Best Memoir Books

Frances Mayes, a poet and university professor, buys a ruined villa in the Tuscan hills, restores it with her partner Ed, and discovers the rhythms of Italian rural life — its food, its seasons, its ancient craftsmanship, and its unhurried beauty.

Naipaul's account of his first visit to India — the ancestral homeland he had carried as an idea throughout his Trinidadian childhood. What he found was a place of overwhelming complexity, poverty, and social denial that he could neither embrace as home nor dismiss as foreign. A devastating and controversial travel memoir.

Ibram X. Kendi argues that there is no neutral position on racism — only racist and antiracist policies and ideas — and weaves this argument through memoir, examining his own history of internalized racism and the process of thinking himself out of it.

Barnes meditates on death — his own, his family's, his writers' — with the clarity and wit that characterize his fiction. Not quite memoir, not quite philosophy, the book is a sustained confrontation with what it means to live knowing the end is coming.

Gerald Durrell's account of his second animal-collecting expedition to the British Cameroons in 1949, and his extraordinary friendship with the Fon of Bafut — a remarkable ruler with a taste for whisky and dancing.

Murakami has run at least one marathon a year for over twenty-five years. This memoir — written during training for the 2005 New York City Marathon — is about running, but also about writing, ageing, and the relationship between physical and mental endurance. The most personal and direct thing he has published: a self-portrait through the discipline of long-distance running.

The continuation of Cecilia Klein's story from The Tattooist of Auschwitz — after liberation, Cilka is convicted by the Soviets of collaboration and sent to a Siberian labour camp, where she must survive again.

Before The Alchemist, there was the pilgrimage. Paulo Coelho's account of walking the Road to Santiago de Compostela — the ancient Spanish pilgrimage route — and the spiritual lessons his guide Petrus taught him along the way. Part memoir, part spiritual manual, part adventure, this is the book that made Coelho a writer.