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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022

Featuring buster keaton, jean rhys, bernardine evaristo, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Assured and affecting … A powerful and bracing memoir … This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.”

–Lynn Enright ( The Irish Times )

3. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment …

There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

4. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

5. Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)

13 Rave • 4 Positive

“Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling … With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history … Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years … Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.”

–Emily Bernard ( The Times Literary Supplement )

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

2. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“Compelling … We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take … His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read … The Escape Artist is riveting history, eloquently written and scrupulously researched. Rosenberg’s brilliance, courage and fortitude are nothing short of amazing.”

–Laurie Hertzel ( The Star Tribune )

3. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (W. W. Norton & Company)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan

“…illuminating and meticulously researched … paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken … Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph … is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes …

Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was ‘perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.’ However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time … This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Wall Street Journal )

4. The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Grisly yet inspiring … Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world … The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew—grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another—failure was never far behind.”

5. Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis (Knopf)

8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Keaton fans have often complained that nearly all biographies of him suffer from a questionable slant or a cursory treatment of key events. With Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life —at more than 800 pages dense with research and facts—Mr. Curtis rectifies that situation, and how. He digs deep into Keaton’s process and shows how something like the brilliant two-reeler Cops went from a storyline conceived from necessity—construction on the movie lot encouraged shooting outdoors—to a masterpiece … This will doubtless be the primary reference on Keaton’s life for a long time to come … the worse Keaton’s life gets, the more engrossing Mr. Curtis’s book becomes.”

–Farran Smith Nehme ( The Wall Street Journal )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Best Biographies of 2022

OCT. 18, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

by Jon Meacham

An essential, eminently readable volume for anyone interested in Lincoln and his era. Full review >

OCT. 25, 2022

by John A. Farrell

An exemplary study of a life of public service with more than its share of tragedies and controversies. Full review >

AUG. 30, 2022

by Michael Broers

An outstanding addition to the groaning bookshelves on one of the world’s most recognizable leaders. Full review >

NOV. 8, 2022

by Kerri K. Greenidge

A sweeping, insightful, richly detailed family and American history. Full review >

FEB. 1, 2022

by Dan Charnas

A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius. Full review >

JULY 26, 2022

by Philip Short

Required reading for anyone interested in global affairs. Full review >

NOV. 15, 2022

by Brigitta Olubas

An absorbing, well-crafted profile of a supremely gifted writer. Full review >

SEPT. 6, 2022

by Katherine Rundell

Written with verve and panache, this sparkling biography is enjoyable from start to finish. Full review >

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The 20 Best Memoirs of 2022

From marriage to medicine to masculinity, the year's best memoirs dig deep into thorny topics.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

A memoir can be many things: a teacher, a companion, an inspiration. Some memoirs comfort us, reflecting our shared truths, while others challenge us to step outside of our own experiences. All the best books transport us from our lives into someone else’s, but memoirs take on that burden literally, and in doing so, make readers feel less alone. These days, we’re lucky to be living through a golden age of memoir, with the nonfiction form becoming more porous to allow shades of reportage, travelogue, and cultural criticism.

Still, our favorite memoirs of 2022 elevate the form to new heights. They tackle personal, psychological, and philosophical concerns through topics ranging from ancestry to medicine to marriage. With guts and grace, these authors dive deep into their loves and losses, and come ashore with these dazzling treasures for you to read. (Or give ! What better gift than that of a remarkable true story?)

Stay True, by Hua Hsu

When Hsu arrived at Berkeley in the 1990s, a rebellious undergrad obsessed with creating zines and developing “a worldview defined by music,” he made an unexpected friend. At first, Hsu wrote his fraternity brother Ken off as “mainstream,” thinking they had nothing in common beyond their Asian American identities—but soon, an unlikely friendship blossomed, with the two young men penning a screenplay together and discussing philosophy late into the night. It all came crashing down when Ken was murdered in a carjacking, sending Hsu into a decades-long spiral of grief and guilt. Ever since, Hsu has been trying to write Stay True , a wrenching memoir about who Ken was and what Ken taught him. At once a love letter, a coming-of-age tale, and an elegy, it’s one of the best books about friendship ever written.

The Man Who Could Move Clouds, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

“They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have,” Rojas Contreras muses in this poetic memoir. After a head injury afflicted the author with amnesia, she learned that this had happened before: decades ago, her mother took a fall that left her with amnesia, and when she recovered, she gained access to “the secrets.” The first woman to know “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother inherited them from her father, known to the family as Nono, a Colombian community healer renowned for his ability to communicate with the dead, predict the future, heal the sick, and move the clouds. After Rojas Contreras’ accident, she and her mother traveled to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains and tell his story. That quest, recounted here with mesmerizing prose and bracing insight, sent the women on a journey through the brutal colonial history that shaped their family and their nation. Rich in personal and political history, The Man Who Could Move Clouds is an effervescent read.

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, by Paul Newman

After six decades of Hollywood superstardom, it’s difficult to imagine that anything could remain unknown about Paul Newman . But that’s the particular magic trick of this memoir, assembled by way of a literary scavenger hunt. Between 1986 and 1991, Newman sat down with screenwriter Stewart Stern for a series of soul-baring interviews about his life and career. With the actor’s encouragement, Stern also recorded hundreds of hours worth of interviews with his friends, family, and colleagues. The whole enterprise was destined to become Newman’s authorized biography, but his feelings on the project soured; in 1998, he gathered the tapes in a pile and set fire to them. Luckily, Stern kept transcripts—over 14,000 pages worth. Now, those transcripts have been streamlined into this honest and unvarnished memoir, in which the actor speaks openly about his traumatic childhood, his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, and his tormenting self-doubt. But the highs are there too—like his 50-year marriage to actress Joanne Woodward—as well as the mysteries of making art, and the “imponderable of being a human being.” All told, the memoir is an extraordinary act of resurrection and reimagination.

Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronowitz

When Teen Vogue ’s sex columnist decided to end her marriage at 32 years old, chief among her complaints was “bad sex.” Newly divorced, Aronowitz went in search of good sex, but along the way, she discovered thorny truths about “the problem that has no name”—that despite the advances of feminism and the sexual revolution, true sexual freedom remains out of reach. Cultural criticism, memoir, and social history collide in Aronowitz’s no-nonsense investigation of all that ails young lovers, like questions about desire, consent, and patriarchy. It’s a revealing read bound to expand your thinking.

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanley Robinson

A titan of science fiction masters a new form in this winsome love letter to California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. Constructed from an impassioned blend of memoir, history, and science writing, The High Sierra chronicles Robinson’s 100-plus trips to his beloved mountains, from his LSD-laced first encounter in 1973 to the dozens of “rambling and scrambling” days to follow. From descriptions of the region’s multitudinous flora and fauna to practical advice about when and where to hike, this is as comprehensive a guidebook as any, complete with all the lucid ecstasy of nature writing greats like John Muir and Annie Dillard.

Year of the Tiger, by Alice Wong

In this mixed media memoir, disability activist Alice Wong outlines her journey as an advocate and educator. Wong was born with a form of progressive muscular dystrophy; as a young woman, she attended her dream college, but had to drop out when changes to Medicaid prevented her from retaining the aides she needed on an inaccessible campus. In one standout essay, Wong recounts her struggle to access Covid-19 vaccines as a high-risk individual. The author's rage about moving through an ableist world is palpable, but so too is her joy and delight about Lunar New Year, cats, family, and so much more. Innovative and informative, Year of the Tiger is a multidimensional portrait of a powerful thinker.

My Pinup, by Hilton Als

Has any book ever roved so far and wide in just 48 pages as My Pinup ? In this slim and brilliant memoir, Als explores race, power, and desire through the lens of Prince. Styling the legendary musician in the image of his lovers and himself, Als explores injustice on multiple levels, from racist record labels to the world's hostility to gay Black boys. “There was so much love between us,” the author muses. “Why didn’t anyone want us to share it?” These 48 meandering pages are difficult to describe, but trust us: My Pinup is a heady cocktail you won’t soon forget.

Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami

In this winsome volume, one of our greatest novelists invites readers into his creative process. The result is a revealing self-portrait that answers many burning questions about its reclusive subject, like: where do Murakami’s strange and surreal ideas come from? When and how did he start writing? How does he view the role of novels in contemporary society? Novelist as a Vocation is a rare and welcome peek behind the curtain of a singular mind.

Bloomsbury Publishing Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, by Isaac Fitzgerald

In this bleeding heart memoir, Fitzgerald peels back the layers of his extraordinary life. Dirtbag, Massachusetts opens with his hardscrabble childhood in a dysfunctional Catholic family, then spins out into the decades of jobs and identities that followed. From bartending at a biker bar to smuggling medical supplies to starring in porn films, it’s all led him to here and now: he’s still a work in progress, but gradually, he’s arriving at profound realizations about masculinity, family, and selfhood. Dirtbag, Massachusetts is the best of what memoir can accomplish. It's blisteringly honest and vulnerable, pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy. “To any young men out there who aren’t too far gone,” Fitzgerald writes, “I say you’re not done becoming yourself.”

Pretty Baby, by Chris Belcher

As a financially strapped PhD student in Los Angeles, Belcher fell into an unusual side hustle: she began working as a pro-domme, fulfilling the fantasies of male clients aroused by feelings of shame and weakness. Belcher found unique power in the work as a queer woman, writing, “My clientele wanted a woman who would never want them in return, and at that, I excelled." But as she illuminates in this discerning memoir, the work had its drawbacks—namely, the brutality and blackmail of men. In a lucid examination of power, sexuality, and class, Belcher tells a gripping story about the performance of identity, inside and outside of the dungeon.

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun

When Calhoun once went looking for a childhood toy, she stumbled upon a far greater treasure: dusty cassette tapes of interviews recorded by her father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who started but never completed a biography of the gone-too-soon poet Frank O’Hara. As a lifelong O’Hara fan, Calhoun gleefully committed to finishing what Schjeldahl started, but the task proved to be anything but easy. Like her father before her, Calhoun was stonewalled by Maureen O’Hara, the poet’s prickly sister and executor; the project also revealed the faultlines in her complicated bond with Schjeldahl, whom she longs to impress. In this heartfelt memoir, Calhoun recounts how going in search of O’Hara revealed so much more—like the painful complexities of parents, children, art, and ambition.

Because Our Fathers Lied, by Craig McNamara

How do we reckon with the sins of our parents? That’s the thorny question at the center of this moving and courageous memoir authored by the son of Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s architect of the Vietnam War. In this conflicted son’s telling, a complicated man comes into intimate view, as does the “mixture of love and rage” at the heart of their relationship. At once a loving and neglectful parent, the elder McNamara’s controversial lies about the war ultimately estranged him from his son, who hung Viet Cong flags in his childhood bedroom as a protest. The pursuit of a life unlike his father’s saw the younger McNamara drop out of Stanford and travel through South America on a motorcycle, leading him to ultimately become a sustainable walnut farmer. Through his own personal story of disappointment and disillusionment, McNamara captures an intergenerational conflict and a journey of moral identity.

The Unwritten Book, by Samantha Hunt

One of our most gifted practitioners of the short story makes her first foray into nonfiction with this shapeshifting volume. Hunt’s many-feathered subject is the things that haunt: art, the dead, the forest, things left unfinished. Her investigation centers on an unfinished novel written by her late father, a Reader's Digest editor; “the dead leave clues, and life is a puzzle of trying to read and understand these mysterious hints before the game is over,” she writes. As she considers the novel, she sifts through her relationship with her father, characterized as it was by his alcoholism and their shared love of story. Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write.

Roc Lit 101 Shine Bright, by Danyel Smith

Memoir, criticism, and cultural history meet in this masterful study of the brilliant Black women who shaped American pop music, enriched by the author's own experiences and memories. Some of the figures here will be familiar, like Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, while others are long overdue for the reckoning Smith provides, from the Dixie Cups, a gone-too-soon sixties girl group, to the enslaved poet Phyllis Wheatley, who cleared a path for generations of descendants by singing her poems. In this soulful, enriching portrait of these extraordinary artists’ struggles and triumphs, Smith widens the canon to usher in new luminaries.

Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schultz

Eighteen months before Schultz’s father died after a long battle with cancer, she met the love of her life. It’s this painful dichotomy that sets the foundation for Lost & Found , a poignant memoir about how love and loss often coexist. Braiding her personal experiences together with psychological, philosophical and scientific insight, Schultz weaves a taxonomy of our losses, which can “encompass both the trivial as well as the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone.” But so too does she celebrate the act of discovery, from finding what we’ve mislaid to lucking into lasting love. Penetrating and profound, Lost & Found captures the extraordinary joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

Ecco Press South to America, by Imani Perry

The American South is often cast as a backwater cousin out of step with American ideals. In this vital cultural history, Perry argues otherwise, insisting the South is, in fact, the foundational heartland of America, an undeniable fulcrum around which our wealth and politics have always turned. Fusing memoir, reportage, and travelogue, Perry imparts Southern history alongside high-spirited interviews with modern-day Southerners from all walks of life. At once a love letter to “a land of big dreams and bigger lies” and a clarion call for change, South to America will change how you understand America’s past, present, and future.

Admissions, by Kendra James

When James enrolled at Connecticut’s prestigious Taft School at fifteen years old, she had no idea that, as the predominantly white boarding school’s first “Black American legacy student to graduate since 1891,” she would become its involuntary poster child for diversity. James’ hopes for a positive high school experience were dashed by “a swamp of microaggressions,” ranging from a student who accused her of stealing $20 to an article in the student newspaper blaming students of color for the segregation of campus. Determined that students after her wouldn’t suffer the same fate, she became an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment, but soon felt that she was “selling a lie for a living.” Frank and devastating in its candor, as well as incisive in its critique of elite academia, Admissions is a poignant coming-of-age memoir.

The Invisible Kingdom, by Meghan O'Rourke

“I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: ‘gradually and then suddenly,’” O’Rourke writes in The Invisible Kingdom , describing the beginning of her decades-long struggle with chronic autoimmune disease. In the late nineties, O’Rourke began suffering symptoms ranging from rashes to crushing fatigue; when she sought treatment, she became an unwilling citizen of a shadow world, where chronic illness sufferers are dismissed by doctors and alienated from their lives. In this elegant fusion of memoir, reporting, and cultural history, O’Rourke traces the development of modern Western medicine and takes aim at its limitations, advocating for a community-centric healthcare model that treats patients as people, not parts. At once a rigorous work of scholarship and a radical act of empathy, The Invisible Kingdom has the power to move mountains.

Read an exclusive interview with O'Rourkre here at Esquire.

Ancestor Trouble, by Maud Newton

Who are our ancestors to us, and what can they tell us about ourselves? In this riveting memoir, Newton goes in search of the answers to these questions, spelunking exhaustively through her frustrating and fascinating family tree. From an accused witch to a thirteen times-married man, her family tree abounds with stories that absorb and appall, but taxonomizing her family history doesn’t satisfy Newton’s hunger for meaning. Just what do the facts of a life tell us about who we are or where we come from, and what can our personal histories tell us about our national past? Carefully blending memoir and cultural criticism, Newton explores the cultural, scientific, and spiritual dimensions of ancestry, arguing for the transformational power of grappling with our inheritances.

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, by Heather Havrilesky

No one writes about the agony and ecstasy of relationships with as much gutsy grace as Havrilesky, who has long counseled troubled lovers under the guise of Ask Polly . In Foreverland , Havrilesky turns the microscope on her own relationship, illuminating the joys and exasperations of her fifteen-year marriage. From parenting to quarantining together to bristling at her husband’s every loud sneeze, Havrilesky proves that forever is hard, wonderful work.

Read Havrilesky’s column about her husband here at Esquire.

Best of 2022

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Best of the Year: The 15 Best Bios and Memoirs of 2022

From ruminations on addiction and recovery to genre-bending blends of biography and cultural criticism, these are 2022's best memoirs.

This list is part of our Best of the Year collection, an obsessively curated selection of our editors' and listeners' favorite audio in 2022. Check out The Best of 2022 to see our top picks in every category.

There are few stories more compelling or more intimately told than those soul-baring memoirs that seek not just to recount the experiences of one's own life but to draw some greater commentary on the big existential questions. What does it mean to be human? What is our purpose in being here? How much of who we are is purely self-determined? How much is an amalgamation of all those who have left an impact on us? Like all great autobiographies, the very best memoirs of 2022 muse on those questions, contemplating everything from the impact of art and culture on identity to navigating the labyrinthine worlds of grief and illness, addiction and recovery. Exceptional in both their prose and narration, these listens represent a few of the year's best memoirs.

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Constructing a Nervous System

Audible's Memoir of the Year, 2022 To call Margo Jefferson’s exquisite Constructing a Nervous System a memoir is a bit of a misnomer. After all, this skillfully crafted autobiography dances between genres so fluidly, leaping from the personal to deft cultural analysis in a dazzling display of narrative choreography. Jefferson constructs this stunner of a memoir through a literary lens, one that all but embodies the artists she riffs off of and analyzes, developing a story of the self through the creations, personalities, and perspectives of other artists. In a totally unique style that splinters the form of memoir altogether and frequently sees the text in dialogue with itself, this sharp listen illuminates that so much of who we are is built upon what we love and the things we encounter—be it the lasting presence of a late family member or a voice rising from a turntable. — Alanna M.

Told through the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Javier Zamora’s Solito is a moving account of his perilous, exhausting solo journey from El Salvador to the United States, where his parents awaited him. Zamora was entirely reliant on the support and compassion of his fellow migrants to survive—a story that is both his own and shared by many. Zamora is a poet first, and his delivery is pitch-perfect, lending a lyrical cadence and a well of emotion to an already beautifully crafted memoir. His voice, at times quivering, small, or uncertain, much like his young self, is wielded as an instrument of the story, not an appendix, reminding the listener of the human beings behind the statistics and political platforms. — A.M.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

There are some sounds I consider synonymous with my Irish heritage: the slap of ghillies and the clack of reel shoes, the melodic jaunt of lilting or swell of an accordion, and the entrancing lull of a good story. The latter is embodied in Séamas O’Reilly’s tender retrospective on grief, family, and childhood, all amidst the din of the Troubles. However, a dry tearjerker this is not. Instead, whether musing on his father’s unmatched haggling abilities or offering asides on the oddities of death’s theatrics, O’Reilly brings so much joy and soul into his story that it’s impossible not to smile along. There is simply so much love, life, and heart in this rich memoir that you can almost hear it breathing. — A.M.

The Invisible Kingdom

In this deeply researched and insightful memoir, author Meghan O’Rourke illuminates how chronic illness has become the defining medical mystery of our times, and the source of a painful dissonance between the promises of modern medicine and the lived experiences of so many. Drawing on her own health issues as well as her background as a poet, O’Rourke weaves insights from doctors, patients, researchers, and other experts into a captivating and lyrical narrative. The current spotlight that long COVID has thrown on autoimmune and other “invisible” conditions is a central focus of the memoir, and many people will feel seen—and hopefully heard—by the eloquent voice O’Rourke gives to a monumental challenge. — Kat J.

Lost & Found

I’ve always found something peculiar about “loss” as a euphemism for death. Even still, it feels so apt—that sense that something is missing, at first an acute awareness and in time, an understanding of that absence’s permanence. Kathryn Schulz pulls on this thread in her gorgeous memoir Lost & Found , an account of the universality and ubiquity of those two most human experiences—love and death—as filtered through the loss of her father and the life she built with her wife. As someone muddling through a similar grief journey while trying to nurture a relationship of my own, I found a resonant comfort and hope in Schulz’s thoughts on bereavement and all the life there is still left to lead. — A.M.

What My Bones Know

As someone with a mood disorder, I find solace in listens that take new avenues for exploring the complicated and often isolating side effects of mental health conditions. Reconstructing her experiences with guided meditation and using recordings from real therapy sessions, Stephanie Foo takes a highly journalistic approach to dissecting her CPTSD diagnosis in this vulnerable and intelligent memoir. Unpacking how and why her trauma affects her the way it does, What My Bones Know is not only uniquely suited for audio but constructs a creative audio experience that challenged me as a listener in unexpected and illuminating ways. — Haley H.

Quite the Contrary

This juicy and culturally significant listen, which happens to be the memoir of one of my Audible colleagues, is one of the best I’ve had the pleasure of gulping down. In Quite the Contrary, Yvonne Durant gradually unfurls the mother of all cocktail-party stories—the intimate account of her love affair with jazz legend Miles Davis—against her equally compelling career trajectory as a rare Black woman making waves in advertising’s competitive heyday. Witty, poignant, and funny, Durant lets us into secret spaces of celebrity, culture, and bygone New York, unforgettably brought to life by narrator Allyson Johnson. — K.J.

His Name Is George Floyd (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

This landmark biography from Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa is built on more than 400 interviews conducted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, offering the most complete portrait of Floyd’s life and legacy to date. Star narrator Dion Graham pairs with the authors to create a powerhouse performance that moves from Floyd’s ancestral roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina to the housing projects of Houston and his death at the hands of Minneapolis police, paying homage to his life while revealing its deep intersections with America’s history of racism and inequality. — H.H.

To fans of Brandon Stanton's street photography project and bestselling book Humans of New York, Stephanie Johnson—better known as Tanqueray—is nothing short of a superstar. So, to finally hear the septuagenarian share more unfiltered, incredible stories about being a burlesque dancer in 1970s New York City—and many other necessary reinventions to survive life's ups and downs—in her own feisty, raunchy, badass way is a milestone storytelling event that is at times hilarious as well as heartbreaking. Millions fell in love with her indomitable spirit by reading about her life on social media, but listening to this legendary lady is unforgettable. As she says: "Make room for Tanqueray, because here I come." — Jerry P.

The Book of Baraka

Told in collaboration with renowned journalist Jelani Cobb, The Book of Baraka combines poetry and prose with the history that helped to shape Ras Baraka, the current mayor of Newark, New Jersey, into the man he is today. It’s the story of a young Black boy’s coming of age as the son of one of the most influential and controversial poets and revolutionaries of the era but also of how that boy would later shape his city—first as a poet, then as an educator, and now, as mayor. As a former resident of Newark myself, I have nothing but praise for Baraka’s accomplishments. But don’t just take it from me. His is a story you definitely don’t want to miss out on, and it should be heard from the mayor himself. — Michael C.

Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for any story involving animals, particularly when those little critters are of the motley variety. Needless to say, I was drawn to Laurie Zaleski’s Funny Farm immediately. An account of running a rescue for beasties ranging from cats to horses? That ridiculously cute cover? Sign me up. What I didn’t expect, however, was a truly affecting memoir that extended far beyond barnyard antics, exploring the depths of Zaleski’s difficult childhood, her mother’s remarkable strength, and carrying on a mission inherited. So sure, come for the adorable furry and feathered friends, but stay for the author’s graceful, heartrending tribute to her late mother and a testament to the redemptive power of caring for others, four-legged or otherwise. — A.M.

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom

If you’re a fan of true crime podcasts, you probably already know Rabia Chaudry’s euphonic voice—as host of both Undisclosed and Rabia and Ellyn Solve the Case , her skills behind the microphone are well documented. Chaudry's gifts for performance and storytelling shine the clearer in her deeply personal debut memoir. So named in reference to Chaudry’s childhood nickname, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom is an immensely relatable listen for anyone who has ever battled body image issues, a rumination on those most complicated relationships (with both food and family), and a love letter to Pakistani cuisine. — A.M.

Also a Poet

A true blend of biography and memoir, Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet is a fascinating gem of a listen. Calhoun, the author behind nonfiction listens like Why We Can’t Sleep and St. Marks Is Dead , turns her eye toward a subject matter far closer to home. In examining her strained, complicated relationship with her father, the acclaimed art critic Peter Schjeldahl, Calhoun comes across an unexpected connection between them: the late bohemian poet Frank O’Hara. Twisting in its exploration of family, legacy, and art, this Audible Original—which features exclusive archival audio of artistic giants—is an evocative act of catharsis. — A.M.

Corrections in Ink

Journalist Keri Blakinger has dedicated much of her career to shining a light on the stark realities of criminal justice in America. Her ongoing work with nonprofit news collective The Marshall Project aims to provide a better quality of life for prisoners, with Blakinger advocating for inmate safety and well-being while underscoring their oft-disregarded humanity. But Blakinger’s focus isn’t merely academic—as detailed in Corrections in Ink , she’s lived through the prison system herself. Employing well-crafted, blazing prose and narration marked by an uncommon frankness, she recounts her battle with addiction and subsequent incarceration. Listening to her story is sometimes difficult, painful even, but that’s part of its power—this is a courageous, contemplative memoir poised to change the conversation. — A.M.

Dirtbag, Massachusetts

Kidlit author Isaac Fitzgerald rocketed into the capital-L literary landscape with this astounding memoir-in-essays, its instantly iconic title matched by an unforgettable voice. With his origins firmly in Massachusetts, Fitzgerald grew up with a love of literature and a bohemian sensibility that transcended his rough-and-tumble background and its narrow presentation of masculinity. That foundation serves him well in this fiercely honest, vulnerable, and rowdy collection of reminiscences that range from Boston to Burma (now Myanmar), connecting the dots from Fitzgerald’s former lives as an altar boy, fat kid, and small-time criminal to lightning-bolt musings on religion, race, body image, and family. Both literally and literarily speaking, his voice is one to savor. — K.J.

Best of the Year: The 14 Best Celebrity Memoirs of 2022

Best of the Year: All Genres

The birth of "Quite the Contrary"

Stay informed with these essential political audiobooks and podcasts

Best of 2022
Best of the Year

100 Notable Books of 2022

By The New York Times Books Staff Nov. 22, 2022

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Let’s be honest, every year is a good one for books. Join us in honoring these.

Chosen by the staff of The New York Times Book Review Nov. 22, 2022

Best Barbarian: Poems

Reeves’s terrific second poetry collection eruditely sets out to unite the Western literary canon with its omissions and oppressions, resurrecting an eclectic cast of characters, from Sappho to James Baldwin, to ask the vital yet unanswerable question: “What disaster will I deliver to my daughter?”

The Hurting Kind: Poems

Again and again in this poetry collection , her sixth, Limón confronts nature’s unwillingness to yield its secrets — it’s one of her primary subjects. The seemingly abundant wisdom of the natural world is really a vision of her own searching reflection. “Limón looks out her window, walks around her yard, and, like Emily Dickinson, trips over infinities,” our reviewer wrote.

Now Do You Know Where You Are: Poems

Levin’s poetry collection is about many things — Donald Trump, climate grief, the Covid pandemic — but it’s also the diary of the poet’s painful passage from not writing to writing again: an unguarded literary experiment that freely shares her self-doubts, false starts and dead ends.

The Nobel laureate’s latest novel to be published in the United States follows three primary characters in an unnamed coastal town in German East Africa in the early 1900s, one of whom decides to fight for the Germans in World War I; it is equally a love story and an exploration of war and imperialism.

In Zink’s sixth novel , a girl named Bran harbors writerly aspirations while working for her stepfamily at a nursery specializing in exotic imports. “Avalon” is “the effulgent and clever sort of novel that replicates the experience of learning a new game,” our critic Molly Young wrote.

The Bangalore Detectives Club

This first book in an effervescent new mystery series turns the clock back a century, to 1920s India, where a solitary, bookish, Sherlock Holmes-loving young wife uses her penchant for logic games to solve a garden-party murder.

Bliss Montage: Stories

These eight wily tales feature women (mostly Chinese American) moving languorously through the world, operating with cool detachment, their questionable choices fueling the narratives and heightening the stakes.

The Books of Jacob

At 1,000 pages, chronicling the life of the 18th-century messianic cult leader Jacob Frank, this novel by the Nobel laureate Tokarczuk (newly translated from the original Polish by Jennifer Croft) is epic by any standard: a sort of fictional gospel charged with Jewish folk magic and a sense that God is lurking nearby.

The Candy House

Egan’s sequel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, tells more than a dozen interrelated stories and defies neat summarizing. It’s about music, New York’s East Village, magazine journalism, San Francisco in the 1970s, Gen-X nostalgia, the digitalization of everything and the search, in the face of that digitalization, for forms of authenticity.

Did an unorthodox therapist drive a woman to suicide? This novel of purportedly found documents, including journals and biographical interludes, takes on this psychological mystery while exploring through its nested narratives the possibilities of fiction.

A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

In each of the 99 short sketches in this collection , which was translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, the revered Hong Kong author crafts a miniature fictional world around a particular item from 1990s consumer culture: the “Tomb Raider III” video game, “South Park,” the Hello Kitty franchise.

Checkout 19

Bennett’s enthralling second novel opens in a library and offers a paean to the written word; its narrator is a writer whose life has been blown imaginatively open by the transformative and transportive nature of reading.

Companion Piece

An artist grappling with her father’s illness and the despair of lockdown receives a call from an acquaintance, who presents her with a strange conundrum plucked from a dream. From there, the novel opens into an epoch-spanning story about freedom and restriction, with a 16th-century lock as a unifying motif.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

This mesmerizing horror novel reimagines H.G. Wells’s “The Island of Doctor Moreau” in the Yucatán Peninsula. Moreno-Garcia immerses readers in the rich world of 19th-century Mexico, exploring colonialism and resistance in a compulsively readable story of a woman’s coming-of-age.

Dead-End Memories: Stories

First published in Japan in 2003, the author’s 11th book to be translated into English (in this case by Asa Yoneda) collects five strange, melancholy and beautiful stories of lonely women negotiating the quiet fallout of personal history.

The Dead Romantics

“Six Feet Under” meets “While You Were Sleeping” in this tale of an affair between a heartbroken writer and the ghost of her newly dead editor. It’s an antidote for despair, a romance novel that is frank about the fact that life ends and time marches on but that nevertheless insists: We aren’t a horror novel. We’re a love story. You’ll laugh during the funeral scene and cry when the dance party begins.

Demon Copperhead

Kingsolver’s novel offers a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,” set in contemporary Appalachia and galloping through issues including poverty, addiction and rural dispossession even as its larger focus remains squarely on the question of how an artist’s consciousness is formed.

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

Hannaham’s captivating novel , following the fate of a trans woman who’s on parole after serving 20 years in a men’s prison, mixes humor and horror as its irrepressible heroine encounters the injustices of the justice system.

Everett is a formidably prolific author, whose books include parody and horror and magical realism and more, linked by an interest in academia, language games, Blackness and nonsense. Those themes recur here, in a novel that borrows its name from an early James Bond story and features a math professor recruited by a supervillain.

Batuman’s first novel, “The Idiot,” told the story of Selin, a freshman at Harvard. In this new novel, Selin is a sophomore, and we’re shown another year in the life of an ambitious, bookish student in the mid-1990s. We read what Selin reads — Pushkin, Babel, Freud, Chekhov — and watch her compare it with those she encounters in fiction.

Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith

This graphic novel — the funny and sad tale of a great lesbian writer’s struggle to find herself — is deftly told, and the spare illustrations are infused with idiosyncrasy and energy.

Four Treasures of the Sky

Set in China and the American West in the late 19th century, this engrossing, eventful first novel follows the coming-of-age of a Chinese teenager who is sold into prostitution in California, before posing as a man just to survive. Our reviewer noted that “Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones.”

The Furrows: An Elegy

After losing her brother when she was 12, the narrator of Serpell’s second novel keeps seeing men who resemble him as she works through her trauma long into adulthood. She enters an intimate relationship with one of them, who’s also haunted by his past. This richly layered book explores the nature of grief, how it can stretch and compress time and reshape our memories.

Gods of Want: Stories

These stories by the Taiwanese American author of the gutsy 2020 debut novel “Bestiary” are obsessed with the vagaries of emigration and adolescence. Populated by ghosts and spirits, they dissolve the rigidities of American life into a slipstream of folkloric myth and transform the familiar world into something wilder.

Hokuloa Road

In Hand’s brilliantly atmospheric novel , an out-of-work carpenter from Maine lands a job as a caretaker on a remote Hawaiian estate, where he learns that people have a tendency to vanish and where he soon finds a tank of poisonous sea urchins and an aviary full of extinct birds.

Homesickness: Stories

These eight stories , which are set in Ireland’s County Mayo and beyond, are shot through with dark humor as they tell of lives plagued by illness, alienation, substance abuse, suicide and bad luck.

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water

Set in New York City, this taut and poignant novel centers on a 56-year-old Dominican woman grappling with motherhood, acceptance and loss in the midst of the Great Recession, as she unburdens her life story to a career counselor.

If I Survive You

This debut story collection follows a Jamaican family in Miami, where the narrator struggles to forge an identity for himself and his parents run up against storms, financial trouble and racism. With charm and sympathy, Escoffery devises an intimate exploration of intergenerational conflict.

The Immortal King Rao

The future is grim in Vara’s first novel : Climate collapse is ruining life on earth and a mega-corporation has replaced national governments. The book is “a monumental achievement,” our reviewer wrote, “beautiful and brilliant, heartbreaking and wise, but also pitiless, which may be controversial to list among its virtues but is in fact essential to its success.”

Joan Is Okay

Joan, the hero of this novel , is a 36-year-old attending physician in an I.C.U. on the Upper West Side of New York. Pressures from her family, H.R. and her neighbor throw her in a rage that Wang leaves bubbling beneath the surface. “Wang has given us a character so unusual and unapologetically herself that you can’t help wanting to hang out with her, knowing full well that she wants nothing more than to be left alone,” our reviewer wrote.

The Latecomer

Korelitz’s sparkling novel has all the hallmarks of a beach read: a dysfunctional family (featuring test-tube triplets), a major plot twist, a house on Martha’s Vineyard. But the ambitious scope — and the exploration of race, class, politics, real estate and the art world — make this 448-page blockbuster a story for all seasons.

Lessons in Chemistry

Set in the 1960s, Garmus’s irresistible debut novel introduces readers to Elizabeth Zott: scientist by training, cooking show host by default. One meal at a time, she galvanizes her audience to question the lives they’ve been served.

Liberation Day: Stories

The prevailing mood throughout the author’s first collection since 2013's “Tenth of December” is more muted and uncertain, featuring characters who have either given up or been given up on, and are merely waiting for the End — the final crashing down of the system.

Lucy by the Sea

A successful writer and her ex-husband relocate to Maine from Manhattan at the peak of the Covid pandemic in this loosely connected, deeply moving and quietly funny follow-up to Strout’s earlier novels about Lucy Barton.

My Government Means to Kill Me

In this nostalgic picaresque novel , a Black gay teenager named Trey arrives in 1980s New York City. What follows is a story of sexual and political awakening and life lessons learned at the school of hard knocks.

Motherthing

In this gruesome, blackly funny, utterly original feminist horror story , a woman grappling with the suicide of her evil mother-in-law discovers the woman is more bothersome dead than alive. “My mother is back,” her husband tells her. “She’s in the basement.”

Night of the Living Rez: Stories

In this brash, irreverent story collection , Talty illuminates life and death on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation by following David, a Penobscot boy, through adventures and troubles that evoke loss, intergenerational trauma and more.

Our Missing Hearts

In Ng’s potent novel , a 12-year-old boy called Bird searches for his mother, who is on the run from a government with antediluvian — but also depressingly timely — notions about free speech.

The Old Woman With the Knife

Following a 65-year-old woman in Seoul who is ready to retire from being a hired assassin, Gu’s first novel to be released into English, translated by Chi-Young Kim, addresses societal attitudes on aging in Korea and elsewhere. “An unfortunate series of mishaps draws her inexorably back into the action, yielding a brisk narrative,” our reviewer wrote.

Olga Dies Dreaming

Liberation is at the heart of this debut novel about a Brooklyn wedding planner who is the daughter of a Puerto Rican revolutionary. Gonzalez’s thoughtful story grapples with questions of how to break free from a mother’s manipulations, from shame, from pride indistinguishable from fear, from abandonment, from oppression and from greed.

The Passenger

In McCarthy’s new novel (a companion volume to the forthcoming “Stella Maris”), a salvage diver is unwittingly swept into a conspiracy after he investigates a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico and finds one of the bodies missing. He’s also grieving his dead sister, a mathematical genius whose hallucinations in her final year of life are interwoven throughout the story.

Pure Colour

The Canadian writer’s 10th book is part bonkers cosmology and part contemporary parable. In a creation myth viewed through the keyhole of a single life, a young would-be critic grapples with the loss of her adoring father and her unrequited crush on a woman who lives above a bookstore.

The Rabbit Hutch

Gunty’s dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing debut novel weaves together the dramas of tenants in a shabby Midwestern apartment building with impressive scope and specificity, in a narrative that luxuriates in the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from everyday life. This received the National Book Award for Fiction.

Red Blossom in Snow: A Lotus Palace Mystery

In a genre that sometimes finds it hard to look away from the blinding sun of 19th-century England, Lin’s novel about Tang Dynasty warriors and courtesans, constables and scholars offers romance readers a transportive setting, complex personalities and sweeping, epic emotion.

The Return of Faraz Ali

In this quietly stunning debut novel , a midlevel police officer in Lahore, Pakistan, is sent to cover up a girl’s murder in the red-light district where he was born. The characters feel real, as does the violent collision of their scheming and resignation, the depths of their wanting.

The School for Good Mothers

An overwhelmed single mother leaves her toddler home alone — and lands in a state-run reform school for wayward parents. Welcome to a nightmarish surveillance state, courtesy of an assured and dynamic new voice in fiction. “Who decides who should become parents and how children should be raised?” our reviewer wrote. “If these questions aren’t already keeping you up at night, Chan’s cautionary tale will ensure that they do.”

Sea of Tranquility

In her luminous sixth novel , the author of “Station Eleven” takes up existential questions of time and being, via a handful of characters spread across centuries who have all, in some way, experienced a strange vision and interacted with a mysterious time traveler.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

The winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, Karunatilaka’s novel examines the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war through the eyes of a murdered photojournalist, who has seven days to figure out who killed him and why. His quest shows us a diverse array of groups and competing interests.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This delightful novel follows students at M.I.T. and Harvard who enter the arena of video game development, with hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking results. The book pays homage to the Literary Gamer — “someone for whom reading and playing are, and always have been, the same voyage,” our reviewer wrote.

Diaz uncovers the secrets of an American fortune in the early 20th century, detailing the unchecked rise of a financier and the enigmatic talents of his wife. This exhilarating novel subverts readers’ expectations with each of its four parts while paying tribute to literary titans from Henry James to Jorge Luis Borges.

The Whalebone Theatre

Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, and a big hit in England, this is a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as “Brideshead Revisited,” following a trio of children from their dramatic experiments on the beach of Dorset, to their adult roles in the theater of war.

This novel examines the lives of a group of enslaved people, called “the Stolen,” first as they struggle under the brutality of slavery and then as they try to escape with the help of mysterious, otherworldly interventions. “A central question of the novel is: What level of hope can one attain in Black skin, in a Black body, when Black people are deprived of the right to determine their own lives?” our reviewer wrote.

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty

The first romance of Emezi’s prolific and diverse career features a widowed 29-year-old artist who unexpectedly finds love with an older chef. “I love this book’s understanding of how tightly grief can tangle itself with elation, and how loss might elicit possession,” our reviewer wrote. “It is also riotously, delightfully queer.”

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me

In her new memoir , Calhoun resurfaces material that her father, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, gathered years ago for a possible biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966, at 40. “Also a Poet” began as Calhoun’s attempt to finish what her father couldn’t, but it turned into a story about both the impossibility of reconstructing another person’s life and the importance of trying — and an investigation of the strained, complicated relationship between a creative father and daughter.

American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

Hochschild, a renowned journalist, delivers a harrowing portrait of America between the years 1917-21, rife with racist violence, xenophobia and political repression abetted by the federal government. The book serves as a cautionary tale and a provocative counterpoint to our own era.

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

For many decades, a supposed mystery has lurked at the heart of American foreign policy: Why has the United States supported Israel so staunchly and for so long? Mead’s nuanced history makes the case that U.S. support for the Jewish state has benefited America more than critics allow.

Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings

When Kenan died in 2020, he was best known for his novels and short stories, which filtered his North Carolina childhood through the lens of magical realism. But, as demonstrated here , Kenan brought the same wit, heart and eye to his nonfiction, which in aggregate functions as an informal, wide-ranging memoir.

Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

In this book which traces the lead-up to the Covid pandemic, and the frantic attempts to stop it, Quammen marries an old-fashioned love of colorful language to his passion for detail — an odd coupling that results not just in a lucid book about an important topic, but also in one that’s a pleasure to read.

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan

Pinckney’s elegant memoir of his decades-long friendship with the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick doubles as a poignant elegy to a bygone world: that of New York intellectuals of the 1970s and ’80s, when to be a writer for, say, The New York Review of Books was to belong to a rarefied community for whom thinking, reading, talking and writing represented life of the highest order.

Constructing a Nervous System

The book’s title is a sly description of Jefferson’s project, with “nervous system” referring to the materials — “chosen, imposed, inherited, made up” — that jumble together into an identity. The book is part rumination on the nature of memoir, part traditional autobiography and — always — an engagement with art, including that of Ella Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

Ruminative and rich, this book is a feast for the senses of the U.S. census. Bouk, a history professor specializing in bureaucracies and quantification, digs deeply into the paperwork and politics behind the numbers, with humor, gravitas and a poet’s flair for wordplay.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

Shortly after college, saddled with student loan debt and desperate for a job, Beaton, a cartoonist known for her best-selling series, “Hark! A Vagrant,” signed up to work in the remote oil fields of rural Canada, where the men vastly outnumbered the women. The stories in this illustrated memoir are as gritty and harrowing as you might expect, but there’s humor here, too, as well as compassion and tenderness.

Easy Beauty

In her gorgeous, vivid first book , Jones writes about living with sacral agenesis, a physical condition that gives her “a body that could never be mistaken for symmetrical.” As she rejects the dismissive gaze of others, Jones shows how she stands in the light of her own extremely able self.

Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

Following internecine fandom battles (“vicious and exhilarating, like college football except interesting”), Tiffany, a technology reporter, traces the shifting status of fangirls in the culture at large.

Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021

Indiana was the art critic for The Village Voice in the 1980s and is a multigenre artist. “Fire Season” presents 35 years of his political and cultural criticism, much of it chilling to read in hindsight.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

This revelatory new biography of J. Edgar Hoover suggests that the former director of the F.B.I., often remembered as a cartoon villain, was less an outsider to the postwar consensus than an integral part of it.

Getting Lost

Comprising diary entries from 1988 through 1990, this book, translated by Alison L. Strayer, recounts an affair the celebrated French author and Nobel laureate had in Paris with a married Soviet diplomat who was nearly 15 years her junior. The sex is torrid, and described with a lemony eye for detail.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Combining narrative flair with a skillful deployment of archival sources, Greenidge’s penetrating study underscores the moral contradictions and racial trauma in a slaveholding family best known for two white female abolitionists.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

This vivid book by a historian at Dartmouth shows how much of World War II looks different when viewed from the perspective of Black Americans — many of whom drew parallels between the fascist threat abroad and Jim Crow at home.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Yong’s book urges readers to break outside their “sensory bubble” to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings. The book is filled with enthralling facts, like the way that a dolphin echolocating a human in water can perceive not only the human’s outer shape but also what’s inside, including skeleton and lungs. The book is “funny and elegantly written,” our critic Jennifer Szalai says , and showcases Yong’s “exceptional gifts as a storyteller.”

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

A former journalist dismantles the received wisdom about Hong Kong’s history and replaces it with an engaging, exhaustively researched account of its long struggle for sovereignty from China and — at least as important — from Britain.

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

You know the index as a handy list of subjects and proper names, typically at the end of a nonfiction book, guiding you to find the information you seek. If this sounds obvious and unobjectionable, Duncan’s smart, playful book will encourage you to think again. Duncan tells the story in writing that is “imaginative but also disciplined, elucidating dense, scholarly concepts with a light touch,” our critic Jennifer Szalai wrote.

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

The author, an Oxford historian, recasts the history of North America from a Native American perspective, making clear that Native tribes controlled the continent for millenniums (“On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck”). One of the best books ever written on Native American history.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

This memoir by an acclaimed novelist is about her marriage with Brian Ameche, his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the couple’s search for a painless and dignified way for him to end his life. “Bloom tells this story with grace and tact,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote . “She doesn’t go overboard in explaining her moral reasoning. She doesn’t have to. Her title is her explanation.”

Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris

By putting Kiki de Montparnasse at its center , Braude’s exuberant biography sets out to rebalance the usual Left Bank Paris narrative, in which the 1920s chanteuse, artist’s model, memoirist and iconic Man Ray subject is customarily and reflexively cast as a muse to more famous figures.

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale, charts the struggle to adapt Chinese script to a new world. Her rigorous, engaging history suggests that the language’s evolution reveals the country’s past, present — and future.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

Elkins, a Harvard professor who won a Pulitzer for her 2005 history of British atrocities in colonial Kenya, here expands her canvas to describe the enormous degree of violence required to maintain the British Empire during the 20th century and challenges the dubious claims put forth about Britain’s benevolent rule.

Life Between the Tides

A historian and nature writer explores tide pools — those shifting ecosystems that form where the ocean meets the land — and evokes their tiny inhabitants in luminous, lovely detail.

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

Wulf’s exuberant narrative spans a little more than a decade, when a group of poets and intellectuals clustered in the German university town of Jena in the last years of the 18th century and became known as the “Young Romantics.”

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

In the 1940s, a group of young women who went on to great success (including the novelist Iris Murdoch) challenged prevailing philosophical views at Oxford. As a group biography , this book is “evocative and sparkling,” our reviewer wrote, “sketching each woman’s character with a novelist’s mastery of detail.”

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century

This sensitive and stately biography of the choreographer George Balanchine shows how he reinvented the language of ballet through much of the 20th century. Homans surveys his private life, including his marriages and affairs with his dancers, as well as the beauty and agony of his craft.

The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil

Brown, the English-born, Oxford-educated former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk and The Daily Beast, here dishes on the increasingly wobbly contours of the British royal family. “It’s frothy and forthright, a kind of ‘Keeping Up With the Windsors’ with sprinkles of Keats,” our critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote.

Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe

In this exhaustively researched biography of possibly the greatest athlete of all time, the author calmly lets witnesses express the eternal astonishment about how well his subject did seemingly everything, and how beautifully he did it.

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

It took decades before the masters of modern painting were widely celebrated in the United States. In this fascinating, immensely readable narrative , Eakin documents how the “fanatical determination” of a small group of people helped Picasso, Matisse, et al. conquer America. He manages to braid aesthetics with history and personal details about the leading individuals’ love lives, adulteries and divorces.

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas

Beckerman, a former editor at the Book Review, turns his lens on the small moments — 17th-century correspondence, Chartist petitions, Futurist manifestoes — that led to larger revolutions. In a moment where all discourse seems conducted at top volume, Beckerman mounts an argument for “a realm of relative quiet,” as our reviewer said, “where millions of connections are daily wired together, and which offer to conversationalists thoughtful rather than thoughtless provocations, solid sources of knowledge rather than fathomless wells of ignorance, and even, every so often, shots of pleasurable illumination.”

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

This enthralling biography is a persuasive exercise in rehabilitation. Making her case through stylish prose and a close reading of Adams’s career as a canny propagandist and syndicated news service provider, Schiff suggests that he may have done more than any other of America’s founding fathers to prime colonists for armed rebellion and is undeserving of the neglect in which his post-Revolution reputation has often foundered.

Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” Kirchick writes in this sprawling and engrossing history . Kirchick reveals copious blood on the hands of the powerful, who for decades regarded alternative desires or any association with them as a “contagious sexual aberrancy,” and cause for immediate banishment from mainstream society.

Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy

In this wry and fascinating book , Gajda traces the history of the right to privacy and its (understandably fraught) relationship in the United States with the First Amendment. She examines the tension that has persisted over the years in the tug of war between “the right to know” on one side and “the right to be let alone” on the other.

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

This jaw-droppingly candid memoir is by the daughter of Richard Rodgers (she was also the confidante of Stephen Sondheim and the composer of “Once Upon a Mattress”). A posthumous treasure, written with The Times’s chief theater critic.

In this memoir , Zamora details migrating to the United States from El Salvador by himself when he was just 9 years old, to reunite with his parents. It’s a journey that spans thousands of miles, throughout which Zamora faces uniformed men with machine guns, smugglers, Border Patrol and more.

Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

Abdelmahmoud spent the first 12 years of his life in Sudan identifying as Arab — when he thought about his identity at all. When he emigrated to Kingston, one of the whitest cities in Canada, he quickly learned he was Black. Life in a new country brought with it discomfort but also possibility.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

After excellent books on the history of cancer and the gene, Mukherjee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist, here turns his inquisitive mind and considerable storytelling gifts to the cell, a structure both fundamental and highly varied. His subject may be literally tiny but its implications for medicine are tantalizingly vast.

In his quietly wrenching memoir , Hsu recalls his college friendship with Ken, who was killed in a carjacking less than three years after they met.

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

In this intimate and revelatory book , Aviv writes about people who have experienced mental health crises, and how the psychiatric explanations offered for what they were going through often came up short.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Both “a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism,” as Rundell puts it, this superb book rises to the challenge of introducing the poet and his world to a new generation, encouraging us to read him for how, as much as for what, he wrote.

The Trayvon Generation

The poet and scholar traces the effects of systemic racism and trauma on those who have grown up in the past 25 years, in a profound and lyrical meditation on race, class, justice and the ways young people have processed those issues through literature, music, dance and (especially) visual art.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation

Through case histories and independent reporting, the author elegantly traces the life-or-death effects of the legacy of slavery on Black health today: reproductive, environmental, mental and more. Villarosa “repositions various narratives about race and medicine … as evidence not of Black inferiority, but of racism in the health care system,” our reviewer wrote.

Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka

This work of narrative ethnography by an anthropologist and an outreach worker opens with the discovery of a young murder victim, his corpse discarded at the dump, then widens its focus to take in the lives of Zambian youth who learn the rules of the undercity because they have to.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

O’Toole, a prolific journalist and critic, didn’t think his own six decades merited an autobiography, so instead he wrote a “ personal history ” of contemporary Ireland in which the country’s dizzying 20th-century shifts — economic, religious, moral, social, political and geopolitical — come to vivid life via vignettes from O’Toole’s own life.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm

McKinsey & Company has built a global reputation for professionalism, smarts and ethics. But this damning exposé by two Times reporters shows how its work for dictators and opioid drug makers, among others, suggests a willingness to put profits ahead of values.

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The 33 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022

T here’s a lot more than pumpkin-flavored everything to look forward to this fall, starting with a particularly impressive crop of new books. Beloved authors like Kate Atkinson , George Saunders , Dani Shapiro , and Annie Proulx are returning—and former First Lady Michelle Obama has written another book that promises to be a must-read. There are also exciting debuts on the way from authors like Ryan Lee Wong, who delivers an activist’s coming-of-age story, and Jessi Hempel , who writes about the relief of revealing your true self.

Here, the 33 best books to read this fall.

If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery (Sept. 6)

Jonathan Escoffery’s sharp debut explores longing and belonging through a series of intertwined stories focusing on one family’s quest to find home. Centering on the experiences of Trelawny, the nerdy but lovable son of two Jamaican immigrants who moved to Miami after rising political violence in Kingston forced them to vacate, the stories explore the challenges that he and his family face as they attempt to square two vastly different cultures and survive disasters both natural, like Hurricane Andrew, and man-made, including the 2008 recession and capitalism at large.

Buy now : If I Survive You on Bookshop | Amazon

The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell (Sept. 6)

Little is known about Lucrezia de’Medici, the noblewoman who died at the age of 16 in 1561, but her mysterious death, rumored to be caused by poisoning at the hand of her husband, allegedly inspired the poet Robert Browning to write the foreboding monologue, “My Last Duchess.” In The Marriage Portrait , Maggie O’Farrell , author of the celebrated 2020 novel Hamnet, takes her own swing at Lucrezia’s story. She sets aside the young woman’s imminent death, instead focusing on imagining a rich interior life for the duchess that highlights the tragic contrast between her big hopes and dreams and the stark limitations of her time.

Buy now : The Marriage Portrait on Bookshop | Amazon

On the Rooftop , Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (Sept. 6)

It’s the 1950s in gentrifying San Francisco , and widower Vivan’s three daughters are aspiring musicians who perform at local bars and nightclubs. She wants them to make it big—but as the girls turn into women, they begin pursuing paths that will lead them away from music and their mother’s dreams. The family unit begins to splinter in parallel with their historically Black neighborhood. On the Rooftop jumps between four narrators—Vivian and each of her daughters—and beautifully captures the complicated emotions that arise when a parent realizes that what she wants for her kids doesn’t necessarily align with what they need.

Buy Now: On the Rooftop on Bookshop | Amazon

People Person , Candice Carty-Williams (Sept. 13)

Dimple Pennington didn’t exactly hit the jackpot in the family department—she barely knows her four half-siblings, and her absent father is a people person who enjoys fraternizing with everyone but his own kids. But when she lands in a sticky situation that could lead directly to prison, help comes from a surprising, familial place. As Dimple and her siblings band together, they get to know each other for the first time as adults and begin to come to terms with the role their father might, or might not, play in their lives. The novel—Candice Carty-Williams’ second, after her acclaimed 2019 debut Queenie —is a big-hearted reminder that a messy family is still a family.

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Woman Without Shame, Sandra Cisneros (Sept. 13)

Sandra Cisneros returns with her first book of poetry in 28 years with Woman Without Shame , an electrifying collection of meditations on her life and work as an artist, paying tribute to her Mexican ancestors and the legacy she carries. The author, who made her writing debut in 1983 with The House on Mango Street , looks back on both her personal and artistic experiences as a way of freeing herself for the future, revisiting past loves and family trauma while dissecting topics like politics and religion. Unapologetically passionate, sensual, and expansive, Cisneros’ poems are a tribute to her journey as a creative.

Buy now : Woman Without Shame on Bookshop | Amazon

Revolution and Dictatorship , Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (Sept. 13)

Many political scientists have puzzled over how and why dictatorships that stem from social revolution—like those in China, Cuba, and Iran—are so durable. In Revolution and Dictatorship , Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that the counterrevolutionary conflict triggered by these violent uprisings leads to the kind of solidarity and state-building that allow authoritarianism to flourish. The nearly 700-page book is a clear and comprehensive analysis from the duo who previously authored Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War .

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Bliss Montage, Ling Ma (Sept. 13)

Ling Ma follows up her prescient and popular 2018 debut novel Severance with Bliss Montage , a collection of short stories that finds the fantastical within the mundane. In eight captivating tales that blur the lines between reality and delusion, Ma harnesses the pulsating desire and power dynamics present in all relationships, from intimate friendships and haunting romantic entanglements to motherhood and the invisible yet omnipresent ties of ancestors.

Buy now : Bliss Montage on Bookshop | Amazon

Drunk on Love, Jasmine Guillory (Sept. 20)

Jasmine Guillory’s wine-fueled new romance novel, Drunk on Love , offers top notes of heady flirtation and a satisfyingly rich finish. Protagonist Margot Noble is deeply stressed running the family’s Napa Valley winery alongside her brother, but she finds release in a hot one-night stand with Luke, a handsome stranger and former Silicon Valley techie who just happens to be, unbeknownst to Margot, the winery’s newest employee. As they abruptly transition from lovers to colleagues, Luke and Margot must contend with their simmering attraction and unexpected feelings for each other.

Buy now : Drunk on Love on Bookshop | Amazon

Less Is Lost , Andrew Sean Greer (Sept. 20)

Arthur Less is back for more. Readers met the gay, middle-aged, fictional novelist in Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less , which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. Now, Less is channeling his emotions over his former partner’s death into a U.S. road trip, bouncing from literary gig to gig. Along the way, expect him to transform in surprising—and inevitably amusing—ways. Less Is Lost is a satisfying sequel about resilience and choosing love.

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The Book of Goose , Yiyun Li (Sept. 20)

The deep bond between two girls with drastically divergent destinies lies at the heart of The Book of Goose , which traverses rural France, Paris, London, and Pennsylvania in the years following WWII to tell a tale that twists and turns through immense fortune and devastating loss. Despite their different upbringings and personalities, Fabienne and Agnés share a friendship that’s strengthened by their secret game, the writing of their own narratives. Their relationship is challenged when Agnés leaves for finishing school and, later, a stint in the publishing world. But when she learns of Fabienne’s unexpected death after nearly a decade of physical and emotional separation, it prompts her to tell the stories that they wrote in order to keep her friend’s memory alive.

Buy now : The Book of Goose on Bookshop | Amazon

Lucy By the Sea, Elizabeth Strout (Sept. 20)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout revisits one of her most unforgettable characters, the titular heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton and Oh William! , its sequel. Lucy By the Sea is another Barton installment that confronts the deep and familiar tangles of intimate relationships. As the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold, Lucy and her ex-husband William, with whom she shares a complex friendship, hunker down in a remote town in Maine, away from her life in New York City. Through this complex and isolating time, Lucy plumbs the nuances of human connection.

Buy now : Lucy By the Sea on Bookshop | Amazon

Shrines of Gaiety , Kate Atkinson (Sept. 27)

For nearly three decades, Kate Atkinson has reliably shuttled readers back through time, often to the years during—or between—wars. In her new novel, Shrines of Gaiety , she takes on London in the 1920s, masterfully capturing both its shimmer and its seediness. Atkinson introduces Nellie Coker, an ambitious nightclub owner with six children who’s just been released from prison. The narration shifts between an eccentric cast of characters, including Nellie, her kids, a detective determined to bring her down, two young runaways, and an unassuming librarian trying to unravel a mystery. It’s a deliciously fun, absorbing read.

Buy Now: Shrines of Gaiety on Bookshop | Amazon

Stay True, Hua Hsu (Sept. 27)

In Hua Hsu’s poignant new memoir, Stay True , a coming-of-age friendship provides the catalyst for clear-eyed recollections. Hsu describes how a friendship struck with Ken, a student whose preppy, stereotypically masculine interests were a far cry from his own counter-cultural tastes, became a deep kinship rooted in their exclusion from American culture. Though their backgrounds differed—Ken came from a long line of Japanese Americans, while Hsu is the child of Taiwanese immigrants—they found common ground. After Ken’s unexpected and violent death, Hsu kept his memory alive by writing. The result is this bittersweet memoir, a reflection on the power of friendship and how we can find connection in the most unexpected of places.

Buy now : Stay True on Bookshop | Amazon

Fen, Bog, & Swamp , Annie Proulx (Sept. 27)

Novelist Annie Proulx—author of the short story Brokeback Mountain , in addition to such titles as The Shipping News and Barkskins —has always written carefully and compellingly about the environment. In Fen, Bog, & Swamp , she turns her attention to peat-making wetlands. Proulx brings fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries to life with detailed descriptions of their importance, their history, and how they’re now being exploited. It’s a fascinating deep dive that doubles as a call to action to protect wetlands from climate change.

Buy Now: Fen, Bog, & Swamp on Bookshop | Amazon

The Furrows, Namwali Serpell (Sept. 27)

The fluctuating but omnipresent nature of grief and the unreliability of memory inform Namwali Serpell’s affecting new novel, The Furrows . Protagonist Cassandra’s world is forever changed when her younger brother Wayne tragically drowns at the beach as a child, his body never found. Her family copes with the loss in devastating ways: her mother can’t acknowledge the death, her father leaves to start a new life and family, and Cassandra can’t help but see her brother’s face everywhere, a recurrence that takes on a curious new bent after she meets a mysterious man also named Wayne. With warmth and dexterity, Serpell has crafted a narrative that underscores how loss can show us the depths of our love.

Buy now : The Furrows on Bookshop | Amazon

The Family Outing , Jessi Hempel (Oct. 4)

Journalist Jessi Hempel was the first person in her family to come out—but she was not the last. In her memoir, Hempel recalls growing up in veiled dysfunction. Looking back, she realizes that everyone in her outwardly perfect household was hiding something. Today, everyone in the family has come out: Hempel as gay, her sister as bisexual, and her brother as transgender. Her father revealed that he is gay, and her mother opened up about traumatic experiences that shaped her life. The Family Outing is a mesmerizing debut that shines with empathy.

Buy Now: The Family Outing on Bookshop | Amazon

Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng (Oct. 4)

In Our Missing Hearts , Celeste Ng imagines a terrifying dystopian future where Asian Americans are treated as suspicious threats by the government and citizens, where the children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, can be “relocated,” and where art is under siege for being unpatriotic. For 12-year-old Bird, countless questions swirl around his family’s complicated history. His mother, a Chinese American poet, left when he was 9 years old under murky circumstances after her work became a rallying cry for dissenters protesting the government’s Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. In the years since, he’s learned to disavow both her name and her art. But when Bird receives a mysterious drawing in the mail, he’s certain it’s from his mother—and he becomes determined to find her, uncovering dark truths about his world in the process.

Buy now : Our Missing Hearts on Bookshop | Amazon

When They Tell You to Be Good, Prince Shakur (Oct. 4)

In his searing debut memoir, When They Tell You To Be Good , writer and activist Prince Shakur reckons with his self-actualization in a world inherently hostile to his identities as a queer, Black radical in America. Starting with his experiences as the young son of Jamaican immigrant parents in Ohio, Shakur details his struggles with familial homophobia and the aftermath of his father’s murder. In college, he finds community and political organizing that speak to his values, but realizes there is no easy answer to structural oppression in the U.S; his travels around the world both during and after college reveal to him that the prejudice he has experienced is not exclusively American, though his trips to Ferguson, Mo., where he protested for Black Lives Matter, and to the Dakotas, where he stood alongside activists at Standing Rock, were among his most meaningful. The story of Shakur’s life is a deeply personal reflection that celebrates self-discovery in the face of intergenerational trauma and a violent colonial legacy.

Buy now : When They Tell You to Be Good on Bookshop | Amazon

Which Side Are You On , Ryan Lee Wong (Oct. 4)

In Ryan Lee Wong’s debut novel, Reed, an Asian American college student, is ready to drop out to devote himself full-time to the Black Lives Matter movement. But his mother, who once led a Korean-Black coalition, challenges him to rethink what it means to be an ally and self-proclaimed radical. Over the course of a few days, when Reed is back at home in Los Angeles, his eyes open to what it really takes to create positive change. Which Side Are You On is a thought-provoking and poignant coming-of-age story.

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Making a Scene, Constance Wu (Oct. 4)

In 2019, Constance Wu , one of the most visible Asian American actors in Hollywood, experienced intense backlash after complaining on social media about the renewal of Fresh Off the Boat , the trailblazing sitcom that helped catapult her to fame. The actor gives the situation fresh context in her bold new memoir, Making a Scene . Through a series of candid and relatable essays, Wu details how a lifetime of acting, from community theater to major projects like Crazy Rich Asians , has helped her express the big feelings and strong personality she was always taught to repress. Her voice is forthright and clear as she delves into experiences of sexual assault, racial discrimination, and heartbreak.

Buy now : Making a Scene on Bookshop | Amazon

Signal Fires , Dani Shapiro (Oct. 18)

Dani Shapiro , who most recently authored the 2019 memoir Inheritance , is releasing her first novel in 15 years. Signal Fires is a complicated family drama that opens in 1985, when three teenagers are involved in a terrible car accident that will alter their families’ lives for years to come. Shapiro’s characters’ interweaving stories grapple with the ways that guilt festers when it’s not dealt with—and, ultimately, the unexpected paths that can lead to healing and redemption.

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Liberation Day , George Saunders (Oct. 18)

George Saunders—who’s been described as “the best short-story writer in English”—is returning with his first collection of stories since 2013’s Tenth of December . One piece transports readers to the hell-themed section of an underground amusement park; another to a hailstorm on Mother’s Day, as two women who loved the same man reach their breaking point. Other stories explore authoritarianism, obedience, rebellion, and freedom. Liberation Day is an immersive, inventive treat full of dark humor and uncomfortable truths.

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Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman , Alan Rickman (Oct. 18)

You might know Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard , or Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter . You’ll know him much better, in many more dimensions, after reading his diaries, which he began writing in the 1990s. By the time he died in 2016, there were 27 volumes; Madly, Deeply distills them into nearly 500 pages of wit and passion. Expect heartfelt musings on the craft of acting, politics, friendships, and the meaning of life.

Buy Now: Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman on Bookshop | Amazon

Readme.txt , Chelsea Manning (Oct. 18)

It’s been more than a decade since Chelsea Manning —a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst—smuggled military and diplomatic documents out of Iraq and released them to WikiLeaks. After being charged with the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military records, she was sentenced to 35 years in military prison; while incarcerated, she announced that she is a transgender woman. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence, and she’s since been released. Though Manning’s story has inspired an opera and off-Broadway play, on top of plenty of headlines, her new memoir, README.txt , marks the first time she’s telling her full story in her own words.

Buy Now: Readme.txt on Bookshop | Amazon

The Passenger , Cormac McCarthy (Oct. 25)

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road , delivers one of the most anticipated literary novels of the fall. The Passenger introduces readers to Bobby Western, a salvage diver investigating a private plane crash shrouded in mystery: everyone is dead, with the possible exception of one passenger who’s unaccounted for, and the black box is missing. As Bobby gets caught up in an increasingly tense situation, he continues to be haunted by the death of his sister and the legacy of his father, who worked on the atomic bomb. The second volume, Stella Maris , will be released on Dec. 6.

Buy Now: The Passenger on Bookshop | Amazon

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi ( Nov. 1)

The threat of the end times has long been spun into cautionary tales, but Franny Choi asks readers to consider what it looks like for those who have already experienced an apocalypse. In their arresting poetry collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On , Choi considers the many ways in which the unthinkable has already happened for the most marginalized around the world by way of catastrophe, war, and devastation. Touching on everything from Korean comfort women during WWII to the very present climate crisis, Choi draws attention to the traumas that people have already experienced and calls for solidarity for the future.

Buy now : The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On on Bookshop | Amazon

The World We Make, N.K. Jemisin (Nov. 1)

The New York City mayoral race has long been a point of contention for its residents, something that takes on even greater consequences in The World We Make, N.K. Jemisin ’s anticipated sequel to The City We Became . In a dystopian future, New York City and its human avatars Brooklyn, Manny, Bronca, Venezia, Padmini, and Neek have prevented an invasion by the “Enemy,” an evil force that threatens to destroy the essence of the city—and possibly the universe along with it. But a new mayoral candidate, dead-set on using gentrification, xenophobia, and “law and order” to gain power in New York, may disrupt the tenuous peace of the city, unless the avatars can intervene.

Buy now : The World We Make on Bookshop | Amazon

Saha, Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang (Nov. 1)

Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha opens on a chilling scene in a dystopian future: In the rich and privileged country of Town, a doctor named Su is found dead in an abandoned car. The authorities believe the only place where such violence could have taken place is the Saha Estates, a slum where they happen upon the main suspects, Do-Kyung and his sister Jin-Kyung. But after Do-Kyung mysteriously disappears, Jin-Kyung’s quest to discover what happened to him reveals a truth that could change the course of life not only for the residents of Saha, but also for the rest of Town.

Buy now : Saha on Bookshop | Amazon

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing , Matthew Perry (Nov. 1)

It’s the one with reflections: when Matthew Perry—who portrayed Chandler on the beloved sitcom Friends —announced that he had finished writing his memoir, he noted it was about time he reclaimed his story. “The highs were high, the lows were low,” he wrote . “But I have lived to tell the tale, even though at times it looked like I wouldn’t.” In Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing , Perry recounts his childhood, TV career, struggles with addiction, and path to sobriety. Expect plenty of the actor’s signature humor and warmth.

Buy Now: Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing on Bookshop | Amazon

Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz (Nov. 1)

For over four decades, Jerry Saltz’s voice has been one of the most valued in the art world as both a critic and a champion of artistic works and their creators. Now, the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine award winner takes stock of the cultural landscape over the last two decades to make the case that art in all its forms, from the provocative to the political, is vital for our existence. His latest book, Art Is Life , covers everything from the trailblazing career of Kara Walker and the controversial work of Jeff Koons to Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s groundbreaking portraits of President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Buy now : Art Is Life on Bookshop | Amazon

Now Is Not the Time to Panic , Kevin Wilson (Nov. 8)

Kevin Wilson’s most recent novel, 2019’s Nothing to See Here , centered on two children with the unique ability to spontaneously combust. He returns with another quirky offering, this time about teenage misfits Frankie and Zeke, who create a cryptic poster and hang hundreds of copies around town. The poster takes on a life on its own, with rumors swirling that it was designed by kidnappers or Satanists—and incites a panic with deadly consequences. Frankie and Zeke hide their involvement and their friendship dissolves. But years later, Frankie receives a call from a journalist who’s digging into the events and claims to know who was responsible for the poster, threatening to turn her carefully constructed life upside down.

Buy Now: Now Is Not the Time to Panic on Bookshop | Amazon

The Light We Carry , Michelle Obama (Nov. 15)

Four years after her blockbuster hit Becoming , Michelle Obama is releasing another book: The Light We Carry , which promises to dispense advice on staying hopeful in challenging times. The former First Lady, who will also narrate the audio version of the book, has said she’ll describe her most beneficial habits, like “starting kind” and assembling a “kitchen table” of confidantes. It’s arriving just in time for book clubs to adopt it as their last read of the year.

Buy Now: The Light We Carry on Bookshop | Amazon

Butts: A Backstory, Heather Radke (Nov. 22)

With Butts: A Backstory , journalist and Radiolab contributor Heather Radke invites readers to look back at it—that is, a nearly two-century history of obsession with the female posterior. From 19th-century bustles to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit “Baby Got Back,” women’s backsides have been a point of cultural fascination, criticism, and praise. Delving into this history, Radke provides fresh insights into why butts hold such sway over society—and what that says about our relationships to race, class, gender, and power.

Buy now : Butts: A Backstory on Bookshop | Amazon

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Nonfiction Books » Best Biographies » New Biography

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Last updated: May 09, 2024

The best new biographies. We scrutinized the bookshelves to bring you the best of the recent biographies. "There’s no rubric for what makes a great biography—they just provide a sense of what it means to be human"—Elizabeth Taylor, author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics' Circle biography committee.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

By nicholas shakespeare.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by biographer and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare, is now out in the US. It's the first authorized biography of Fleming since 1966, lengthy (800+ pages) but very readable. If you're curious about the man who created James Bond , this is the biography to read about him. Fleming served in naval intelligence during World War II, lived life to the full on all fronts, and died at age 56 of a heart attack.

Read expert recommendations

Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

By natalie dykstra.

Anyone who has visited Boston and is at all interested in art and museums will be aware of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with its Venetian palace inner courtyard and extraordinary art collection, including works by Titian, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Vermeer (some, sadly, stolen in an art heist in 1990), Matisse, Whistler and Sargent. Fewer will have reflected on the life of the woman who created it. Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra is not the first biography of Mrs. Jack (as she was mainly known in her lifetime) but it's one that tries to give a sense of her inner life and how that played out vis-à-vis her art collecting. It's an excellent book because you learn a lot: about art and how it was collected, but also what life was like in the 19th and early 20th centuries for a very wealthy American woman/family. The book will also have you in tears at times, at the sheer scale of tragedy people had to live with before the advent of vaccines and antibiotics.

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative

By jennifer burns.

Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns is a really interesting biography of the brilliant economist who, more than anyone, is credited with turning the idea that markets are good and governments are bad into a reigning ideology in many countries for the last half-century. (For its specific effects in Chile, The Chile Project , also published in 2023, is well worth reading). Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is, apparently, the first full-length biography of Friedman based on archival research. It's very readable and a great way into the debates which remain with us, even though Friedman himself died in 2006, at the age of 94.

Books by Milton Friedman , recommended on Five Books

Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan

By ruby lal.

“Gulbadan was the daughter of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, and the aunt of Akbar, sometimes called ‘the Great.’ Gulbadan was born in Kabul, ended up in Akbar’s harem in Agra, and eventually went on a trip to Saudi Arabia, to visit the holy places of Islam. Lal manages to recreate all this beautifully.” Read more...

Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024

Sophie Roell , Journalist

Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair

By maurice samuels.

“One very readable book from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series is a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, the man at the centre of the Dreyfus Affair. It was a cause célèbre that rocked 19th-century France, but as historian Maurice Samuels points out in the introduction, not much attention has been paid to the life of the man most affected by it. If all you knew about Dreyfus was that he was a Jewish army officer who was wrongfully convicted of treason and imprisoned on Devil’s Island, this is a nice way to find out more (and if you’ve never heard of him at all, start with T he Man on Devil’s Island or the historical thriller An Officer and a Spy).” Read more...

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

By lyndsey stonebridge.

We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge is an excellent, well-written book that shows why Hannah Arendt is still an important and sometimes controversial thinker today.

Monet: The Restless Vision

By jackie wullschläger.

“As I read it, at first Monet is not an attractive character. You think, ‘This is absolutely why, as a woman, you should not live with an artist.’ It’s full of scrounging letters, and the suffering of these women who are, of course, immortalised in beautiful portraits by him, but following him around or being abandoned by him…She explains quite how it is that he comes to revolutionise art and to create these ravishing works that are just luminous. She writes very beautifully about it. As life goes on, instead of being improvident, he becomes very wealthy. Finally, you see him at Giverny employing six gardeners, one of whom has to dust off the water lilies! There’s great pathos. You’re won over to him, as his life goes on, and see how he, too, has suffered for his art. It’s a rich and moving account.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize

Susan Brigden , Historian

Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor

By donald j. robertson.

“In another Yale series, Ancient Lives, there’s a new biography of the 2nd-century Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, whose book, Meditations , is often recommended for those interested in the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. It’s by Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavioural psychotherapist and a firm believer that Stoicism has much to teach us in our daily lives.” Read more...

Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell

By d j taylor.

“Orwell biographer D.J. Taylor has a new book out… Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell . You’ll learn a lot about Orwell’s life and how it made its way into his books.” Read more...

Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story

By sophie elmhirst.

“ Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmshirst is about an ordinary couple from Derby who set out to sail around the world in the early 1970s. The reason we know about them is that theirs turned into a survival story: their boat was sunk by a sperm whale and they were left adrift on a raft in the Pacific Ocean for 118 days. It’s an easy and engaging read: I started it one evening after dinner and stayed up to finish it just after midnight.” Read more...

King: A Life

By jonathan eig.

🏆 Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

“I was excited to see a new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. by American journalist and biographer Jonathan Eig. Like many foreigners who spend time in the US, I was aware who Martin Luther King Jr. was and his importance, but not the details nor why he shared a name with a 16th-century German monk (whom my history professors at Oxford seemed to think important). This biography is highly readable and, according to the introduction, draws on new information, particularly on Mike’s father.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023

The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment

By s. frederick starr.

“Also hailing from central Asia are the main protagonists of The Genius of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni and the Lost Enlightenment by S. Frederick Starr. It’s a dual biography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna) and Biruni, key figures in the flowering of science and philosophy that took place in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. Both men were born in the 10th century in modern-day Uzbekistan. This is an important period for anyone interested in the history of science, a missing gap in Western curricula (at least in my day).” Read more...

by Walter Isaacson

“Isaacson sat at the feet of Musk – literally, in the same room as Musk – for two or three years, I think. The whole second half of the book is about the last three years, so it’s very detailed. It’s very much reporting. He doesn’t step back except right at the end, and then to make a rather general point about how you need the good and the bad in order to have a genius…Isaacson doesn’t say, ‘I’m now going to make a judgment on what’s happened.’ It’s very much an account of being with this extraordinary, tempestuous entrepreneur…It’s a long book with very short chapters. It’s quite punchy, in that sense of ‘OK now we’re moving on’ which gives you a bit of an impression of what it must be like to live with or work with Elon Musk. But it doesn’t then step back and say how significant it is.” Read more...

The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

Andrew Hill , Journalist

Vergil: The Poet's Life

By sarah ruden.

“One interesting book for fans of the great epic poem of the Augustus years, the Aeneid, is a literary biography of its author, Vergil. Vergil: The Poet’s Life is by American scholar and translator Sarah Ruden. Other than his poem, we don’t know much about the author, so Ruden has to do a lot of heavy lifting, but why not? Ruden recently translated the Aeneid , and you can also read her Five Books interview about Vergil.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023

Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer

By lorraine byrne bodley.

“Other biographies published recently include one about the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828). It’s called Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, a professor of musicology at Maynooth University. Schubert famously died aged just 31, but striking early in the book is how old that was compared to some of his siblings. This book is written so it’s accessible to non-musicians, but this is a serious work of scholarship.” Read more...

Spinoza: Life and Legacy

By jonathan israel.

Spinoza: Life and Legacy is a new biography of the 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza , by historian Jonathan Israel. Israel is a leading historian of early modern Europe, and an expert on the Dutch Republic, the tolerant—by 17th-century standards—world in which Spinoza grew up. His parents had fled Portugal because of the Inquisition and, as Israel points out, that "dark Iberian context was a crucial factor in Spinoza's background, early life, and formation and likewise an essential dimension for understanding his thought generally." The book builds on Steven Nadler's biography of Spinoza , and at more than 1,200 pages is absolutely not for beginners. Rather, it's for those seeking to think deeply—and disagree with Israel at times, no doubt—about Spinoza and his life and thought.

(If you're looking for a more introductory approach to Spinoza, our interview about him is with Steven Nadler )

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

By beverly gage.

🏆 Winner of the 2023 NBCC Biography Award

“Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents, of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: ‘We cannot know our own story without understanding his.'” Read more...

The Best Biographies of 2023: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist

Elizabeth Taylor , Biographer

Ramesses the Great: Egypt's King of Kings

By toby wilkinson.

“Other biographies out these past three months include Ramesses the Great by Toby Wilkinson, the Cambridge Egyptologist…Both rulers spent a lot of time and energy building their reputations, which may be why we’re reading about them three millennia…later” Read more...

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times

By aaron sachs.

“A biography about writing biography! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis. Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.” Read more...

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century

By jennifer homans.

“It’s a biography of a man who almost walks with the 20th century, so you get all that history. Balanchine was of Georgian heritage and grew up in Tsarist Russia. Early on, he was selected to go into the Imperial Ballet School, so he’s on that track. Then, the Russian Revolution happens and everything falls into turmoil on all fronts. There’s a lot of hunger, violence, and chaos…Balanchine eventually winds up in America, where he meets well-connected benefactors and cultural managers. They feel that American ballet hadn’t yet achieved the same level of institutional high standing as Europe. They have the ambition to rectify that and are keen to use people like Balanchine and others who had come over to the US. Eventually, Balanchine sets up the New York City Ballet Company, which, in effect, becomes the country’s national ballet.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Frederick Studemann , Journalist

Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan

By felipe fernández-armesto.

Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan is historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's takedown of the Portuguese explorer whose disastrous expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe.

Rebels Against the Raj

By ramachandra guha.

🏆 Winner of the 2023 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography

The foreigners who fought against Franco in Spain are much feted in literature and the popular imagination, those who helped India fight for its independence from the British Empire not so much. In this book, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha tells the story of seven of them (five Brits and two Americans), rescuing them from obscurity.

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

By jonathan freedland.

“This book is extraordinary because Rudolf Vrba and a fellow inmate, Alfred Wetzler, were the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Jonathan Freedland is a fiction writer too—he writes thrillers under the name Sam Bourne—so there is an element of thriller in the way that he describes this escape and the build-up to it. It is incredibly heart-in-your-mouth compelling. But it’s a bigger story than just one man’s breakout. Vrba goes on to try and put the word out about what’s going on in Auschwitz and saves many lives in the process. The book is memorializing one man’s heroism.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Caroline Sanderson , Journalist

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

By john tresch.

✩ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography

✩ Nominated for the Edgar Award for best work of criticism or biography

John Tresch, a professor of history of art and science at the Warburg Institute, situates the iconic American author in an era "when the lines separating entertainment, speculation and scientific inquiry were blurred." The troubled horror writer embraced contradiction, exposing the hoaxes of contemporary scientific fraudsters even as he perpetuated his own.

Peerless among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman

By kaya şahin.

A new biography of Süleyman (often called 'the Magnificent' in the West, but not in this book), the Ottoman sultan who ruled from 1520 to 1566. He was one of the most powerful men in the world but to the modern reader, his life seems utterly tragic. The book is by Kaya Şahin, a historian at Indiana University, who is able to bring his knowledge of Turkish sources to the story. Another aim of the book is "to restore Süleyman's place among the major figures of the sixteenth century"—which also included Henry VIII, Charles V and Francis I (Europe), Ivan IV (Russia), Babur and Akbar (India), Shah Ismail and Shah Tahmasb (Iran).

Kennan: A Life between Worlds

By frank costigliola.

Kennan: A Life between World s is an excellent biography of George Kennan, the American diplomat and Russophile who first raised alarm bells about Stalin after World War II, authoring an anonymous article in Foreign Affairs and "The Long Telegram". His biographer Frank Costigliola brings to life a man who loved Tolstoy and Chekhov, was devastated at never knowing his mother, and spent most of his life opposing the policy of containment towards the Soviet Union that he's best known for.

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

By olivier zunz.

🏆 Winner of the Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique 2022

An excellent biography of Alexis de Tocqueville , the 19th-century French politician and author of Democracy in America and The Ancien Regime and the Revolution .

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

By rebecca donner.

🏆 Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for biography

🏆 Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography

The highly acclaimed biography of Mildred Harnack, an American doctoral student living in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, who became an important anti-Nazi activist and later a spy for Allied forces during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo in Sweden, she was tried by a Nazi military court and finally executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. In All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days , Harnack's great-great-niece reconstructs her story in an astonishing work of nonfiction that draws together letters, intelligence documents and the testimony of survivors to create this remarkable story of moral courage.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

By katherine rundell.

🏆 Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

🏆 Winner of the 2023 British Book Award for Non-Fiction: Narrative

“Rundell is a children’s author who also specializes in Renaissance literature and makes the case that Donne should be as widely feted as William Shakespeare, his contemporary. She writes, ‘Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, part from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love”.” Read more...

Award Winning Biographies of 2022

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

By janice p. nimura.

✩ Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for biography

A dual biography of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, the United States' first female physicians and the founders of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a hospital staffed entirely by women in antebellum America. Through the story of their lives, says the Wall Street Journal , we encounter "a rough-hewn, gaudy, carnival-barking America, with only the thinnest veneer of gentility overlaying cruelty and a simmering violence."

Pessoa: A Biography

By richard zenith.

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote prolifically throughout his life, but often under a series of assumed names and identities, which he called 'heteronyms.' Relatively unknown during his lifetime, he left a cache of more than 25,000 papers which are still being studied, translated and published almost a century after his death. Here, the renowned translator and Pessoa scholar offers an insight into Pessoa's teeming imagination and polyphonous genius by tracing the back stories of his alter egos, recasting them as projections of Pessoa's inner tensions—social, sexual, and political.

Mike Nichols: A Life

By mark harris.

✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography

A New York Times- bestselling biography of the Hollywood director Mike Nichols, one of America's most prolific and versatile creative figures, by the author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back . Born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish family in 1930s Berlin, Nichols immigrated to the United States as a child, where his incredible drive saw him rise through the social ranks; by 35 he lived in a New York City penthouse overlooking Central Park, with a Rolls Royce, a string of Arabian horses, and a circle of friends that included Richard Burton and Jackie Kennedy. Mark Harris draws on interviews with more than 250 of Nichols' contemporaries to tells this story of a complicated man and his tumultuous career.

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

By keisha n. blain.

✩ Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for an outstanding biography or autobiography

The historian and best-selling author Keisha N. Blain examines the life and work of the Black activist Fannie Lou Hamer, positioning her as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks.

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

By susan bernofsky.

The first English-language biography of Robert Walser, one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century. In Clairvoyant of the Small, Susan Bernofsky—his award-winning translator—offers a diligently researched and delicately written account of his life and work, setting him in the context of 20th century European history and modernist literature.

Queen of Our Times: The Life of Elizabeth II

By robert hardman.

The Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, has been on the throne for 70 years, making her the world's longest-reigning monarch other than Louis XIV of France (1643-1715: he came to the throne aged 4). Lots of events are taking place in the UK to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, including a number of new books about her life. We have an interview with royal biographer Robert Lacey on the best books about the Queen but it dates from a few years ago. Robert Hardman's Queen of Our Times came out this year and offers a detailed look at her life from birth. The book is readable, chatty almost, and a good corrective to anyone who has watched the Netflix drama The Crown , whose "questionable accuracy" Hardman points out.

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi tells the story of the great Russian novelist's life by brilliantly intertwining it with his own words, taken from where Dostoevsky's fiction is drawn from his own lived experience. And it was quite some life: amongst other ups and downs, Dostoevsky was nearly executed and spent four years in a Siberian labour camp. You can read more in our interview with Alex Christofi on the best Fyodor Dostoevsky books .

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

By timothy brennan.

Places of Mind is a biography of Edward Said , the Palestinian intellectual who shot to prominence with his damning critique of how Westerners write about the East, Orientalism , in 1978. The biography is written by his student and friend Timothy Brennan.

The Van Gogh Sisters

By willem-jan verlinden.

We've heard much about the crucial role that Theo van Gogh played in the life of his brother, Vincent. But Vincent also had three sisters who were a big influence on him. In fact, it was an argument with his eldest sister, Anna, that was the reason he left the Netherlands. This is their story.

Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt

By samantha rose hill.

***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***

“This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included. As a result, we don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life but rather get to understand what really mattered.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2021

Nigel Warburton , Philosopher

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

Must-Read Biography Books | July 2022

In biography & memoir , books to read if you like... , ebook , news, 07 jul 2022.

In the mood for a new biography or memoir? Check out these instant bestsellers by Tracie Breaux, Séamas O’Reilly, Keri Blakinger, and more. Enjoy your new non-fiction picks!

by Tracie Breaux

Release Date: July 1, 2022

Born to abusive parents, Tracie spent years stuffing her written hopes and dreams in her shoes. She found herself running away from her parents through a dark forest at the age of fifteen while being chased by two men with a rope. Only then would Tracie wonder if she’d made a mistake in running away, if she’d pushed the envelope of hope too far.

Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter

By emma soames.

Release Date: June 7, 2022

A unique and evocative portrait of World War II—and a charming coming-of-age story—from the private diaries of Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

By séamas o’reilly.

An instant bestseller in Ireland, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is a book about a family of loud, argumentative, musical, sarcastic, grief-stricken siblings, shepherded into adulthood by a man whose foibles and reticence were matched only by his love for his children and his determination that they would flourish.

Corrections in Ink

By keri blakinger.

Corrections in Ink is an electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman’s journey—from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom—emerging with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced.

Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature

By zibby owens.

A deeply personal memoir about one woman’s journey to finding her voice and rewriting her story by the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books™.

Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland

By kristi noem.

Release Date: June 28, 2022

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem tells her rough and tumble story of growing up on a ranch, and how a blessed life of true grit taught her how to lead.

Interview with Neil V. Young, Author of Children of the Stars

04 Sep 2024 - Author Interviews , eBook , News

Interview with Becheru D. Dan, Author of The Worlds of Origin

Interview with Abby Goldsmith, Author of Megacosmic Rift (Torth Book 4)

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Daddy Yankee’s Book ReaDY! The Power To Change Your Story Set to Release Next Year: ‘I Am Very Excited’

The memoir will highlight the “pivotal moments” that shaped the Grammy-award winner’s career and his “personal growth"

Harper Collins, Gladys Vega/Getty

Daddy Yankee has unveiled his newest release!

The “Gasolina” musician, 47, announced he is releasing his first book with HarperCollins Publishers called ReaDY! The Power To Change Your Story in English and in Spanish versions next year.

The memoir will highlight the pivotal moments that shaped the Grammy-award winner’s career and his personal growth along the way, according to a synopsis. It will follow his “humble beginnings in Puerto Rico and New York City to becoming a global music sensation.”

“In this fascinating book, Daddy Yankee takes readers on a journey where music, resilience and faith converges in a story filled with trials, triumphs and transformative lessons," a press release from the publisher explains.

Daddy Yankee, whose real name is Raymond Ayala, shared the news on social media , unveiling the cover of his new book and sharing a brief summary of the contents inside. He encouraged fans to look forward to the book and get "reaDy" for its release date.

“I am very excited to present you the first physical copy of my book " reaDY, the power to change your story" where I share many personal experiences, life testimonies and many lessons that I have learned throughout my life,” he captioned the post in Spanish. “God bless you 🙏🏻.”

“Raymond has been inspiring and entertaining millions of people over the past three decades as Daddy Yankee. We're excited to partner with him in this new chapter of his life and career as an author,” said HarperCollins Publisher Cris Garrido, VP and Publisher of Spanish, in a release.

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“I've loved working with Raymond on the book — it reflects the same level of commitment and excellence that he brings to everything he does,” he continued. “The storytelling is rich and captivating, and he does a wonderful job of drawing from his own experiences and life lessons to show readers of all walks of life that we each have the power to change our stories.”

Carrie Thornton, VP and Publisher of Dey Street Books, added, “As an author, [Daddy Yankee] will have the opportunity to speak to his millions of fans, and a legion of readers, in a more intimate and in-depth way than he ever has before … Dey Street is excited to collaborate with Daddy Yankee and his team to reach new audiences and do what we do best, help launch cultural conversations.”

The musician has found many successes over the years after the release of his first studio album, No Mercy in 1995. Some of his biggest hit songs including “Gasolina,” “Despacito” with Luis Fonsi and “Con Calma” have garnered worldwide success, and he has gone on to be recognized as one of one of the best-selling Latin music artists of all-time, picking up five Latin Grammy Awards, 14 Billboard Latin Music Awards and other awards.

The announcement of his new book comes two years after his stepping away from music following the release of his album, Legendaddy in 2022 and its companion tour.

ReaDY! The Power To Change Your Story will be released in April 2025 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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ForAmerica: A fact check for the vice president Watch Tim Constantine and David Bozell

Battle for truth heats up as election draws close Craig Huey joins Cheryl Chumley

Latest episode: A peace plan for Ukraine Anatol Lieven joins Martin Di Caro

Trump releases new book, a blueprint for his presidency.

NEWS AND OPINION:

Arriving Tuesday: “Save America,” a new book by former President Donald Trump .

“Lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed, ‘Save America’ showcases President Trump’s major themes and accomplishments, including record-breaking trade negotiations, tax cuts, international diplomacy, and border security. This blend of powerful imagery and commentary paints a clear picture of President Trump’s future vision for our country,” Winning Team Publishing said in advance notes for the book.

“Save America is the only book which highlights the past, and offers a roadmap for the future directly from President Donald J. Trump!” the publisher said.

Much of the public is already onto the new book. It was ranked No. 3 on the Amazon overall bestseller list on Monday, and could very well leap to No. 1 on publication day.

THE KENNEDY FACTOR

Former President Donald Trump may have an emerging bloc of voters who could lend him some support.

“Can Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’s anti-establishment coalition help swing the election for Trump?” Brian Robertson asked in an analysis published by The Federalist on Monday,

“The truth is, few in Kennedy’s coalition of anti-war, medical freedom, and free-speech advocates against the D.C. power structure would have felt highly motivated to turn out for either of the major party alternatives if RFK Jr. had simply withdrawn from the race,” Mr. Robertson wrote.

“The fact that Kennedy not only endorsed Trump but indicated that he would likely be taking a role in policy and personnel decisions in another Trump administration gives his supporters the opportunity to cast a vote for his agenda rather than for Donald Trump, about whom they are unenthusiastic at best. With Kennedy actively campaigning for Trump and making the case that a Harris-Walz administration would be catastrophic on every issue they care about means it is highly likely they will turn out for Bobby rather than stay at home, even if they are too embarrassed to tell pollsters or acquaintances that they are voting for Orange Man Bad,” Mr. Robertson said.

Mr. Robertson served for over a decade in the U.S. Senate as a senior policy adviser for the Joint Economic Committee as well as Sen. Sam Brownback , Kansas Republican. He also worked for the Trump administration at the Health and Human Services and State departments, according to a brief biography that accompanied his analysis.

STRONGER, RESILIENT, PROSPEROUS

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley took a moment Monday to comment on the national holiday in question.

“Happy Labor Day! Today, we celebrate the vast contributions of American workers, whose hard work and grit have made the United States the greatest country in the world,” he said in a written statement.

“Through negotiating fairer trade deals like the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, cutting regulations, allowing manufacturers to send made-in-America goods across the world, and lowering costs for every household, Republicans are the party of working families – and alongside President Donald J. Trump , we will fight to make our country stronger, more resilient, and more prosperous than ever before,” Mr. Whatley said.

LONE STAR DETERMINATION

Let’s visit the southern U.S. border for a while

“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott , the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard continue to work together to secure the border; stop the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and people into Texas; and prevent, detect, and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” according to a news release from Mr. Abbott’s office released Friday.

“Texas National Guard soldiers are now using drones equipped with infrared technology to locate and arrest illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border,” the release said.

And the results?

“Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to over 518,300 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 46,000 criminal arrests, with more than 40,000 felony charges. In the fight against the fentanyl crisis, Texas law enforcement has seized over 521 million lethal doses of fentanyl, enough to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States and Mexico combined,” the report said.

“Texas has decreased illegal crossings into the state by 85% due to our historic border security mission,” it said.

MEANWHILE IN SPACE

“The U.S. Air Force has awarded an additional $491,607,268 modification to a previously awarded contract to General Dynamics, a global aerospace and defense company. This contract will go towards a project supporting the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture Ground Management and Integration and operation and sustainment efforts. This announcement brings the total cumulative face value of the contract to $887,797,585,” said a written report released Monday by Sen. Kevin Cramer , North Dakota Republican.

“The work is expected to be completed by September 30, 2029, and will be performed in Grand Forks, North Dakota and Huntsville, Alabama. The Space Development Agency (SDA) is the contracting activity,” the report said.

“The United States must develop space assets at the speed of China, and that takes major investments. This award acknowledges that reality and I’m glad Grand Forks is positioned so well to contribute to this important mission,” Mr Cramer said in a written statement shared with Inside the Beltway.

In August, Mr. Cramer himself flipped the switch to bring the SDA Operations Center North online at Grand Forks Air Force Base. He also participated in a Grand Forks Base Retention Committee meeting, toured the University of North Dakota National Security Corridor and announced new Navy personnel stationed at the base itself.

POLL DU JOUR

• 88% of U.S. adults say it makes a real difference to them who is elected president in 2024.

• 81% say they have a good idea what the current presidential candidates stand for.

• 79% say that there is a presidential candidate running who they think would make a good president.

• 72% feel that the candidates have come up with good ideas for solving the country’s problems.

• 71% say that the presidential candidates are talking about issues that they personally care about.

• 44% say the way the 2024 presidential campaign is conducted makes them feel like the election process is working as it should.

SOURCE: A Gallup Poll of 1,015 U.S. adults conducted by telephone Aug. 1-10. 

• Follow Jennifer Harper on X @HarperBulletin.

• Jennifer Harper can be reached at [email protected] .

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The 20 Best Memoirs of 2022

Stay True, by Hua Hsu

The Man Who Could Move Clouds, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, by Paul Newman

Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronowitz

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Year of the Tiger, by Alice Wong

My Pinup, by Hilton Als

Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami

Bloomsbury Publishing Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, by Isaac Fitzgerald

Pretty Baby, by Chris Belcher

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun

Because Our Fathers Lied, by Craig McNamara

The Unwritten Book, by Samantha Hunt

Roc Lit 101 Shine Bright, by Danyel Smith

Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schultz

Ecco Press South to America, by Imani Perry

Admissions, by Kendra James

The Invisible Kingdom, by Meghan O'Rourke

Ancestor Trouble, by Maud Newton

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, by Heather Havrilesky

Best of 2022

Best of the Year: The 15 Best Bios and Memoirs of 2022

Constructing a Nervous System

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

The Invisible Kingdom

Lost & Found

What My Bones Know

Quite the Contrary

His Name Is George Floyd (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

The Book of Baraka

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom

Also a Poet

Corrections in Ink

Dirtbag, Massachusetts

Best of the Year: The 14 Best Celebrity Memoirs of 2022

Best of the Year: All Genres

The birth of "Quite the Contrary"

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100 Notable Books of 2022

Let’s be honest, every year is a good one for books. Join us in honoring these.

Best Barbarian: Poems

The Hurting Kind: Poems

Now Do You Know Where You Are: Poems

The Bangalore Detectives Club

Bliss Montage: Stories

The Books of Jacob

The Candy House

A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

Checkout 19

Companion Piece

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Dead-End Memories: Stories

The Dead Romantics

Demon Copperhead

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith

Four Treasures of the Sky

The Furrows: An Elegy

Gods of Want: Stories

Hokuloa Road

Homesickness: Stories

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water

If I Survive You

The Immortal King Rao

Joan Is Okay

The Latecomer