The New York Times bestselling author of the Maisie Dobbs series offers a deeply personal memoir of her Kentish childhood and her family’s resilience in the face of war and privation.
After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather’s shellshock, her mother’s evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father’s torturous assignment to an explosives team during WWII;
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A timely memoir about world record–breaking Tyus’s 1964 and 1968 Olympic victories, amid the turbulence of the 1960s, along with contemporary reflections.
In 1968, Wyomia Tyus became the first person ever to win gold medals in the 100-meter sprint in two consecutive Olympic Games, a feat that would not be repeated for twenty years or exceeded for almost fifty. Tigerbelle chronicles Tyus’s journey from her childhood as the daughter of a tenant dairy farmer through her Olympic triumphs to her post-competition struggles to make a way for herself and other female athletes.
The Hidden Figures of sport,
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In the ebullient spirit of Ocean’s 8, The Heist, and Thelma & Louise, a sensational and entertaining memoir of the world’s most notorious jewel thief—a woman who defied society’s prejudices and norms to carve her own path, stealing from elite jewelers to live her dreams.
Growing up during the Depression in the segregated coal town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, Doris Payne was told her dreams were unattainable for poor black girls like her. Surrounded by people who sought to limit her potential, Doris vowed to turn the tables after the owner of a jewelry store threw her out when a white customer arrived.
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Dorothy Gallagher’s husband, Ben Sonnenberg, the author of Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy, died more than a decade ago. At the time of his death, he had suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years and was almost completely paralyzed, but his wonderful, playful mind remained quite undimmed. In the ten sections of Stories I Forgot to Tell You, Gallagher moves freely and intuitively between the present and the past to evoke the life they shared together and her life after his death, alone and yet at the same time never without thoughts of him,
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A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature.
In her fiction, Claire Messud “has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives” (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature.
In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt;
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A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author.
“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges— in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences— she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism.
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