The Diary of a Bookseller (PB) by Shaun Bythell
Category: Memoir | Reading Level: very good
Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost ... In these wry and hilari ...Show more
Homesickness by Janine Mikosza
Category: Memoir
An extraordinary memoir that reflects on memory and finding your voice after decades of silence.She tells me she’s returning to every childhood home she lived in, and all the memories she can’t leave behind.The past, she says, it kind of owns me.I want permission to write her life while she lives it. I ...Show more
A House in the Sky : A Memoir of a Kidnapping That Changed Everything by Amanda Lindhout; Sara Corbett
Category: Memoir
The inspiring story of a woman who survived kidnap and being held captive for a year in war-torn Somalia . . . Amanda Lindhout loved to travel. She backpacked around the world, crossing borders, enthralled by what she encountered. This led her to becoming a reporter, working in war-ridden Afghanistan an ...Show more
Mary's Last Dance: The untold story of the wife of Mao's Last Dancer by Mary Li
Category: Memoir
'I can vividly remember the last steps of the last ballet, walking off the stage led by a mother and knowing the decision I had to make. That was my last dance.' Mary Li (nee McKendry) is an international ballet star and a mother like no other. She became a household name when her husband Li Cunxin publ ...Show more
Smashing Serendipity The Story of One Moorditj Yorga by Louise Hansen
Category: Memoir
This is a raw, gritty, inspiring, eye-opening true story of one woman's life that represents the lives of so many other Aboriginal women like her. Life is tough for the Connell family, growing up in a small town where racist attitudes, discrimination and violence against Aboriginal people are commonplac ...Show more
Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane
Category: Memoir
As a boy, Gerald Murnane became obsessed with horse racing. He had never ridden a horse, nor seen a race. Yet he was fascinated by photos of horse races in the Sporting Globe, and by the incantation of horses' names in radio broadcasts of races. Murnane discovered in these races more than he could find ...Show more
The Color of Water by James Mcbride
Category: Memoir
As a boy in Brooklyn, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked her about it, she'd simply say, 'I'm light-skinned.' Later he wondered if he was different too and asked his mother if he was black or white. 'You're a human being,' she snapped. 'Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody! ...Show more
Jali by Oliver Twist
Category: Memoir
'Twist is a star.' The Sydney Morning HeraldComedian Oliver Twist was four years old when he and his family fled the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda for Malawi, their exile for the next fourteen years. Twist has turned the turmoil he and his family endured into a thrilling adventure of a hero's journey. ...Show more
Unheard Voices : Finding Language and Belonging in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds by Dawn Mauldon
Category: Memoir
A daughter's telling of finding language and belonging in the Deaf and hearing worlds.In this poignant and powerful memoir, the author tells the story of both her mother's childhood - growing up deaf in the 1920s in rural Victoria - and her own childhood with Deaf parents. Through intimate and evocative ...Show more
The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton
Category: Memoir
'Being a copper?s son, I?ve always got one eye out for trouble. I can?t help it. But I don?t go looking for it anymore.?In Tim Winton?s fiction, chaos shapes the lives of his characters. So too Winton?s own life. The extraordinarily powerful true stories that make up The Boy Behind the Curtaintake us be ...Show more
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay
Category: Memoir | Series: Diaries of a Junior Doctor | Reading Level: very good
'Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.' - Stephen Fry Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more tha ...Show more
The Gloves Are Off by Maggie Kirkpatrick
Category: Memoir
'I can actually tell my story without benefit of playwright or hidden beneath the cloak of a character.' Maggie Kirkpatrick, famous for her role as The Freak in Prisoner, presents a no-holds-barred account of her life both on and off screen. In The Gloves Are Off, Maggie takes us on her journey from hum ...Show more