Memoirs to move you
Sarah Aspinall’s glorious memoir charts her relationship with her glamorous mother Audrey who always felt she was destined for glitzier things, even though she was born into poverty in 1930s Liverpool.
Diamonds At The Lost And Found: A Memoir In Search Of My Mother (Fourth Estate, £9.99) moves from the fading seaside glamour of Southport to New York and Hollywood, sweeping us up in Audrey’s endearing quest for true love and happiness.
Inge’s War: A Story Of Family, Secrets And Survival Under Hitler (Ebury, £9.99) is a gripping family memoir in which Svenja O’Donnell delves into the shadowy past of her aloof German grandmother Inge.
She captures Inge’s childhood in East Prussia, how she found love in the jazz bars of Hitler’s Berlin, and recounts her flight from the horrors of the Red Army.
Svenja offers a new perspective on the lives of ordinary Germans during the Second World War.
On a very different note, when Pete Paphides’ parents moved from Cyprus to Birmingham in the 1960s in search of a better life, they had no money and only a little English. There, they opened the chippie that provides the fragrant backdrop to Broken Greek:
A Story Of Chip Shops And Pop Songs (Quercus, £9.99), a delicious, music-mad coming-of-age memoir set in the 1970s and 80s.
For a fascinating read, full of pithy parenting wisdom too, try House Of Music: Raising The Kanneh-Masons by Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason (Oneworld, £9.99).
The mother of seven musically talented siblings – including cellist Sheku who performed at Prince Harry’s wedding – reflects on the years of joy, penny-pinching and crazy routines that went into raising her brilliant family.
Joyous and revealing, Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography Of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees
(Trapeze, £9.99) draws on exclusive access to the late comedian’s extensive archive and interviews with her family and closest friends including Julie Walters, Dawn French, Celia Imrie and many others. It’s a fitting tribute to a pioneering entertainer and her exacting comic genius.
Believing that most people are pretty decent deep down is not only a radical new way to think, it’s also a way to achieve true change in our society, argues Rutger Bregman in Human Kind: A Hopeful History (Bloomsbury, £9.99). This cheering and perspective shattering book draws on a wide range of illuminating examples from the Blitz to Hurricane Katrina.
In the award-winning One Two Three Four (Fourth Estate, £9.99), Craig Brown explores The Beatles phenomenon from 150 original angles. Amid stories about how the band formed, the madness of Beatlemania, their friendships, romances, and families, the Fab Four also get high with Bob Dylan, spar with the Stones, and discover LSD after their dentist spiked their coffee.
You needn’t be a Beatles fan to love this rich, wide-ranging and often surprising read.