biographies for christmas

The best autobiographies for Christmas 2019

From comedians and documentarians to a slave-turned-orator

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David Cameron briefly put himself back at the centre of attention this year with the release of his autobiography For the Record , which featured some striking admissions and disappointing omissions - piggate anyone?

Having left British politics after failing to convince the public to back Remain in the 2016 EU referendum, the former prime minister has come in for criticism for leaving the country with a problem of his making.

The book addresses the allegations , with Cameron admitting he has “ many regrets ”. “From the timing of the vote to the expectations I allowed to build about the renegotiation, there are many things I would do differently,” he says.

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The BBC says the book also contains other “candid” revelations “about his views on gay marriage, drug use at Eton College and an embarrassing first brush with royalty in his autobiography”.

The autobiography can be one of the most insightful - and powerful - literary forms. Done poorly, as Roald Dahl complained, it is merely ”a book a person writes about his own life, and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details”.

Dahl’s own autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood “isn’t sophisticated or classy” says The Guardian , but “it’s a Dahl autobiography, which makes anyone who turns their nose up at it a right twit”.

Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television by Louis Theroux

This 2019 autobiography is a funny, honest and heartfelt account of Louis Theroux’s life and time in television. The national treasure takes readers on a journey from his socially awkward youth to his Emmy-nominated, BAFTA-winning career success.

While Theroux appears in his documentaries, it is his television interviewer persona that we see on screen, rather than the man himself. This book changes that, putting the real Theroux at the heart of the story, in what Telegraph Magazine calls an “absorbing and surprisingly candid” account of his life and work.

It’s “self-deprecating, eager to please and shot through with a sense of bewilderment”, says The Guardian - just what you’d expect.

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald

Stand-up comedian and former Saturday Night Live comic spent two years on a farm in northern Canada putting together his biography full of outrageous tales of his life and the job of comedy.

Best books of 2019 to give or recieve this Christmas

“Stand-up comedy is a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny,” MacDonald writes in the introduction.

The actor, gambler, raconteur, and SNL veteran has certainly had a life full of varied experiences, and readers might want to approach his memoirs on the understanding that his stories are “often built on grim foundations: prison rape; drug deals gone very bad; a young boy whose dying wish is to kill a baby seal”.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominic Bauby (1997)

Extreme adversity, whether a product of illness, death or grief, is one of the most fertile breeding grounds for memoirs and autobiographical pieces. Few, however, have expounded so eloquently on such extreme circumstances as French author Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ( Le Scaphandre et le Papillon ), published in 1997.

In 1995 at the age of 43, Bauby, then-editor of fashion magazine Elle, suffered a stroke, sending him into a coma. When he awoke he discovered that his entire body was paralysed, save for one of his eyelids - a condition known as locked-in syndrome.

Remarkably, Bauby teamed up with a group of dedicated carers and medical staff and, by blinking his way through the alphabet, came up with a method of communication with the outside world, and ultimately used this technique to write a memoir.

The Diving Bell is a tragic story, but the deep introspection of Bauby - who refers to himself as being “both dead and alive” throughout - offers readers a life-affirming, cathartic experience that GoodReads describes as “a small book composed of many big wonders”.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (2003)

In 2003, author and journalist Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana was hospitalised with a case of pneumonia that developed into severe septic shock. Days later, while Quintana was still comatose in the hospital, her husband of nearly 40 years died suddenly of a heart attack while at the dinner table.

Although often a difficult read, Didion’s attempts to piece her life tother in the year following her husband’s death, while caring for Quintana, is a powerful, delicate and often wryly humorous look at the human response to immense grief.

Described by Reader’s Digest as a “stunning memoir” that exemplifies “why your brain needs you to read every single day”, The Year of Magical Thinking won Didion the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography.

Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman (1995)

Writer Andre Aciman was born and raised in Alexandria to a family of Sephardic Jews who had wandered from Italy to Turkey, then settled in Egypt.

His father owned a wool mill and his parents were very rich, as were the rest of the exotic clan who lived with them. They were forced to conceal their Jewish roots when Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power, ushering in a time of high Arab nationalism, intense anti-Semitism and eventually war.

After fleeing to Paris and leaving behind much of their remarkable history and culture in the region, Aciman’s memoirs are a wonderful slice of - admittedly rather unusual - life, rich with human sadness and humour at the transience of memories and phases of life.

“All, like the author of this book, will look back on their years in Alexandria with the melancholy knowledge that the past cannot be recaptured,” wrote The New York Times upon its publication in 1995. Publishers Weekly describes it as “a marvellous memento of a place, time and people that have all disappeared”.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass (1845)

“If there is one African American who can make the strongest claim to be the godfather of the literature derived from the black American experience, it must be Frederick Douglass,” writes The Guardian . “To some critics, he remains the most influential African American of the 19th century.”

Less a comprehensive life story of the remarkable slave-turned-orator, whose works were a major influence on the abolition movement in the US, Narrative on the Life is a brutal yet hopeful insight into a period of American history that at the time had been rarely - if ever - told from his side of the divide.

Narrative works as both a fascinating, priceless historical document and a landmark moment in black American literary culture that remains as shocking and essential today as it was in 1845.

Experience, by Martin Amis (2000)

Part-memoir and part-portrait of Martin Amis’s father Kingsley, Experience tells the story of the author’s childhood, at times taking the form of a letter to his family and closest friends. An affecting, whimsical and often rather strange book, Experience was met with rave reviews upon release in 2000.

The Daily Telegraph described this peculiar memoir as one of the “20 best biographies and autobiographies of all time” in a 2014 list.

It is, the paper says, “easily Martin Amis’s best book, in which he leaves behind the struggle for effect, stops trying to say anything serious, and in doing so creates something effective and serious about his early life, his relations with his father, the death of his cousin, his various artistic rivalries, and, of course, those teeth”.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), by Jenny Lawson (2012)

“If, at any time in your life, you’ve battled anxiety or felt like a misfit, you’ll want to add this witty, riotous 2012 memoir to your reading list,” says Reader’s Digest .

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is by Jenny Lawson, a blogger who spent ten years at the Houston Chronicle before creating her own site TheBloggess.com - with a brief stint as reviewer of pornography for a sex-toy company in between, says The Washington Post.

Scattered with vibrant, colourful language, this thoroughly 21st-century autobiography is an imaginative and somewhat fantastical tale of Lawson’s unusual life, including struggles with a severe anxiety disorder and miscarriages. Somehow it manages to keep readers laughing throughout.

Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin (2007)

Comedian Steve Martin was, for a period in the 1970s and early 80s, the world’s most famous stand-up comic. Yet his trajectory was a strange one - his breakthrough and rise to fame was as abrupt as his decision to stop performing in 1981, not returning to the field for 35 years.

As such, the comedian’s memoir Born Standing Up , published in 2007, is an intriguing look into the mind of a fiercely private man.

“ Born Standing Up is full of hard-won personal truths, lightly tossed-off comic touches and astute observations about the 1970s,” says Time Magazine , calling it one of the best books of 2007. “He’s also touchingly forthcoming about his difficult childhood, all the more so since his personal revelations come to us untainted by any hint of exhibitionism.”

Fellow comedian Jerry Seinfeld also heaped praise on the book, calling it “one of the best books about comedy and being a comedian ever written”.

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank (1947)

Also known as The Diary of Anne Frank , the Jewish teenager’s journal details her family’s two years in hiding during the Second World War. Frank, who died in a concentration camp two years before the book’s release, was plagued by German occupation in her Netherlands home.

For her 13th birthday, she received a red-and-white plaid diary, that she began writing in as if it were a personal friend: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”

Her entries described the anti-Semitism her family faced but also included typical adolescent musings.

“With time, Anne Frank became a universal symbol of hope and the desire for freedom,” says the Jewish Telegraphic Agency .

The book won a Pulitzer Prize, became a staple of school curricula and was even used by prosecutors to convict the Nazi officers who deported Jews out of Holland to concentration camps, says the news agency.

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi (2016)

Written by Paul Kalanithi during an ultimately tragic battle against stage IV metastatic lung cancer, When Breath Becomes Air was a monumental critical success when it was posthumously published by Random House in January 2016.

In a four out of four-star review for USA Today , reviewer Matt McCarthy called the book “a story so remarkable, so stunning, and so affecting that I had to take dozens of breaks just to compose myself enough to get through it”.

The New York Times adds that Kalanithi “wrote his own book with great determination but also great difficulty, to the point of wearing silver-lined gloves to use the trackpad when his fingertips began to crack during chemotherapy”.

“But the difficulty doesn’t show: Dr. Kalanithi knows how to make a paragraph fly,” the paper adds.

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Best books for Christmas 2021: Fiction, biography, sport and children’s books

Something for everyone from sport fans and literary types to politics nerds in this list.

Getting your hands on that festive must-read may be harder than usual this year – just when bookstores thought they were over the worst of it, worldwide paper shortages, Brexit-related delays and supply chain issues put a spanner in the works. Buy early, is the message, to which I would add, buy local and be patient. Like the rest of us, booksellers are trying their best in less-than-ideal conditions. But there’s nonetheless plenty of literary fare to get excited about this Christmas, whether you’re looking for a sumptuous gift book, a stocking filler, or a page-turner to stave off the winter blues.

Elizabeth Strout's Oh William! (Penguin, £14.99) plunges us back into the world of Lucy Barton, and it will be no surprise to fans of the Maine author that this was the best book I read all year. Recounting the story of Lucy's first husband, William, and his as-of-yet unexplored past, it's everything we've come to expect: spare, profound, subtle, heart-breaking.

Closer to home, Colm Tóibín is on top form with The Magician (Penguin, £18.99), a novelisation of the life of Thomas Mann, while Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These (Faber, £10), is a slim, skilfully told novel about a coal merchant whose family is struggling to get by in the run up to Christmas 1985, and a Magdalene laundry that casts a shadow over the community.

In lighter fare, the Aisling books are only getting more charming. In the latest, Aisling and the City by Emer MyLysaght and Sarah Breen (Gill, €14.99), our beloved heroine takes on New York, with hilarious results.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk: Extraordinary novel searches for meaning

Five Straight Lines – A History of Music: Preoccupied with the Western canon

The Falling Thread by Adam O’Riordan: a fine tapestry of the past

Genre fiction fans will enjoy Shadow Voices: 300 Years of Irish Genre Fiction: A History in Stories (Hodder & Stoughton, £25). Edited by John Connolly, it takes the lives of more than 60 writers – from Swift to Stoker to Jane Casey and Liz Nugent – and sets them alongside the stories they have written.

Crime/Thriller

It didn't take long for Covid-19 to find its way into fiction. Beginning in a supermarket queue the week the pandemic reaches Ireland, Catherine Ryan Howard's 56 Days (Corvus, £14.99) asks whether lockdown has created an opportunity for someone to commit a perfect crime.

Going back in time, Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (Fleet, £16.99) is a lively crime caper set in 1960s Harlem. As the rumblings of social change and upward mobility hum, a half-crooked furniture salesman gets sucked downward into crime.

Silverview by John le Carré (Viking, £20), is a cat-and-mouse chase from an East Anglian seaside town to the Eastern Bloc. Published 10 months after he passed away, it marks a fitting final work by the master of spy fiction.

Two particularly handsome anthologies this year are Tomorrow is Beautiful by Sarah Crossan (ed.) (Bloomsbury, £12.99) and Local Wonders: Poems of our Immediate Surrounds by Pat Boran (ed.) (Dedalus, €25). The former cleaves to Crossan's belief that "poetry should serve everyone" and comprises "poems to comfort, uplift and delight" from Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou and more, while the latter celebrates a rediscovery of precious places, with new poems from all over the island and beyond.

Songwriter Imelda May's debut poetry collection, A Lick and a Promise (Faber & Faber, £22) contains 100 poems, including You Don't Get to be Racist and Irish, written in support of Black Lives Matter. Derek Mahon fans will delight in The Poems (1961-2020) (Gallery Press, €35). It gives a wide-spanning vision of the Belfast poet's career, bringing together the poems he wished to be read from that 40-year period.

Memoir/Biography

It probably says something about Irish humour that the funniest book I read all year was Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? (Fleet, £16.99). Séamas O'Reilly's memoir about growing up among 10 siblings in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of his mother's death is witty and warm, and a book I'd as likely give to my dad as my best friend.

Catherine Corless has written a landmark memoir in Belonging: A Memoir of Place, Beginnings and One Woman's Search for Truth and Justice for the Tuam Babies (Hachette Ireland, £15.99). It recounts her personal story, as well as the individual accounts of some of the many survivors of the Tuam mother and baby home.

For politics obsessives, Gary Murphy's Haughey (Gill, €27.99) presents a reassessment of the former taoiseach's life and legacy, while the lives of performers are explored in autobiographies from musician Martin Hayes – Shared Notes: A Musical Journey (Transworld, £20) – and comedian Billy Connolly – Windswept & Interesting: My Autobiography (Two Roads, £25).

In We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland (Head of Zeus, £25), Fintan O'Toole takes, as his starting point, the year he was born (1958), and records and reflects on the changes this country has seen since then.

Frank McDonald's A Little History of the Future of Dublin (Martello, £12.99) charts the development of our capital, from its Viking origins, through to "Abercrombie's Dublin of the Future", and the failures, successes, and potential of Dublin today.

Following on from the success of Old Ireland in Colour, John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley's Old Ireland in Colour 2 (Merrion Press, €24.95), delves further into our historical archives, colourising more than 150 images and bringing old Ireland vibrantly to life.

And an uplifting approach to a history book is Mark Henry's In Fact: An Optimist's Guide to Ireland at 100 (Gill, €24.99). It charts 100 years of the Irish State through facts and stats, and is perfect for flicking through by the fire.

Fans of sporting biographies have plenty to look forward to this year, with Kerry footballer, Aidan O'Mahony, taking us through his personal and sporting journey in Unbroken: A Journey of Adversity, Mental Strength and Physical Fitness (Hachette Ireland, £14.99), while Peter Schmeichel charts his exceptionally successful goalkeeping career alongside the remarkable story of his family in One: My Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton, £20).

And from Liam Brady to Robbie Keane, Anne O'Brien, Stephanie Roche and more, Barry Landy follows the fortunes of Irish footballers and managers making their mark outside of Ireland and Britain, in Emerald Exiles: How the Irish Made their Mark on the World (New Island, €17.95).

High End/Big Spend

Anyone looking to splash out on a special treat might consider The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon (ed.) (Allen Lane, €80). A two-volume book complete with slip case, it collects never-before seen drafts, letters and photographs, and charts McCartney's life through song.

Bigger than a doorstopper, The Coastal Atlas of Ireland by Robert Devoy, Val Cummins, Barry Brunt, Darius Bartlett and Sarah Kandrot (ed.s) (Cork University Press, €59) mixes history and geology to give a comprehensive portrait of Irish coastlines, while Irish Work (RRB Photobooks, £75) centres upon photographer Tom Wood's relationship with Ireland, containing more than 200 images, taken between 1972 and 2019.

A beautiful biography is Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture by Justine Picardie (Faber & Faber, £25). It explores "how the polished surface of fashion conceals hidden depths" through the story of Catherine Dior, member of the prosperous Dior family and unlikely resistance hero.

Stocking Filler

Dinosaur Therapy by James Stewart and K Romey (ill.) (Harper Collins, £8.99) is a humorous and uplifting comic about dinosaurs navigating the complexities of life. It grew out of the successful web comic @dinosandcomics .

For presentation-phobics, Everything I Know About Life I Learned from PowerPoint by Russell Davies (Profile Books, £14.99) is an easy-to-thumb-through book about the art of the PowerPoint presentation. Divided into sections such as PowerPoint Saved My Life, PowerPoint Rules the World and PowerPoint is Easy, it's colourful and uncomplicated.

A bit on the glossier side are: In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden by Niall Williams and Christine Breen (Bloomsbury, £18.99), and Décor Galore: The Essential Guide to Styling Your Home by Laura de Barra (£16.99). The former is a celebration of life in rural Ireland, by a pair who left New York for Kiltumper 34 years ago. And after reading the latter, not only do I want the gaff goddess's help restyling my home, I want her to run my life.

Graphic Novels

Will McPhail has been drawing cartoons for the New Yorker since 2014, and his debut graphic novel, In (Sceptre, £18.99), features a young illustrator who can't connect with people. It's stylish, funny, fresh and compassionate.

Scarenthood , by Nick Roche (IDW Publishing, €18.19), is a folk-horror set in modern Ireland. Illustrated by Chris O'Halloran, it reflects on parenthood through the story of a group of parents who accidentally free a malevolent entity from beneath their children's pre-school.

For Avengers fans, William Shakespeare's Avengers: The Complete Works by Ian Doescher, Danny Schlitz (ill.) (Quirk Books, £27.99), presents all four Avengers films as Shakespearean plays. Containing authentic meter and verse, stage directions, and entertaining Easter eggs, it's how the bard would have wanted it, methinks.

Children’s/Teen

The classic poem, Twas the Night Before Christmas by Clement C Moore (Walker Books, £12.99), is brought to life with artwork from one of Ireland's most beloved illustrators, PJ Lynch, and would suit kids aged 4+.

For children aged 7-9, a new translation of Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Olga Tokarczuk's first children's book, The Lost Soul (Antonia Lloyd-Jones, tr., Joanna Concejo, ill.) (Seven Stories Press, £16.99) would make an attractive gift. It tells the story of a man "who worked very hard and very quickly and who had left his soul behind him long ago".

For children aged 9+, The Great Irish Politics Book by David McCullagh, Graham Corcoran (ill.) (Gill, €24.99) is the latest in Gill's "Great Irish…" series. It looks at political systems, elections, voting and government, human rights, freedom of speech and fake news.

The New Girl by Sinéad Moriarty (Gill, €12.99), about a friendship between an Irish girl and a Syrian girl who joins her class, will keep younger teens (12-14) reading, while older teens (15+) will warm to Precious Catastrophe by Deirdre Sullivan (Hot Key Books, £7.99). The second in the Perfectly Preventable Deaths series, this supernatural mystery revisits twins Caitlin and Madeline, whose lives have been changed forever by the horrors they've encountered.

For readers of all ages, Manchán Magan, author of the bestseller Thirty-Two Words for Field, together with illustrator, Steve Doogan, has put together a collection of Irish words for the natural world, in Tree Dogs, Banshee Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature (Gill, €19.99).

Charity Books

Books published in aid of charity make great gifts, and two stand out this year. Lights on the Horizon (€24.95), and Irish Air Spectacular (€35). The former is a collection of prose, poetry and photography created during lockdown. It raises funds for the HSE and the NHS across the island of Ireland. The latter is a collection of spectacular aviation photography captured over Ireland, created in aid of St Vincent de Paul. More information can be found on lightsonthehorizon.com and irishairspectacular.ie , respectively.

Now on its seventh volume, Winter Papers (Curlew Editions, €40) is an annual arts anthology, edited by Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith. As gorgeous on the outside as it is on the inside, it can be purchased singly or as part of a multi-volume package on winterpapers.com .

For the gift that keeps on giving, a literary journal subscription is ideal. A one-year gift subscription to The Dublin Review costs €34 and comprises four issues, while The Stinging Fly offers magazine-only subscriptions from €28, or magazine and book packages from €55.

Banshee , a journal of exciting, accessible, contemporary writing publishes twice a year, and a subscription costs €23, while Tolka , a new biannual journal of "formally promiscuous non-fiction", costs €20, with the added benefit of nabbing a high-class journal early in its conception.

Niamh Donnelly

Niamh Donnelly, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and critic

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The best books to give as presents this Christmas

From Anne Enright’s study of womanhood and youth to Rory Stewart’s insights into British politics, novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the paperback they would love to find in their own stocking

• Rachel Cooke’s best graphic novels of 2023
• Alison Flood’s best crime novels and thrillers of 2023
• Kate Kellaway’s best poetry books of 2023

Ann Patchett

Author of Tom Lake ( Bloomsbury)

I’ll be wrapping The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Orion) , a novel that takes place at the intersection of the Black and Jewish communities, which turns out to be a grocery store. This is James McBride (always fabulous) at his very best. The second book I’ll give is by Alice McDermott, who has always been one of our greatest writers, but Absolution (Bloomsbury) exceeds every expectation. It is one of the finest modern novels I’ve read, a moral masterpiece. In my stocking I’d like to find The Magician’s Elephant (Walker) by Kate DiCamillo, which isn’t just for young readers, but for everyone who enjoys a riveting plot, gorgeous writing, suspense and magic, all in a book that can be read in under two hours.

Author of Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World (Profile )

I will be giving Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), her great launch into historical novels (and brilliantly read by her, complete with the right accents, for the audio version). And I won’t be able to resist giving Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker (National Gallery of Ireland), edited by Aoife Brady. Fontana was a 16th-century female artist from Bologna, and the book is based on an exhibition of her work in Dublin earlier this year. It’s completely eye-opening . In my stocking, please could I find any paperback version of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales . I’ve read most of them, but never cover to cover. Christmas might be a chance.

Clive Myrie

Author of Everything Is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate & Hope (Hodder & Stoughton )

I was impressed with Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting , about a well-off Irish family that falls on hard times. Money perhaps helped suppress the turmoil within, masking a true understanding of their world, as well as the wider one in which they live. It’s funny and painful with ghosts from the past and spectres from the future. Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (Vintage) is a romp through what I suspect many people of all political persuasions would agree has been a bewildering recent history in British politics. There are larger questions about the state of democracy but also gossip and funny individual episodes. What I would like to receive is a bound copy of the evidence in the ongoing Covid inquiry. The Starr report into the conduct of President Clinton, including his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, was a bestseller. From what we’ve already heard, the Covid inquiry could be one too.

Mick Herron

Author of The Secret Hours (John Murray Press )

Books I’ll enjoy giving as gifts this year include The Letters of Seamus Heaney , edited by Christopher Reid and newly published by “Fabers”, as Heaney was wont to dub his publisher. The warm and generous spirit of the most lauded poet of his generation shines through this volume: it’s a delight. Others can expect to unwrap Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Fabers again), a terrific slice of alternative world noir that’s fully realised and deeply satisfying. And if Santa’s been paying attention, I’ll find The Mirror and the Road: Conversations With William Boyd (Penguin, edited by Alistair Owen) in my own stocking.

Deborah Levy

Author of August Blue (Hamish Hamilton )

I will be wrapping copies of Wish I Was Here (Profile) by M John Harrison. This dazzling anti-memoir is nothing less than a portrait of a writer with a beautiful mind. Harrison turns over what it takes to simultaneously be present to everyday life and imaginative flight. A masterpiece. I’ll also be giving The Plague (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Jacqueline Rose. The vitality of these valuable essays on death, war and Simone Weil keeps on giving long after the last page has been turned. A distinguished gift to find in my own stocking for any year, Irenosen Okojie’s boldly captivating collection of stories Nudibranch (Dialogue) is a thrilling mix of social surrealism and technical verve.

Craig Brown

Author of One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (4th Estate )

Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge makes grim reading: the government of Britain in the hands of shock jocks, and a civil service in a state of resigned torpor. But the sharpness of the character sketches and the restless nature of the author, by turns self-loving and self-loathing, make it burst with life. Art Exposed (Pallas Athene) by the museum curator Julian Spalding is a bracing trumpet blast against the drear pieties of the contemporary art establishment, and includes witty portraits of encounters with, among many others, the late queen and Sir Roy Strong. I’ve only just come across the poems of AE Stallings. They’re a joy: simple, playful, profound. I’d be happy to find her verse translation of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics) in my stocking on Christmas morning.

Jacqueline Crooks

Author of Fire Rush (Vintage)

Radical: A Life of My Own by Xiaolu Guo (Vintage) is a book I will be giving to several friends. More than a memoir, it is as much about the skilful exploration of language as it is about a woman stepping outside her world, taking risks in a new territory. How to Say Babylon (4th Estate) by Safiya Sinclair is another memoir that delivers on many levels. I love her use of patois and Rastafarian vernacular, which together create a strong sense of Jamaica, its people and its past. I would love to receive Cane, Corn & Gully (Out-Spoken) by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. Experimental, brave, exciting.

Bret Easton Ellis

Author of The Shards (Swift Press )

Of the new novels I came across this year, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton) was the most enjoyable. A sprawling, Franzen-esque saga about the Barnes family in Ireland recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, it’s an amazing piece of realist fiction, full-bodied, multi-narrative; a huge swing by Murray. On the opposite side of the spectrum was The Guest by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus), an eerie, miniaturist character study about a few days in the life of a female grifter drifting through the Hamptons – the simple power and pull of the novel lies in its ambiguity, its refusal to try to explain Alex – that’s the point: you can’t. The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics) is the paperback I’d choose to receive and keep – I don’t know why I’d never read this Edith Wharton masterpiece, but it was the most satisfying reading experience of the year and made me question whether she was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.

Claire Kilroy

Author of Soldier Sailor (Faber )

This Plague of Souls (Canongate) depicts a man returning to his empty home after a spell in prison. His family is missing. The signal difference between this and other novels about middle-aged, soul-searching men is Mike McCormack’s uncanny ability to reveal the contents of his protagonist’s soul. Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape), so good they named it twice, so good I read it twice – and read two different novels, because moral positions are incorrigibly plural in Enrightville, reflecting the world we are in. The Colony (Faber) by Audrey Magee has received enough recommendations to bump it to the top of my stocking wishlist.

Jyoti Patel

Author of The Things That We Lost (Merky)

Wandering Souls (4th Estate) by Cecile Pin is the book I’ve recommended most this year, so I’ll definitely be wrapping up a copy or two this Christmas. It follows a family of nine fleeing war-torn Vietnam, with only three surviving the journey. Finding themselves in Thatcher’s Britain, they attempt to build new lives around their grief. It’s tenderly woven and so beautifully assured. I’ll also be giving Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (4th Estate). I adored this collection of short stories following a Jamaican family in Miami for its honesty and how its prose brims with warmth and heart. I’d love to receive a paperback of Brown Girls (4th Estate) by Daphne Palasi Andreades in my stocking. I fell in love with it for many reasons, not least for the masterful use of first-person plural, which results in a joyful, almost choral narrative voice.

Mark O’Connell

Author of A Thread of Violence (Granta)

David Grann’s brilliant and compelling book The Wager (Simon & Schuster) seems to me like a safe Christmas bet for any reader who enjoys a good story, well told. I’ve been a big fan of Rachel Connolly’s writing for a long time, and her debut novel, Lazy City (Canongate) , did not disappoint. And if anyone feels like buying me a book for Christmas, please make it Jeremy Lewis’s Cyril Connolly: A Life (Pimlico). A friend of mine has been pumping a WhatsApp group chat full of amazing quotes from this 1997 book over the last couple of months, and it’s amounted to a very effective viral marketing campaign.

Peter Frankopan

Author of The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury)

Top of my list of gifts to give is Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933 (Bloomsbury) , a sparkling if unsettling account of the years after the end of the first world war, which were marked by economic desperation and repeated false dawns before the terrible reality of Hitler’s ascent to power. I was thrilled that Penguin Classics published a new translation of The Secret History of the Mongols by Christopher P Atwood this year. It’s a spectacular text and a wonderful edition that I will also be wrapping several copies of. I always hope to find Wisden in my Christmas stocking. I got mine early as I was invited to give a speech at Lord’s to mark its launch back in April. So this year’s copy is extra special to me.

Megan Nolan

Author of Ordinary Human Failings (Jonathan Cape )

I read an early copy of The Shards (Swift Press) by Bret Easton Ellis over Christmas last year and found it to be ideal fodder for the sacred week between the day itself and New Year’s Eve, when nobody is allowed to make demands of you. A novel that is both exhilaratingly brash and surprisingly thoughtful, it’s both a return to form and a new sort of genius for Easton Ellis. I love giving poetry books as gifts and I have given away Couplets (Faber) by Maggie Millner a dozen or so times this year. A novel in verse about, among other things, a woman leaving a long-term boyfriend for a woman and the new worlds that unfold before her, it’s hilarious and sexy and very human. I am excited at the prospect of receiving Sleepless (Fitzcarraldo), Marie Darrieussecq’s book about insomnia. Her surreal novel Pig Tales has haunted my imagination for many years.

Kevin Jared Hosein

Author of Hungry Ghosts (Bloomsbury )

The unfamiliar becoming the familiar – that’s one of my joys in reading I’d like to share. My first pick, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa (Bloomsbury), a tragicomic debut by Stephen Buoro, follows a teenage Nigerian boy who hopelessly fawns over white women. When he meets one, we’re able to deconstruct his uncanny fetish. My second, Shy (Faber) by Max Porter, follows a titular delinquent, weaving a jumble of forms and devices, shaping despair into something uniquely moody and a delight to read. Put My Sister, the Serial Killer (Atlantic) by Oyinkan Braithwaite in my stocking. Societal statements dressed up as genre always interest me.

Anne Enright

Author of The Wren, the Wren ( Jonathan Cape )

The Norton centenary edition of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is a beautiful hardback of an essential text and a great gift to any aspiring writer. It might be complemented by some terrific debut fiction from Nicole Flattery, Nothing Special (Bloomsbury), or Michael Magee, Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton), and the most comforting book I read this year – Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (Allen Lane), which tells of her slightly paranoid obsession with Naomi Wolf, her conspiracy theorist “double”. Klein catches that sense that the world has become fictional, but she manages to stay sane, interesting and trenchantly political throughout. In difficult times, this feels very empowering. As for a paperback in my stocking, there is actually one I need – it is called How to Read in Your Sleep: The Answer to All the Books in Your Hall.

Blake Morrison

Author of Two Sisters ( B orough Press )

Ten years on from his death, it’s heartening to hear the great poet’s voice again in The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber), brilliantly edited by Christopher Reid and a perfect gift. They’re letters dashed out at airports or on planes as he races round the globe: dutiful, generous, with a rare talent for friendship and no black marks. Also, Patrick Barkham’s The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin (Hamish Hamilton) is biography at its most inventive, mixing Deakin’s own writings with friends’ memories and improvisational add-ons to celebrate a bold and surprising life. For a stocking filler, Jane Feaver’s Crazy (Corsair) is one of the best novels I’ve read in years: obsessive, intimate and very funny.

Don Paterson

Author of Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Faber )

NB by JC (Carcanet) collects James Campbell’s fearless, gossipy, wise and brutally funny TLS columns in one handy volume, and reminds us what a lark book chat would be again if we all got off social media. It would make an excellent gift. I also loved Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound (Faber), her vivid, riveting account of 20th-century “outsider” composers. It is a parade of forgotten geniuses, mavericks and lunatics, mostly marginalised by the intensity of their own obsessive vision (or like Ruth Crawford Seeger, Peggy’s mother, the grinding mill of the patriarchy). And if Santa’s listening and I can find an elastic-free diabetic stocking, I’d like the late Louise Glück’s Poems: 1962–2020 (Penguin Classics), a reassuringly chunky book that should cover the gaps in my reading of one of the few essential poetic voices of the past 50 years. If he can’t fit it in, I’ll take the great Fiona Hill’s memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here (Mariner) .

Author of Wednesday’s Child ( 4 th Estate )

The two hardbacks I would buy for friends are Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape) and Idra Novey’s Take What You Need ( Daunt ), two brilliant and fierce novels featuring brilliant and fierce women characters, about the crossing (or uncrossing) of the most difficult border, that which exists within families. The paperback I would like for my own stocking is Mantel Pieces (HarperCollins), which I thought I would not read until I finish all the fiction by Hilary Mantel and now I’m getting close to that goal.

Richard Ford

Author of Be Mine (Bloomsbury)

I’ll be giving copies of Playhouse (Knopf) by Richard Bausch. This is a big, spacious novel you can immerse yourself in. Bausch is one of the US’s great literary realists and possesses a storywriter’s finesse and diamond-point verbal deftness. Playhouse is full of vivid characters, intriguing/interesting intellectual threadings, much riveting incident, and Bausch’s incomparable wit on the page. Second, The Lock-Up (Faber) by John Banville. Here, the Booker prize winner has it all cooking: two careworn constabulary figures, now older and nicely repurposed from his previous policiers; a murdered Trinity College lady professor; settings stretching from the warn-torn Bavarian Alps to the cold, shadowy, secret-keeping purlieus of 1950s Dublin. It’s a novel you’ll want to sit down with on a chill and windy winter night and read all of. In my stocking I want The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. This 1961 masterpiece won the American National Book award, notably nosing out two other masterpieces, Catch-22 and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road . Set in mid-century New Orleans at carnival time, it brilliantly, hilariously broke the grip held by the magisterial Faulkner when it came to portraying freshly the modern, southern, white ascendancy power structure in its creaky and often ridiculous decline.

Monica Heisey

Author of Really Good, Actually ( 4 th Estate )

I’ve already bought several copies of Dolly Alderton’s Good Material (Fig Tree) for the men and women in my life, and I will continue the rampage through the festive season. It’s the perfect blend of easy to read, funny and extremely astute. Short stories make a great holiday gift – they’re the exact right thing to read during that hazy period between Christmas and new year, when no one is really doing anything, but your focus is sort of split between leftovers and television and vague plans for the year ahead. For this reason and many others, Tessa Hadley’s After the Funeral (Jonathan Cape) would be an ideal gift. The paperback I’d most like to receive is a beat-up old edition of something I already love – Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America (Faber), maybe, or Beloved (Vintage Classics) by Toni Morrison – with a gorgeous vintage cover.

Tania Branigan

Author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution ( Faber)

I’ll be giving Shy (Faber) by Max Porter, which is addictive if (for all the right reasons) hard to read at times. It left me both hoping and fearing for this dangerous, vulnerable boy. For a friend who spurns fiction, it will be All That She Carried (Profile) by Tiya Miles. Despite documenting the horrors of slavery, it’s full of resilience and love – the devotion of an enslaved mother to the daughter stolen from her; the care with which the author imagines and explores their lost lives. And I’m crossing my fingers for Eileen Chang’s Half a Lifelong Romance (Penguin Modern Classics).

Michael Magee

Author of Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton )

The Wren, t he Wren (Jonathan Cape) by Anne Enright is one of my books of any year. It’s about womanhood, youth and that slow, painful, but joyous estrangement that emerges between mother and daughter as life runs its tumultuous course. I was also blown away by Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection: Witness (4th Estate). His sentences are sublime. His stories are monuments. I can’t stop thinking about them. I’d like a copy of Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (Lynne Rienner) by Ghassan Kanafani in my Christmas stocking. I’ve read some stories online, but I want the book. I want to hold it in my hands.

Colin Grant

Author of I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Vintage )

Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (WW Norton & Co) and Nicholas Rankin’s Trapped in History (Faber) show two writers prepared to do the heavy lifting to free us from our timid engagement with the past. Wilson’s elegant translation of Homer’s epic tragedy deepens our understanding of this bruising song of love and death. And in his dramatic account of Britain’s suppression of the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion, Rankin walks with ghosts unflinchingly into our shared history. A paperback but not lightweight, Yomi Sode’s Manorism (Penguin) excels as an innovative poetry collection that’s a tough but tender reflection on parenting, childhood and the transformative power of words.

Paul Harding

Author of This Other Eden (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s debut, Innards (Atlantic) , is a batch of signs and wonders, delivered via lightning from Soweto. For vision, range, depth and voice, I can’t think of another collection that so knocked me out cold, story after story, all the way through. Your eyebrows will be singed and smoke will be coming out of your ears when you’re done.Ayana Mathis and I cross paths semi-regularly, and a point of commiseration over the last decade has been how slowly and painstakingly our writing has seemed to go. Now, her new novel, The Unsettled (Hutchinson Heinemann), is out in the world – published already in the US and out in the UK next spring – andI’d have gladly waited 20 years for a book this rich, deep, and huge-spirited. I’d love a paperback copy of John Cheever’s Collected Stories (Vintage Classics) in my holiday stocking, to replace the one I received for Christmas years ago. A lot of Cheever’s peers have dated terribly but I’m still haunted and thrilled by the best pieces in that book.

Nathan Thrall

Author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story (Allen Lane)

There could hardly be a more urgent time to understand the inner lives of Palestinians, which are depicted with poignance and grace in Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost (Jonathan Cape) . I will be wrapping it together with a brilliant collection of political essays by one of our sharpest literary journalists, Adam Shatz, who takes us from Palestine to Paris in Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso). As I finished writing A Day in the Life of Abed Salama , a close friend asked if I had read another book about a school bus crash, Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter . I hadn’t, but now count Banks as one of my favourite writers. I’d be delighted to find any of his books in my stocking. What a loss that he passed away earlier this year.

Yomi Adegoke

Author of The List (4th Estate)

I’ll be giving people copies of The Black British Quiz Book (HarperCollins) by Sanae Elmed and Shay Loko, of Prtyhere. It’s an inclusive spin on the traditional game, testing general knowledge on things like food, history and music as well as much more niche trivia found in the deepest recesses of Black Twitter. It’s also packed with interesting facts for those wanting to learn something. Another good gift is The Pepperpot Diaries (Dorling Kindersley) by Andi Oliver. While I’m a notoriously dreadful cook, I did try her shrimp curry and syrup-drenched chicken wings recipes (not entirely prepared by me, thank God) and they were divine. I also want to be Andi Oliver when I grow up. The paperback I’d most like to receive in my stocking is Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (Faber), recently adapted for the stage at the Soho theatre. I like my books with flawed, difficult characters and have been warned the protagonist is a real piece of work, so she sounds right up my street.

Author of Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo)

Roger Lewis wrote two of my favourite biographies, on Anthony Burgess and Charles Hawtrey, and Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Riverrun) falls somewhere between those two subjects. It is seriously vulgar – Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project reimagined by a 1960s gossip columnist. High, low, but never middlebrow, its cast includes: Roland Barthes, Benny Hill, Rachel Roberts, George Sanders, Muriel Spark, Andy Warhol and Kingsley Amis; ie it could have been written expressly for me. Any book by John Szwed or about Harry Smith is a must-read, so Szwed’s biography Cosmic Scholar : The Life and Times of Harry Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux ) is irresistible. Alchemy and magic, drink and drugs, Brecht and bebop, obsessive vinyl/book collecting, animated film, paper planes – there’s something here for all the family. In my Christmas stocking I would like to find anything by Fernanda Melchor and/or Gary Indiana .

To browse all of the books in the Observer and Guardian ’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

• 2023 in Culture
• Autobiography and memoir
• Biography books
• History books
• Politics books
• Society books

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The Best Biographies of 2022

Summer Loomis

Summer Loomis has been writing for Book Riot since 2019. She obsessively curates her library holds and somehow still manages to borrow too many books at once. She appreciates a good deadline and likes knowing if 164 other people are waiting for the same title. It's good peer pressure! She doesn't have a podcast but if she did, she hopes it would sound like Buddhability . The world could always use more people creating value with their lives everyday.

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The following are the best biographies 2022 had to offer, according to my brain and my tastes. And I know it might sound like something everyone says, but it was really hard to pick them this year. Like many people, I love “best of” lists for the year, even when I disagree with the titles that make the cut. There is something about narrowing the field to “the best” that makes me excited to read the list and see what I’ve read already and which gems I’ve missed that year. If you want to look back at some of the titles Book Riot chose in 2021, try this best books of 2021 by genre or best books for 2020 . Both will probably quadruple your TBR, but they’re super fun to read anyway.

For 2022 in particular, there were a ton of excellent titles to choose from, in both biographies and memoirs. I am not being polite here but let me just say that it was genuinely hard to choose. To make it easier on myself, I have included some memoirs to pair with the best biographies of 2022 below. If you don’t see your absolute favorite, it’s either because I didn’t like it (I don’t believe in spending time on books I don’t like) or because I ran out of space. And it was most likely the latter!

His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

Samuels and Olorunnipa are two Washington Post journalists who meticulously researched Floyd’s personal history in order to better understand not only his life and experiences before his death, but also the systemic forces that eventually contributed to his murder. While very interesting, this is also a harder read and very frustrating at times as there is so much loss wrapped up into this story. Definitely one of the best biographies of 2022 and one that I think will be read for years to come.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

This is one of those classic biographies that I think readers will just love diving into. Rich in detail and nuance, it drops readers into Dunbar’s life and times, offering a fascinating look at both the literary and personal life of this great American poet. If you are able to read on audio, you may want to check out actor Mirron E. Willis’s excellent narration.

Didn’t We Almost Have it All: In Defense of Whitney Houston by Gerrick Kennedy

Maybe you’re a huge fan or maybe you don’t know who Whitney Houston was, but either way, you can still read this and enjoy it. Kennedy is very clear that he didn’t set out to write a traditional biography. He wasn’t trying to dig up new “dirt” about the singer or to ask people in her life to reflect back on her now that she has been gone for 10 years. Instead, Kennedy tackles something deeper and possibly harder: to see and appreciate Houston as the fully-formed and talented human being that she was and to understand in full her influence over popular culture and music.

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Finding Me by Viola Davis

If you are also interested in reading a memoir from 2022, you could pair Whitney Houston’s biography with Viola Davis’s book. It was a title I saw everywhere in 2022, but didn’t pick up until the end of the year. My only two cents to add to this strong choice is that I was also just about the last person on earth who hadn’t heard about Davis’s childhood. Please don’t go into this without knowing at least something about what she had to overcome. However, despite all that, I still think it is an excellent and ultimately uplifting read. Content warnings include domestic violence, child endangerment, physical and sexual abuse, rape and sexual assault, drug addiction, and animal death. And also the unrelentingly grinding nature of poverty.

Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee by Daryl Joji Maeda 

This is a much more academic presentation of Bruce Lee and the myriad of ways he can be “read” in his connections and contributions to American pop culture. If you or someone you know is itching to read an extremely detailed and deeply considered look at Lee’s life, then this is the book for you. If you read on audio, be sure to check out David Lee Huynh’s narration.

We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu

If you want to read something much lighter but still connected to Asian representation in Western movies, you could do worse than Liu’s 2022 memoir. In comparison to other books on this list, this felt like a much lighter read to me, but it is not without some heavier moments. While I am not a superfan of Liu (because I’m not really a superfan of anyone), I did enjoy learning about Liu’s childhood and especially hearing little details like that his grandparents called him a nickname that basically translated to “little furry caterpillar” as a child. I mean, is there anything more adorable for a kid?

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

This is another meaty biography that readers will just adore. Complex and fascinating, von Neumann’s curiosity was legendary and his contributions are so far-reaching that it is hard to imagine any one person undertaking them all. This is a good choice for readers who are fascinated by mathematics, big personalities, and intellectual puzzles.

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

This is another best biography of 2022 that many, many readers will want to sink into. The audio is also by the author so you may want to read it that way. Whether someone reads it with eyes or ears (or both!), this book is sure to interest many curious Christie fans. And if Worsley’s biography isn’t enough for you, you may also enjoy this breakdown of why Christie is one of the best-selling novelists of all time or these 8 audiobooks for Agatha Christie fans .

The School that Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler by Deborah Cadbury

Cadbury writes a fascinating biography of Anna Essinger, a schoolteacher who managed to smuggle her students out of a Germany succumbing to Hitler’s rise to power and all the horror that was to follow. Essinger’s bravery and clear-eyed understanding of what was happening around her is amazing. This is a thrilling and fascinating biography readers will no doubt find inspirational.

The Escape Artist: The Man who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland

Freedland is a British journalist who has written this thoroughly engrossing book about Rudolf Vrba, a man who managed to escape from Auschwitz. It’s no surprise that this is a very important but difficult read. For those who can manage it, I highly recommend immersing oneself in this historical nonfiction biography about a man who survived some of the darkest events of human history.

That is my list of the best biographies of 2022, with a few memoirs for those who are interested. And now of course, I need to mention several titles I have yet to get to from 2022: Hua Hsu’s Stay True , Zain Asher’s Where the Children Take Us , Fatima Ali’s Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More , and Dan Charnas and Jeff Peretz’s Dilla Time , to name a few!

Also Bernardine Evaristo published Manifesto: On Never Giving Up in 2022 and somehow it slipped through the cracks of my TBR. I will have to make time for that one soon.

If you still need more titles to explore, try these 50 best biographies or 20 biographies for kids . And to that latter list, I might add that a children’s biography came out about Octavia Butler in 2022 called Star Child by Haitian American author Ibi Zoboi, so you might want to check that out too!

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