Inside the author’s mind
Get lost in a gripping life story this summer. JAKE KERRIDGE picks the best new paperback memoirs and biographies
MEMOIRS
LADY IN WAITING
Anne Glenconner Hodder, £8.99
LADY Glenconner has become something of a celebrity at the age of 87 thanks to this memoir.
Her stories of life as lady-in-waiting to the prickly Princess Margaret are hilarious and touching and, although her life has been full of tragedy, the stoical Lady G writes with infectious joy and optimism. AN IMPROBABLE LIFE
Trevor McDonald W&N, £8.99
THE autobiography of the Trinidadian journalist, above, who became Britain’s most trusted newscaster, gaining a reputation as a fearless reporter along the way and interviewing Nelson Mandela, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi.
He comes across as modest and lovable, which is unusual for a journalist. ANOTHER PLANET
Tracey Thorn Canongate, £9.99 MUSICIAN Tracey Thorn, from pop duo Everything But The Girl, makes a return visit to the commuter town where she grew up, to examine the nature of suburban life and how the boredom it entailed sparked her creativity.
A lovely mixture of funny, poignant teenage memoir and thoughtful social history. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Alastair Cook Penguin, £9.99 HAVING retired at the grand old age of 33, one of England’s greatest ever batsmen has written his memoirs.
Widely regarded as a nice, somewhat unemotional chap,
Sir Alastair reveals the more ruthless and passionate sides to his character in a book more probing than most sporting autobiographies. TILL THE COWS COME HOME
Sara Cox Coronet, £9.99 THE Radio 2 presenter shares memories of her joyful childhood growing up on a cattle farm – what she calls “a Bolton version of Narnia”.
Warm and witty without being twee. ON CHAPEL SANDS
Laura Cumming
Vintage, £9.99
IN 1929 a little girl called Betty Elston was kidnapped from a beach in Lincolnshire but was safely returned within a few days. Betty’s daughter, Laura Cumming, uses the mystery as the starting point for an investigation into the sad, strange story of her mother’s family and it’s a brilliant piece of detective work. MY NAME IS WHY
Lemn Sissay Canongate, £9.99 POET and playwright Lemn Sissay grew up suffering abuse and neglect in care homes.Then, aged 17, he learnt his real name – he’d thought he was called Norman – and discovered his Egyptian mother had been pleading for the authorities to return him to her for years.
A terrible tale of bureaucratic muddle and racial prejudice but told with great generosity of spirit. Paperback available from July 2. GOTTA GET THEROUX THIS
Louis Theroux Pan, £8.99
THE quizzical documentary maker, below, looks back at some of his greatest hits, ranging from his exposé of the porn industry to his tangles with Scientologists.
But he’s also highly self-critical, exploring why he finds relationships difficult and rebuking himself for failing to uncover the dark side of Jimmy Savile.
An unusually candid and intelligent celeb memoir. Paperback available from July 9. LET ME NOT BE MAD
AK Benjamin
Vintage, £9.99
THIS memoir by a neuropsychologist starts by describing some of the peculiar cases he has worked on but, as the book progresses, it becomes a horrifying, gripping account of the author’s own descent into mental illness. It’s an offbeat and disturbing reflection on what a powerful enemy your own brain can be.
BIOGRAPHIES
THE VOLUNTEER
Jack Fairweather
Penguin, £9.99
THE idea that somebody would wangle their way into Auschwitz concentration camp sounds like a bad joke. But that’s what the Polish partisan Witold Pilecki did in 1940, allowing himself to
be arrested so he could spy on the Nazis and organise resistance. Fairweather’s beautifully written biography has deservedly won the Costa Book of the Year award. CHANEL’S RIVIERA Anne de Courcy W&N, £10.99 THIS book starts as a glamorous gossip-fest, describing how the French designer Coco Chanel and her neighbours lived the high life on the Côte D’Azur in the 1930s.
But it takes a grimmer turn once the Nazis occupy France. De Courcy moves deftly between sparkle and horror. THE FIVE Hallie Rubenhold Penguin, £9.99 YOU could fill a library with all the books written about Jack the Ripper and yet few have taken any interest in the lives of the five women he murdered.
Hallie Rubenhold redresses the balance in this remarkable piece of historical sleuthing, showing us that the victims were living, breathing human beings with their own remarkable histories. THE MAKING OF POETRY Adam Nicolson William Collins, £10.99 IN 1797-98, the young poets WilliamWordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent 12 months as neighbours in the Quantock Hills in Somerset, formulating the poetic and political principles that would inform their great works.
Nicolson tells their story alongside his account of his own year staying in the Quantocks, experiencing the natural world as they did. BEYOND THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS Ursula Buchan Bloomsbury, £10.99 JOHN Buchan’s thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps is as popular as ever a century after it was written but it formed only a small part of the life of this Scottish cleric’s son who wrote more than 100 books and became Governor-General of Canada.
This biography by Buchan’s granddaughter is a stylish, enthralling tribute. THE GREAT SUCCESSOR Anna Fifield John Murray, £10.99 A HORRIBLY compulsive biography of the apparently not-dead-afterall Kim Jong-un, tyrannical Supreme Leader of
North Korea.This big baby’s tantrums and excesses provide darkly comic relief against the backdrop of his insane oppression of his people. THE PATIENT ASSASSIN Anita Anand Simon & Schuster, £9.99 IN 1940 an Indian revolutionary called Udham Singh murdered the elderly Sir Michael O’Dwyer in London.
Sir Michael’s crime was to have been governor of Punjab 20 years earlier at the time of the Amritsar massacre, when British troops slaughtered hundreds of Indian people.
A riveting exploration of an appalling episode in British colonial history and Singh’s obsessive quest for revenge.
THE ADVENTURES OF MAUD WEST, LADY DETECTIVE Susannah Stapleton Picador, £9.99 MAUD West founded a detective agency in 1905 and became a highly successful sleuth, a master of disguise (she made a very convincing man) and a brilliant self-publicist.
This beguiling book is both a biography of Maud and an exploration of how biographers go about their work, as we follow Stapleton on the hunt for information about this forgotten but fascinating figure. THE FATAL PASSION OF ALMA RATTENBURY Sean O’Connor Simon & Schuster, £9.99 IN 1935 Alma Rattenbury was acquitted of conspiring with her 18-year-old lover to murder her husband.
But the press and the public wouldn’t forgive her sins against respectability and she committed suicide not long after the trial.
A harrowing but compelling story of a woman’s journey from war hero to public enemy. OUR MAN George Packer Vintage, £11.99 A BIOGRAPHY of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, tracing his involvement in US foreign policy from the VietnamWar to the Afghanistan campaign. It’s a funny portrait of an often misguided genius and shows how the US has got into such a pickle trying to police the world.