The nights are getting shorter and colder, it’s time to curl up with a good book and a warm beverage of choice.  Biographies and memoirs are always good to curl up with on a winter evening, and we’ve got some fabulous new ones in the collection.  Take a look at these we’ve selected from this month’s new stock.

Anything can happen / Hampton, Susan
“Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about storytelling and lies and how truth and memory are complex. It keeps in play so many things: irony and spirituality, a slice of social history of Sydney’s inner west, a farm in Victoria, a lesbian subculture, Mardi Gras, the literary pleasures of teaching writing. With the eye of a poet, and the dry drollery of someone who has experienced it all, straight and married, gay and married, mother, friend, lover, writer, this is a raw and powerful account of a life lived fully.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

No son of mine : a memoir / Corcoran, Jonathan
“Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Missing persons : or, My grandmother’s secrets / Wills, Clair
“When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a mother-and-baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet Clair was never told of Mary’s existence. How could a whole family–a whole country–abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family’s story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Continue reading “Anything Can Happen – New Biographies and Memoirs in the Collection” →