ARRIVALS: SARAH MURDOCH

Ordinary people: Here’s proof that every life features its share of drama, adventure, heartache and love.

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, Alexandria Marzao-Lesnevich

This is a true crime story. It is also a memoir. The crime story concerns the 1992 strangulation of Jeremy Guillory, 6, by Ricky Langley, 26, who was found guilty of firstdegree murder. The memoir is that of Alexandria Marzao-Lesnevich, a Harvard law student who interned in 2003 at the Louisiana law firm that got Guillory’s sentence reduced from death to life at a second trial. “The Fact of a Body” describes her visceral reaction to Langley’s crime and how it made her examine an unforgivable event in her own history.

The Mighty Franks, Michael Frank

Michael Frank’s overthe-top Aunt Hank is at the centre of this offbeat memoir about growing up in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles. Hank loves Mike (“beyond life itself”) and Mike, age 8 when we first meet him, is equally enchanted (“My aunt was the sun and I was her planet”). As Mike gets older, the suffocating closeness and excessive personal disclosures at first seem cloying and ultimately predatory. The author’s colourful relationship with this difficult woman (indeed, difficult family) is brought to the page with novelistic flair.

Memoirs of a Muhindi: Fleeing East Africa for the West, Mansoor Ladha

Mansoor Ladha’s memoir is more than the story of a life well lived; it is a history of the tens of thousands of East African Asians — most viciously in Uganda under Idi Amin, but also in Kenya and Tanzania — who were forced to uproot themselves because of racist policies. A journalist, he and his family arrived in Canada in 1972 and made a good life for themselves. Ladha made his mark as a publisher in small-town Alberta, a white society that wasn’t always welcoming to a brown outsider.

A note on the title: Ladha says muhindi is Swahili for Asians.