Tag: memoir
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The Red Parts
Before Maggie Nelson was born her mother’s sister was murdered in a shockingly violent way, an unsolved crime which overshadows the family in the subsequent decades and which Nelson has previously explored in her collection of poetry Jane: A Murder. In 2005 the case is unexpectedly re-opened, The Red Parts, as described in its subtitle,…
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The Return – Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, by Hisham Matar
Hardback, Penguin:Viking, £14.99, out now Hisham Matar’s father Jaballa Matar, an active opponent of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail. After 1996, there was no word of what happened to him. This beautifully written memoir concerns not only Matar’s memories of family life…
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Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks
Hardback, Picador, £9.99, out now Gratitude is a final gift from the excellent neurologist and writer of popular science, Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015. These short but beautiful pieces encapsulate all that is best about his writing. Humane, kind, interesting and funny, they offer his reflections on a life well lived from one who…
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The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot
Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out now A young woman flies back into Orkney with her newborn baby – pausing at the airport to introduce the baby to her husband, who is being flown out, in a straitjacket, to a psychiatric hospital. Amy Liptrot, the author of this engaging addition to the nature/memoir selection, was the baby…
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The Last Act of Love – Cathy Rentzenbrink
Growing up in Yorkshire, brother and sister Matty and Cathy are ordinary teenagers living in a pub with their parents. Their family is close, loving, and funny. Everything changes when Matty is knocked down in a hit and run, and suffers devastating brain injuries. Matty’s life is saved, but he enters what turns out to…
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Ruth Rendell & Penelope Lively
It’s a truism that old age brings a reawakening of childhood memories. For almost every writer, memory is a rich resource, but things get especially interesting when they undergo that memory reboot in their seventies or eighties. At the age of 84 – and 50 years since her debut From Doon with Death – Ruth…