 am

As a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Rod Nordland learned to expect many dangers, but a brain tumour wasn’t one of them

A mother-daughter love story

17 February 2024 9:00 am

In her latest memoir, Leslie Jamison describes her pregnancy, experience of childbirth and devotion to her baby, returning repeatedly to the dilemmas of a working mother

The summer I dwelt in marble halls

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Gill Johnson recalls the glorious months she once spent in the ‘gilded labyrinth’ of a Venetian palazzo, employed as an English tutor to an aristocratic Italian family

The mystery of Werner Herzog

21 October 2023 9:00 am

The film director treats us to a dervish dance of anecdotes but still keeps his real life secret, says Peter Bradshaw

Robyn Davidson explores yet another foreign country – the past

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Now in her seventies, the travel writer returns to her childhood in Australia, and the trauma of losing her mother at the age of 11

Too many tales of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Contemplating ‘hedgehog philosophy’ with Sarah Sands, Rowan Williams, Greta Thunberg and other luminaries would test anyone’s patience after 150 pages

Another tragic case involving medical incompetence and cover-up

26 August 2023 9:00 am

John Niven had to fight hard to discover why his suicidal brother was left alone and unmonitored in an Ayrshire hospital, with fatal consequences

Who would be a farmer’s wife?

26 August 2023 9:00 am

‘Some days I feel like I’m drowning,’ admits Helen Rebanks, caught between cooking, housework, admin, tagging lambs and the school run at the Lake District family farm

Sticky, slithery, squelchy, smacky: the authentic Chinese food experience

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Fuchsia Dunlop enjoys a rich variety of dishes throughout China, including drunken hairy crabs, crisp pig’s ears, giant carp’s tails and delicate ducks’ tongues

The man who loves volcanoes

19 August 2023 9:00 am

Clive Oppenheimer feels a deep kinship with the many volcanoes he has studied. When he is airlifted from Mount Erebus, he suffers ‘the heartache of leaving a lover’

Tales of the Midwest: The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, reviewed

12 August 2023 9:00 am

Violence and death are balanced by hard-won, transcendent joy in Beard’s remarkable stories that merge fiction and memoir

The waking nightmare

12 August 2023 9:00 am

After years of insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq derives some comfort from finding herself in the company of Kafka, Kant, Proust, Dostoevsky, Borges and Plath

Violence overshadowed my Yorkshire childhood

29 July 2023 9:00 am

Catherine Taylor describes her anxiety growing up in Sheffield against an ‘uneasy backdrop’ of picketing miners, the Hillsborough disaster and a serial killer on the loose

Beware of pity

29 July 2023 9:00 am

In her powerful memoir-cum-manifesto, Selina Mills tells us what she misses most, what irritates her most and why she won’t have a guide dog

Nostalgia for old, rundown coastal Sussex

22 July 2023 9:00 am

Despite the seediness and threat of violence, Littlehampton was a place of neighbourly camaraderie, fondly evoked in Sally Bayley’s latest memoir

Man for hire

22 July 2023 9:00 am

Shoji Morimoto offers himself to strangers in Tokyo to queue on their behalf, make a fuss of their dogs or simply provide a human presence

A celebration of the music of Jamaica

22 July 2023 9:00 am

Abandoned in infancy, Alex Wheatle grew up in children’s homes, but found salvation in roots reggae – and, eventually, his father in Jamaica

A feminist finds fulfilment in derided ‘women’s work’

22 July 2023 9:00 am

Like many women in mid-life, Marina Benjamin found herself caring for the very young and the elderly – leading her to ‘a radical feminist turn’

A 1,000-mile trek through the Caucasus finally clears the mind

15 July 2023 9:00 am

Scarred by reporting the Beslan school siege in 2004, Tom Parfitt embarks on a gruelling – and ultimately healing – journey from the Black Sea to the Caspian

Ireland’s most notorious murderer still casts a disturbing spell

8 July 2023 9:00 am

After months of conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer, Mark O’Connell got both more and less than he bargained for, says Frances Wilson

Advice to struggling writers

1 July 2023 9:00 am

Broad in scope and beautifully written, this unconventional autobiography contains some of the best advice struggling writers will ever receive

The Anne Frank story continues

1 July 2023 9:00 am

Hannah Pick-Goslar, a survivor of the Holocaust and Anne’s friend in Amsterdam, movingly describes their snatched conversations in Belsen before Anne disappeared forever

Labour of love? What women need to know about childbirth

17 June 2023 9:00 am

Pregnant women are still woefully ill-prepared for the gruelling experience ahead of them and the life-changing damage that often results, says Lucy Jones

The shocking truth behind the Baghdad bombings of 1950 and 1951

17 June 2023 9:00 am

Avi Shlaim claims to have uncovered undeniable proof that Zionist agents were responsible for targeting the Jewish community, forcing them to flee Iraq and settle in Israel

A last-minute escape from the Holocaust

10 June 2023 9:00 am

In a profoundly moving family memoir, Daniel Finkelstein describes the miracle by which his mother, as a child, was rescued from the hell of Belsen