biographies and memoirs 2023

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The best memoirs and biographies of 2023

The rise of Madonna, Barbra Streisand in her own words, plus the stormy relationship of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are among this year’s highlights

F or most writers, a memoir is a once in a lifetime event, but not for the poet and novelist Blake Morrison. Having already written memoirs about his late mother and father, he has turned his attention to his siblings in Two Sisters (Borough). The book details the life of Gill, his younger sister who died in 2019 from heart failure caused by alcohol abuse, alongside his half-sister Josie, the product of his father’s affair with a married neighbour, whose real parentage went unacknowledged for years. Morrison’s account of their struggles is tender, vivid and achingly sad.

O Brother (Canongate) is another brutal and brilliant sibling memoir in which the Kill Your Friends author John Niven recalls the life and death of his charismatic, troubled brother, Gary, who took his own life in 2010. It’s with both humour and pathos that he recalls his and Gary’s early life growing up in Irvine, Ayrshire, their diverging adult trajectories and the “Chernobyl of the soul” felt by Niven and his family after his brother’s suicide.

From siblings to parents and grandparents: Before the Light Fades (Virago) by Natasha Walter reveals how the author’s mother, Ruth, took her life at the age of 75, leaving a note that read: “Please be happy for me. It is a logical, positive decision.” Her death inspires Walter to investigate her family’s history of activism, tracing a fascinating path from her German grandfather Georg, who protested against the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s, via her mother’s campaigning – Ruth was a member of the anti-war group Committee of 100, founded by Bertrand Russell – through to her own direct action with Extinction Rebellion.

Having detailed the trauma endured by her Jewish grandparents and their siblings during the second world war in her 2020 memoir House of Glass, Hadley Freeman turns the microscope on herself in Good Girls (4th Estate), detailing an adolescence blown apart by anorexia. The book is both a fearless account of her hospitalisation and eventual recovery and an important study of this most slippery and misunderstood disorder.

The Pulitzer-winning Stay True (Picador) , by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, is a powerful and beautifully written meditation on guilt, memory and male friendship as the author reflects on the death of his “flagrantly handsome” college friend, Ken, who was murdered in 1998 after leaving a house party. A similarly thoughtful portrait of friendship, Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (Penguin) tells of Michael Laudor, Rosen’s childhood friend with whom he shared a dream of being a writer. In adulthood, Laudor developed schizophrenia, for which he spent time in a psychiatric institution, and, in 1998, committed a shocking murder. In telling Laudor’s story, Rosen paints a bleak picture of how initially hopeful new attitudes towards mental illness fed into a system where those in desperate need of help slipped through the cracks.

In the clear-eyed and courageous How to Say Babylon (4th Estate), the poet Safiya Sinclair documents her traumatic childhood as the daughter of a militant Rastafarian who struck fear into his wife and children and made it clear to Safiya that she should grow into “the humbled wife of a Rastaman. Ordinary and unselfed. Her voice and vices not her own.” In her teens, Sinclair took refuge in poetry and, in defiance of her father, forged her own path. A domineering father also features in Noreen Masud’s lyrical, melancholy A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton), in which the author travels to some of Britain’s starkest landscapes, including Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and Orkney, while reflecting on themes of exile, heritage and her troubled childhood in Lahore, Pakistan.

Subtitled “an anti-memoir”, Wish I Was Here (Serpent’s Tail) sees the Viriconium author M John Harrison sifting through old notebooks and observing how his character and writing have evolved in a career spanning half a century, all the while rejecting the concept of memoir as another form of fiction. Along with providing snapshots from his life, this delightfully oddball and original book functions as a writing manual in which Harrison reveals his own battles on the page. “The problem of writing,” he says, “is always the problem of who you were, the problem of who to be next.”

A beguiling blend of memoir and biography, the Observer art critic Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap (Chatto & Windus) recalls the life of her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, and that of Carel Fabritius, the 17th-century Dutch artist who was killed aged 32 in the Delft “thunderclap”, an explosion at a municipal gunpowder magazine that caused the roof of his home to collapse. Wrapped around their stories is the author’s own artistic journey, from her early days in London visiting and revisiting Fabritius’s A View of Delft in the National Gallery. Cumming’s luminous descriptions of individual paintings are worth the price of the book alone.

Wifedom (Penguin), by the former human rights lawyer Anna Funder, similarly weaves together memoir and biography to tell the story of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of George Orwell who died at the age of 39. Having spent a summer reading Orwell, Funder noticed how little he mentioned Eileen, even though she had joined him on research trips and collaborated with him on works including Nineteen Eighty-Four. And so Funder shifted her attention “from the work to the life, and from the man to the wife”, in the process creating a nuanced portrait of a charismatic, pragmatic woman who, for better or worse, sacrificed her talent for the man she loved.

Less a straightforward biography than a series of portraits, Red Memory (Faber), by the Guardian’s former China correspondent Tania Branigan, collates remarkable eyewitness accounts of China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of upheaval, paranoia and persecution beginning in 1966. Among Branigan’s interviewees is 60-year-old Zhang Hongbing, who, as a teenager, denounced his mother to the Communist party, leading to her arrest and execution. Zhang takes Branigan to her grave where, between sobs, he chastises his mother for failing to teach him about independence of thought.

Jonny Steinberg’s richly detailed Winnie & Nelson (William Collins) documents the relationship of the late anti-apartheid activist and first South African president Nelson Mandela and his second wife, the former social worker Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who died in 2018. Both fought racism at great personal cost, though, as this insightful biography reveals, they also inflicted immeasurable cruelty on one another.

Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life (Coronet) chronicles, in enthralling detail, Madonna Louise Ciccone’s path from terrifyingly ambitious trainee dancer to pop colossus, all the while placing her in a wider social and cultural context. This is not just the story of massive sales and reinvention but that of a young woman devastated by the loss of her ultra-religious mother and fearlessly battling patriarchal systems, the conservative right and the Catholic church. Another exhaustive portrait of an era-defining star comes courtesy of its subject. Barbra Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra (Century) clocks in at 992 pages, and charts every step of the winding road from Brooklyn to Hollywood.

If both those books reveal the hard graft behind fame, Erotic Vagrancy (Riverrun), by Roger Lewis, tells of the excess. A twin biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the actors famed for their on-off relationship and lavish lifestyle, the title is borrowed from a furious Vatican statement drafted during the filming of 1963’s Cleopatra in Italy, which accused the pair of “erotic vagrancy”. Lewis’s magnificently entertaining book – a doorstopper at more than 650 pages – brims with outrageous anecdotes attesting to the couple’s obsession with one another and their chaotic and decadent ways (they once hired a yacht for their dogs). Burton and Taylor are seemingly monstrous – infantile, vulgar, narcissistic – but, as depicted here, they are nothing less than mesmerising.

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The Best Memoirs of 2023

These ten books explore what it means to be a person..

The beauty of memoir is its resistance to confinement: We contain multitudes, so our methods of introspection must, too. This year’s best memoirs perfectly showcase such variety. Some are sparse, slippery — whole lives pieced together through fragmented memories, letters to loved ones, recipes, mythology, scripture. Some tease the boundary between truth and fiction. Others elevate straightforward narratives by incorporating political theory, philosophy, and history. The authors of each understand that one’s life — and more significantly, one’s self — can’t be contained in facts. After all, the facts as we remember them aren’t really facts. It’s their openness and experimentation that allow, at once, intimacy and universality, provoking some of our biggest questions: How does a person become who they are? What makes up an identity? What are the stories we tell ourselves, and why do they matter? These books might not spell out the answers for you, but they’ll certainly push you toward them.

10. Hijab Butch Blues , by Lamya H

NYC-based organizer Lamya H (a pseudonym) has described her memoir as “unapologetically queer and unapologetically Muslim .” What this looks like is a book that isn’t so much grappling with or reconciling two conflicting identities, but rather lovingly examining the ways each has supported and strengthened the other. Lamya provides close, queer readings of the Quran, drawing connections between its stories and her own experiences of persecution as a brown girl growing up in an (unnamed) Arab country with strict colorist hierarchies. Beginning with her study of the prophet Maryam — whose virgin pregnancy and general rejection of men brings a confused 14-year-old Lamya real relief during Quran class — Lamya draws on various religious figures to track her political, spiritual, and sexual coming of age, jumping back and forth in time as she grows from a struggling child into a vital artist and activist.

9. Better Living Through Birding , by Christian Cooper

On May 25, 2020, birder Christian Cooper was walking the Central Park Ramble when he asked a white woman on the same path to leash her dog. She refused, he started recording, and after both he and his sister posted the video on social media , the whole world saw her call 911 and falsely claim that an African American man was threatening both her and her dog. Cooper quickly found himself at the center of an urgent conversation about weaponized whiteness and police brutality against Black men in the U.S., amplified by another devastating video circulating that same day: George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Many will pick up Cooper’s memoir for his account of the interaction that captured international attention and forever changed his life — and it is a powerful, damning examination — but it is far from the main event. By the time it shows up, Cooper has already given us poignant recollections of growing up Black and gay (and in the closet) in 1970s Long Island, a loving analysis of science fiction, a behind-the-scenes look at the comic-book industry as it broke through to the mainstream, and most significantly, an impassioned ode to and accessible education on recreational birding. (The audiobook comes with interstitial birdsong!) Recalling his time at Harvard, Cooper turns repeatedly to his love of his English classes, and this background comes through in his masterful writing. An already prolific writer in the comic-book space, his memoir marks his first (and hopefully not last) foray into the long-form territory.

8. Love and Sex, Death and Money , by McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark is one of the sharpest, most exciting voices writing at the intersections of capitalism, community, gender, and sex — more broadly, everything in this title — and she is also criminally underread. In her epistolary memoir Love and Sex … , she looks at a lifetime of transitions — journeys not only through her gender, but also politics, art, relationships, and aging — and reflects on all the ways she has become the woman she is today, in letters to the people who helped shape her. Wark’s first letter is, fittingly, directed to her younger self. She acknowledges their infinite possible futures and that, in this way, this younger Wark on the brink of independence is the one most responsible for setting her on the path to this specific future. In theory, it’s a letter to offer clarity, even guidance, to this younger self, but really it’s a means of listening to and learning from her. Her letters to mothers, lovers, and others are as much, if not more, about Wark as they are about the recipients, but that self-reflection doubles as a testament to the recipients’ power. What comes across most strongly is Wark’s belief in ongoing evolution and education, and it’s hard not to leave inspired by that possibility.

7. A Man of Two Faces , by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir maintains the singular voice of his fiction: audacious, poetic, self-aware. Written in nonlinear second-person stream of consciousness — its disjointedness represented on the page by paragraphs volleying from left to right alignment across the page — A Man of Two Faces recounts his life as a Vietnamese refugee in the U.S. When his family moves from wartime Vietnam to San Jose, California, 4-year-old Nguyen is placed in a different sponsor home than the rest of his family. The separation is brief, but it sets a tone of alienation that continues throughout his life — both from his parents, who left their home in pursuit of safety but landed in a place with its own brand of violence, and from his new home. As he describes his journey into adulthood and academia, Nguyen incorporates literary and cultural criticism, penetrating analyses of political history and propaganda, and poignant insights about memory and trauma.

6. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere , by Maria Bamford

It’s safe to say alt-comedian Maria Bamford’s voice isn’t for everyone. Those who get her anti-stand-up stand-up get it and those who don’t, don’t. Her absurdist, meta series Lady Dynamite revealed the work of a woman learning to recognize and love her brilliant weirdness, and in Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult , she channels that weirdness into a disarmingly earnest, more accessible account of both fame and mental illness. Centered on Bamford’s desperate pursuit of belonging, and the many, often questionable places it’s led her — church, the comedy scene, self-actualization conferences, 12-step groups, each of which she puts under the umbrella of the titular “cults” — Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult is egoless, eye-opening, uncomfortable, and laugh-out-loud funny. These are among the best qualities — maybe even prerequisites — of an effective mental-illness memoir, and Bamford’s has earned its keep in the top tier. If you’re thinking of skipping it because you haven’t connected with Bamford’s work before: don’t.

5. In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation , by Isabel Zapata

In Isabel Zapata’s intimate, entrancing memoir In Vitro , the Mexican poet brazenly breaks what she calls “the first rule of in vitro fertilization”: never talk about it. Originally published in Spanish in 2021, and with original drawings woven throughout, In Vitro is a slim collection of short, discrete pieces. Its fragments not only describe the invasive process and its effects on her mind and body, but also contextualize its lineage, locating the deep-seated draw of motherhood and conception, analyzing the inheritances of womanhood, and speaking directly to her potential child. All together, it becomes something expansive — an insightful personal history but also a brilliant philosophical text about the very nature of sacrifice and autonomy.

4. The Night Parade , by Jami Nakamura Lin

When Jami Nakamura Lin was 17 years old, she checked herself into a psych ward and was diagnosed bipolar. After years experiencing disorienting periods of rage, the diagnosis offers validation — especially for her historically dismissive parents — but it doesn’t provide the closure that mainstream depictions of mental illness promise. In The Night Parade , intriguingly categorized as a speculative memoir, Lin explains that if a story is good, it “collapses time”; in other words, it has no beginning or end. Chasing this idea, Lin turns to the stories of her Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan heritage, using their demons, spirits, and monsters to challenge ideas of recovery and resituate her feelings of otherness. Intertwined in this pursuit is her grappling with the young death of her father and the birth of her daughter after a traumatic miscarriage. Extensively researched — citing not only folklore but also scholars of history, literary, and mythology — and elevated by her sister Cori Nakamura Lin’s lush illustrations, The Night Parade is both an entirely new perspective on bipolar disorder and a fascinating education in mythology by an expert who so clearly loves the material. It might be Lin’s first book, but it possesses the self-assurance, courage, and mastery of a seasoned writer.

3. Doppelganger , by Naomi Klein

After the onset of the COVID pandemic, as the U.S. devolved into frenzied factions, sociopolitical analyst Naomi Klein found herself in the middle of her own bewildering drama: A substantial population, especially online, began to either confuse or merge her with Naomi Wolf, a writer who’d gone from feminist intellectual to anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist. Klein’s initial bemusement becomes real concern verging on obsession as she fixates on her sort-of doppelgänger and starts questioning the stability of her identity. Klein becomes entangled in the world of her opposite, tracing the possible pipelines from leftism to alt-right and poking at the cracks in our convictions. Throughout, she nails the uncanniness of our digital existence, the ways constant performance of life both splinters and constrains the self. What happens when we sacrifice our humanity in the pursuit of a cohesive personal brand? And when we’re this far gone, is there any turning back?

2. The Woman in Me , by Britney Spears

Throughout the yearslong campaign to release Britney Spears from a predatory conservatorship , the lingering conspiracy theories questioning its success , and the ongoing cultural discourse about the ways public scrutiny has harmed her, what has largely been missing is Spears’s own voice. In her highly anticipated memoir, she lays it all out: her upbringing in a family grappling with multiple generations of abuse, the promise and betrayal of stardom, her exploitation and manipulation by loved ones, and the harrowing, dehumanizing realities of her conservatorship . These revelations are tempered by moments of genuine joy she’s found in love, motherhood, and singing, though it’s impossible to read these recollections without anticipating the loss — or at least the complication — of these joys. Most touching are her descriptions of her relationships with her sons; her tone is conversational, but it resonates with deep, undying devotion. It’s an intimate story, and one that forces questions about our treatment of mental illness, the ethics of psychiatric practices, the relationships between public figures and their fans, and the effects of fame — especially on young women. Justice for Britney, forever.

1. Pulling the Chariot of the Sun , by Shane McCrae

When Shane McCrae was 3 years old, his white maternal grandparents told his Black father they were taking Shane on a camping trip. It wasn’t the first time they’d done so, but this time, they never returned. What followed was a life full of instability, abuse, and manipulation, while his grandparents — including a grandfather who had, more than once, trawled cities for Black men to attack — convinced McCrae his father had abandoned him and that his Blackness was a handicap. It’s clear McCrae is first and foremost a poet; the rhythm of his prose and his hypnotic evocation of sensory memory reveals the way a lifetime of lies affected his grasp on his past. Maybe he can’t trust the facts of his past, but he certainly knows what it felt like, what it looked like. As he excavates and untangles muddied memories, contends with ambivalent feelings about his grandmother and mother, and ultimately comes to terms with their unforgivable robbery of a relationship with both his father and his true, full self, McCrae’s pain bleeds through his words — but so too does a gentle sense of acceptance. We are lucky to bear witness.

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Notable memoirs of 2023, recommended by cal flyn.

Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn selects the best recent autobiographical writing in this round-up of notable memoirs of 2023—taking in new work from such literary giants as Janet Malcolm and Annie Ernaux, the writer other writers are raving about, and a humorous debut depicting life in a haunted antiquarian bookshop.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm

Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page

The Light Room: On Art and Care by Kate Zambreno

O Brother by John Niven

1 Stay True by Hua Hsu

2 still pictures: on photography and memory by janet malcolm, 3 pageboy: a memoir by elliot page, 4 the light room: on art and care by kate zambreno, 5 o brother by john niven.

Well, usually here I’d have two automatic answers: this year’s winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography or Memoir . But what would you know—in 2023, the same book won both. Bard professor and New Yorker writer Hua Hsu’s Stay True  centres upon the death of a Berkeley classmate in a bungled armed robbery. The Pulitzer judges declared it an “elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.” Stay True has been out in the United States since October 2022, but only reached UK bookshops this month.

Also of note: The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras—a powerful memoir about Contreras’s Colombian heritage and an apparent supernatural inheritance—was also a finalist for both prizes. It traces her family’s history through decades of national upheaval; as the New York Times review noted , “spectral treasure hunts, abusive men, alcoholic ghosts and shape-shifting witches; paramilitaries set fire to a family farm, bomb blasts become a normal occurrence and an uncle is kidnapped by guerrillas four separate times.” Its reliance on oral history manifests as an unavoidably disjointed and unverifiable narrative, but it is nevertheless “a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”

Absolutely. The late, great Janet Malcolm’s final book,  Still Pictures , was released posthumously at the start of this year. It’s a memoir in essays, inspired by a collection of black and white photographs of her Czech refugee family found in a box (labeled ‘old not good photos’) in her attic. They left Prague in 1939, she writes: “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.” Malcolm was instinctively leery of autobiography. Memoir was a “novelistic enterprise,” she felt. But these candid images offered her an alternate way in, one befitting the former photography columnist for the New York Times: “Occasionally… like memory itself, one of these inert pictures will suddenly stir and come to life,” she writes, warming to her theme.  Still Pictures will not, perhaps, be the work that Malcolm will be best known for, but it will greatly appeal to those who already admire her writing.

I was also very excited to learn about a new book from the French Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux .  The Young Man — ably translated from the original French by Alison Strayer—is an exacting account of an affair with a student thirty years her junior. “Perhaps it was the desire to spark the writing of a book—a task I had hesitated to undertake because of its immensity—that prompted me to take A home for a drink after dinner at a restaurant,” she writes, analysing herself after the fact. The affair does not end well, but one does not read Annie Ernaux for happy endings. She has made her name by conducting live dissections of her emotional life, and The Young Man is no different. But it is, even for Ernaux, a very slim book, coming in at only 35 pages.

Have there been notable celebrity memoirs published in 2023?

Otherwise, the celebrity memoir of the year is probably Elliot Page’s Pageboy , which charts—among other things—his Hollywood career, coming out as gay, then his later gender transition. The Juno and  Inception actor might be the most famous trans man in the world right now, and this thoughtful, non-linear account is thus not only a glimpse into the Tinseltown lifestyle but a valuable addition to trans literature . In its sensitivity and earnest tone, wrought from first-hand and sometimes painful experience, it is also, as was noted in the i , “a vital antidote to the toxic trans debate.” If you’d like to get a taste of the book before committing,  People magazine published an extract from the first chapter here .

Kate Zambreno is a true writers’ writer; her books are always being recommended to me by other authors. (Most recently, the novelist Catherine Lacey told me that Zambreno’s Screen Tests is “a perfect book.”) Her latest, The Light Room , is billed as “a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty.” Annie Ernaux herself offered an endorsement, enthusing that Zambreno “has invented a new form,” comprising “a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.” That absolute present is a meditation on parenting, on the quiet joys of maintenance, and what Zambreno terms “life inside”—that is, both of being cooped up in the house during the pandemic, and interiority in that other sense. The life of the mind finds intellectual trapdoors that can relieve the tedium. Speaking to Lithub recently, Zambreno explained that she hopes the book will be “a balm for others, a space of joy as well as exhaustion and deep sadness, a space to think with.”

The US poet Maggie Smith—whose bittersweet poem ‘Good Bones’ went viral several years ago, making Smith an overnight sensation—has released a memoir charting the disintegration of her marriage. (Its title, You Could Make This Place Beautiful ,  is a line from that poem.) Smith’s fans tend towards the devotional, but I do have the sense that this particular book has been unusually polarising. You’ll either love it and find its aphoristic style and motivational tone inspiring, or you’ll find it somewhat trying . Probably that description in itself will be enough to indicate which will be the case in your instance.

Another social media darling, Oliver Darkshire—whose unexpectedly riotous helming of the Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop Twitter account found an avid online audience—has published Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller . Sotheran’s, on London’s Sackville Street, is one of the world’s oldest bookshops, and is by all accounts a charmingly eccentric establishment, with a resident ghost, cursed books, and a byzantine cataloguing system. Darkshire’s whimsical and humorous account of his apprenticeship in this storied, somewhat shadowy, institution is a lot of fun. If you’re on the fence, Lithub has published an extract .

Yes. The Scottish novelist and screenwriter John Niven—perhaps best known for the cult favourite Kill Your Friends — has just released a searing account of his fraught relationship with his charismatic younger brother Gary, who took his own life in 2010. O Brother records how their lives began in tandem but diverged; while John made his way in the music business, and later as a writer, Gary worked manual jobs and dealt drugs in the small town they grew up in. By the end of his life, Gary had alienated most of his friends and family, and was in debt—although not insurmountably so. Looking through his dead brother’s belongings, John tallies up the overdue bills and has the sickening realisation that he could have written a cheque and solved his sibling’s financial crisis instantly. But what might have been a grim story of self-recrimination and despair is, in Niven’s hands, a moving and even exuberant story that reflects the chaotic energy of their brother and the dark humour that he and his sister Linda forge from an otherwise harrowing situation.

Let me slip in a couple more quick ones: naturalist Amy-Jane Beer just won the UK’s Wainwright Prize for The Flow: Rivers, Waters, and Wildness , in which she revisits the waterway that claimed the life of a close friend, and in doing so opens herself again to fluvial beauty; and former Five Books contributor Thea Lenarduzzi ‘s lyrical family memoir  Dandelions   is currently in contention for the UK’s Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

And finally, the next thing on my to-be-read pile is The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, a sufferer of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that will ultimately result in complete blindness. The Millions editor Sophia Stewart raved that it was not only one of the best books she’d read in 2023, but “one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. No descriptor feels capacious enough: an intellectually rigorous memoir, a moving cultural history, and a brilliant study of blindness, disability, and adaptation.” Sounds good to me.

September 23, 2023

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13 New Memoirs We Can't Wait to Read in 2023

These promising reads belong at the top of your TBR list.

A bevy of noteworthy new memoirs are headed our way this year – and we picked out the best of the best. From inspirational environmental narratives and heartfelt meditations on mental health to highly anticipated tell-alls, here are the upcoming memoirs you don’t want to miss.

By Mya-Rose Craig

Nature and family intertwine in Mya-Rose Craig’s moving new memoir, Birdgirl . The 20-year-old author is an avid birder and environmentalist, and in her memoir, she chronicles her family’s travels around the world as they search for birds and marvel at the fragile beauty of nature . Craig also opens up about her mother’s mental health struggles and documents the many ways that being together in nature has helped her family thrive. Indeed, Craig encourages all of us to spend more time outdoors – both to restore balance in our personal lives and to spur us into action against the climate crisis. “An excellent mix of travelogue, memoir, and advocacy” ( Kirkus , starred review), Birdgirl soars.

Publication date: March 28, 2023

While You Were Out

By meg kissinger.

In this intimate and unflinching new memoir, investigative journalist Meg Kissinger draws on her family’s experiences with mental illness to explore America’s deeply flawed attitudes toward mental health and its failing healthcare system. Kissinger is an award-winning reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist who’s dedicated her career to exposing the inadequacy of care for people suffering from mental illness. In While You Were Out , she turns her attention to her own family’s struggles with anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Growing up in the 1960s Chicago suburbs, Meg and her family kept their mental health battles and two siblings’ deaths by suicide a closely guarded secret. Years later, the author is ready to open up about her heartache, grief, and her family’s steadfast devotion as she shines a light on promising new mental health treatments and strategies. “We found ways to help and support each other and ourselves,” Kissinger explains. “I hoped our family’s story could offer insight, solace, and inspiration.”

Publication date: September 5, 2023

Being Henry: The Fonz...and Beyond

By henry winkler.

Henry Winkler, launched into prominence by his role as “The Fonz” in the beloved Happy Days , has transcended the role that made him who he is. Brilliant, funny, and widely-regarded as the nicest man in Hollywood, Henry shares in this achingly vulnerable memoir the disheartening truth of his childhood, the difficulties of a life with severe dyslexia, the pressures of a role that takes on a life of its own, and the path forward once your wildest dream seems behind you.

Publication date: October 31, 2023

Good for a Girl

By lauren fleshman.

Lauren Fleshman is a top-tier distance runner, having won five NCAA championships at Stanford and two national championships as a professional athlete. Good for a Girl is both a love letter to competitive sports and a striking rebuke of the way the sports industry treats women and young girls. Blending personal memoir with a stirring manifesto, Fleshman cites sports physiology and psychology alongside her own experiences to expose gender disparities in athletics and lays out a path for the sports world to inspire a new wave of female participants. A New York Times bestseller, Good for a Girl is a must-read new sports book that doubles as a rousing “call to action for the coaches, parents, and young women of future athletic generations” ( The Atlantic ).

Publication date: January 10, 2023

Hijab Butch Blues

Faith, family, community, identity, culture… Each plays a vital role in this radical new coming-of-age LGBTQ memoir . Lamya H was born in South Asia and moved to the Middle East as a child. Throughout her early years, she searched for her identity and a place to belong. Lamya H then moved to the U.S. for college, where she began a new chapter as an openly queer devout Muslim. In Hijab Butch Blues , the author draws parallels between her journey and famous stories from the Quran to craft a series of heartfelt essays on queerness, community, devotion, and the immigrant experience . “Hopeful and uplifting” ( Kirkus ), Hijab Butch Blues makes an ideal memoir book club pick and is not to be missed.

Publication date: February 7, 2023

Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult

By michelle dowd.

In this “inspiring and insightful tale of resilience in the face of adversity” ( Booklist ), Michelle Dowd vividly relates her experience growing up in an utterly oppressive environment. The author was born into a doomsday cult known as the Field, run by her domineering grandfather. As a child, she was told to distrust outsiders and bow to her family’s extreme religious demands. It was a time of hardship, isolation, and abuse. As a result, Dowd had no choice but to learn how to take care of herself and – crucially – how to live off the land. In Forager , Dowd chronicles her coming-of-age story , sharing the foraging skills she learned and tracing the way in which her capacity for survival ultimately led to her freedom.

Publication date: March 7, 2023

A Living Remedy

By nicole chung.

In her bestselling All You Can Ever Know , Nicole Chung movingly documented her search for the parents that gave her up for adoption . In Chung’s new memoir, the author writes about her adoptive parents and the many hardships they endured – from stretching their paychecks to keep food on the table to living under the shadow of overwhelming medical bills. Chung’s sorrow and rage come to a head when her father passes away at 67, and she realizes that his limited access to healthcare contributed to his death. Beautifully told, A Living Remedy is a “tender personal story with powerful social and political ramifications” ( BookPage ).

Publication date: April 4, 2023

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

By maggie smith.

Think of this lyrical new memoir by award-winning poet Maggie Smith as a literary spiral. At its center, is the collapse of Smith’s marriage, a very personal sadness. Smith then traces that emotional episode outward, leading us along the spiral’s widening curve into an exploration of what it means to be a woman, a mother, a worker, and a traveler on the road of life. We discover a bit about ourselves as we follow Smith on her journey. In You Could Make This Place Beautiful , the author boldly reminds her readers that you can “survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new” (Glennon Doyle, New York Times bestselling author).

Publication date: April 11, 2023

The Forgotten Girls

By monica potts.

Growing up in rural Arkansas, Monica Potts and her best friend Darci dreamed about where their lives would lead. The gifted young students seemed destined for bright futures. Reality, however, played out quite differently. Potts left for college and followed her dream of becoming a journalist and writer. Years later, while reporting on rampant poverty in her home state, she caught back up with Darci. Her childhood friend was now a single mother raising two kids, unemployed, addicted to meth, and on the brink of homelessness. How did their lives take such starkly different paths? The Forgotten Girls is a powerful and enlightening portrait of poverty, addiction, and broken dreams in the land of opportunity.

Publication date: April 18, 2023

Mott Street

By ava chin.

Ava Chin grew up with her mom in Queens, New York, without knowing her father or indeed much about her family. Determined to learn more about her roots, Chin began an extensive search and soon discovered how her ancestors were affected by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Her relatives built their lives out of one building on Mott Street in New York City’s Chinatown. In Mott Street , Chin carefully unravels their stories of survival and reinvention, creating a stunning family tree and an epic portrait of the Chinese American experience.

Publication date: April 25, 2023

Women We Buried, Women We Burned

By rachel louise snyder.

Turmoil and resiliency defined Rachel Louise Snyder’s formative years. At the age of eight, she lost her mother. Then her father uprooted the family and moved everyone into a cultish evangelical community thousands of miles away. Snyder rebelled, was forced out of school and home, and at the age of 16 found herself living out of her car and fending for herself. And yet, she endured, first working her way through college and then transforming into a fierce women’s advocate and an award-winning reporter on domestic violence. In Women We Buried, Women We Burned , Snyder chronicles her story. It’s a memoir of violence and loss, yes, but also of survival, transformation, and hope .

Publication date: May 23, 2023

By Elliot Page

The hit 2007 movie Juno elevated Elliot Page to the center stage, earning him an Oscar nomination and increased scrutiny from the media and the public. Yet while society sought to cast him in the role of a Hollywood star, Page was determined to come to terms with his identity in his own way. The actor publicly came out as transgender in December 2020 and has since become a committed advocate for trans youth and a vocal opponent of anti-trans legislation. In Pageboy , Page candidly shares his life story, pulling no punches when it comes to love, sex, Hollywood, and finding your true self.

Publication date: June 6, 2023

A Place for Us

By brandon j. wolf.

Brandon J. Wolf left his hometown in rural Oregon for Orlando, Florida and the chance to find his community. The move was transformative; back home he endured racism and homophobia, while in Orlando he felt accepted and free. On June 12, 2016, Wolf and his friends were enjoying a night out at the Pulse nightclub when a gunman barged in, killing 49 people and wounding 53 more. Wolf survived the horrific terror attack, and the experience propelled him into activism. A Place for Us traces Wolf’s struggle to find his place in an often hostile world and his emergence as a nationally recognized public speaker and advocate for LGBTQ+ civil rights and gun-safety reform. “One of the most powerful voices of his generation, Brandon Wolf tells a story of race, place, and the struggle for belonging that will drive you to tears and expand your capacity for hope, as well as your appreciation for the power of community” (Joy-Ann Reid, host of The ReidOut ).

Publication date: July 1, 2023

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Powerful Memoirs to Read This Summer

Propulsive plots? Check. Unforgettably real stories? Check. Hard-won insights about love, grief, resilience, and self-discovery? Check, check, check.

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Through the Groves, by Anne Hull

In her nearly two decades as a national reporter for The Washington Post, Anne Hull earned a reputation (and a Pulitzer!) for rigor and artistry in capturing some of the most urgent stories of our time. In her debut book, she directs her characteristically incisive gaze at her own history, weaving an atmospheric and aching account of her childhood in the sweltering heat of Central Florida and the tumult of the ’60s. Hull grew up riding shotgun in her father’s Ford truck through orange groves her family had worked—without competition or disturbance—for generations. But in 1967, change was in the air; Walt Disney had just broken ground on a new park, Californian “seedless clementines” had recently hit the market, and her father’s drinking was destabilizing her home. Hull captures a richly ambivalent portrait of a world on the brink of disappearing and a family in the midst of radical transformation: afternoons spent chasing the “marshmallow fluff of DDT,” springtime orange blossoms so pungent they burned their scent into clothes, men’s bodies ravaged by pesticide inhalation, and women bucking convention. Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.

The Wreck, by Cassandra Jackson

Long before Cassandra Jackson was born, her name was already on a tombstone. In the 1960s, a car accident took the lives of her father’s first wife, his mother, his brother-in-law, his sister, and his three-year-old niece, after whom she was named. Growing up, Jackson was taught to never ask questions about “the wreck” or about the dead family her father only spoke about in his sleep. Only as an adult, facing the possibility of her own infertility, does Jackson finally go in search of definitive answers. In archives and fertility clinics alike, she encounters the specter of generational trauma and medical racism, wondering if her body, like her name, is a “haunted thing.” With mesmerizing lyricism and cutting insight, the author of The Toni Morrison Book Club teaches us that any hope for the future requires an honest confrontation with the past.

Losing Music, by John Cotter

At age 30, John Cotter began to notice a ringing noise, over time, escalated to a deafening roar and a daunting diagnosis: Ménière’s disease, an inner ear disorder for which there is “no reliable treatment and no consensus on its cause.” Over time, Cotter will lose the crisp edges of music, the sound of the ocean, his ability to fully communicate, his sense of balance, and his job as an adjunct professor. Like Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, Losing Music explodes an individual experience of illness into a cultural and medical reckoning; with a sociologist’s rigor and a poet’s lyricism, Cotter takes readers on an odyssey through the social history of disability, the brutal bureaucracy of the American healthcare system, and the intimate violence of living in a volatile body. But this memoir is just as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.

Lesbian Love Story, by Amelia Possanza

“Are you a lesbian or something?” a male teammate asked Amelia Possanza on her explicitly queer adult recreational swim team. She was furious at his lack of recognition, but couldn’t really blame him: “If I had yet to find role models who could show me how to live, where would he have seen a lesbian?” Thus began Possanza’s rabid quest to uncover and animate lesbian stories; lesbians, she suspected, “would have something to teach us all about love.” Drawing from intensive archival research, interviews, and her own whimsical imagination, Possanza brings seven lesbians to life on the page; there are the historical heavy-hitters (hello, Sappho!) and the hidden heroes like Rusty Brown, the World War II hero and drag king renegade. At once a yearning search for a mirror in the fogged glass of history and an uproariously funny skewering of modern queer stereotypes, Lesbian Love Story will radically expand your understanding of lesbianism—and of love itself.

Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder

Today, Rachel Louise Snyder is an award-winning journalist, author, professor, and Guggenheim fellow best known for No Visible Bruises , her groundbreaking exploration of the domestic violence epidemic. But in 1985, she was a homeless high school dropout, surviving off of the scraps of food left by customers, and partying recklessly to keep the ghosts of her past and the gloom of her future at bay. With startling nuance and unexpected bursts of humor, Snyder lays bare the brutalities of her childhood: her mother’s death when she was 8, her father’s turn toward tyrannical evangelisms and abuse, her experimentations with drugs, and her emerging sense of herself as a woman in a violently patriarchal world. As an adult, survival becomes an international investigation rather than a personal struggle as she travels the globe reporting on child marriage, genocide, and gendered violence. For fans of Tara Westover’s Educated , Snyder provides a triumphant story of beating the odds and of radical self-definition—with a punk rock backdrop to boot!

Guinevere Turner When the World Didn’t End, by Guinevere Turner

On January 5, 1975, Guinevere Turner was 6 and the world was going to end. “All of us had been told to choose our favorite toy and put on our favorite clothes and then wait for the spaceship to come,” she writes. The “World People” were to be wiped off the earth, and Melvin Lyman’s loyal followers would be transported to Venus. When that spaceship didn’t come, the explanation was simple and the repercussions, immediate; some of the members’ souls weren’t ready, and daylight saving time must be abolished. Such was life in the Lyman family. Change was constant and arbitrary. Unworthiness was a given. Drawing from years of meticulously kept diaries, Turner resists the urge to let her “adult hindsight interfere or comment,” and allows us to see life inside the cult as she saw it: through the devastatingly innocent eyes of a child. The result is gripping, raw, and deeply human. It will leave you haunted.

Irma, by Terry McDonell

“After Bob goes down, it is just Irma and me.” So begins Terry McDonell’s tender account of his 1950s boyhood as the only son of a single mother. McDonell’s father, Bob, died serving as a fighter pilot in 1945 — before his son could know him. In his father’s absence, McDonell attempts to define his own manhood in opposition to the narrow example presented by his mother’s second husband: “A son hating his stepfather, searching for the character of his true father, is an old story. The center of the story, though, is not one of the fathers or even the son. It is the mother, Irma.” Through compulsively readable vignettes, McDonell assembles a kaleidoscopic view of his mother, his childhood, and his own reckoning with American masculinity.

Charley Burlock is the Associate Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlanti c , the Los Angeles Review , Agni , the Apple News Today podcast, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book about collective grief (but she promises she's really fun at parties). 

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13 best biographies and memoirs of 2023

All human life is here. helen davies and robbie millen delve into the lives of prince harry, elizabeth taylor and elon musk.

T oo much information, some cried! The most talked-about book of the year was Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare . It was like eavesdropping on a particularly intense therapy session. If royal gossip isn’t to your taste try books about two very different love stories — the mad, maddening, molten affair between Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, or the gentle constancy of Timothy West and Prunella Scales.

Spare us from royal revelations of petty privileges and frostbitten penises, I hear you scream — but bear with me. Prince Harry’s book is the bestselling memoir of the year , and for all the hype and hysteria both on and off the page, it is a rattling page-turner. There are the confessions of drug use, sexual escapades, mawkish misery

The Best Memoirs of 2023 (So Far)

The most touching, gripping, moving, and funny personal stories you need to read.

Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

With vacation season looming, here are a few ideas for your summer reading list. This year has been full of funny, fascinating, and evocative memoirs written by both household names and people just introducing themselves to the world. From Geena Rocero’s story of becoming a trans activist in Horse Barbie to Minka Kelly’s account of surviving her childhood in Tell Me Everything , each gives us a deep look into a fascinating life and provides a better understanding of who we are.

Irma: The Education of a Mother's Son

Pageboy: a memoir.

Pageboy is generating headlines but there’s so much more to it. (Not that the Hollywood intel isn’t appreciated.) Since coming out in 2020, Page has been one of the few high profile people speaking about life as a trans man. After over 15 years in the spotlight, Page excavates his memories to introduce himself properly for the first time.

Tell Me Everything: A Memoir

In both celebrity gossip and her star-making role on Friday Night Lights , Kelly has always been the girlfriend. Tell Me Everything gives her the microphone and makes us regret not fully knowing her before. Kelly’s early years were defined by tumult. Her single mother worked as a stripper and led a chaotic life that found them in countless precarious living situations. In a childhood devoid of security, Kelly searched for ways to cope and speaks honestly now about everything from an on-set romance to the pain of pregnancy loss. Tell Me Everything is a gorgeous debut that transcends the celebrity category.

Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

In healing from a very painful breakup, Felix, a celebrated poet and political speechwriter, revisits her experiences with abuse, learning difficulties, and mental health crises through the heartbreaking process of learning how to untangle the threads of pain accrued throughout life. Dyscalculia brilliantly explores the way we understand and deal with pain and how we rate heartbreak on a hierarchy of grief.

Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter

It’s uniquely difficult to explain the maddening frustration and alienation of stuttering and Hendrickson does it beautifully. The stutter he has dealt with since childhood has become an accepted part of his life and his career in journalism. It’s one that enabled him to connect on a deep level with Joe Biden in a 2020 Atlantic piece that marked one of the few times the President has spoken about the way his stutter impacts him as an adult. Life on Delay has powerful resonance for anyone who has ever stuttered and offers others an insight into a remarkably common but under discussed phenomenon.

Horse Barbie: A Memoir

Growing up in the Philippines, Rocero found national fame in the world of beauty pageants. Relocating to the U.S. as a teen meant starting over, building a career as a model while hiding the fact that she was trans. Rocero forged a path for herself where one hadn’t previously existed and in Horse Barbie gives us such a warm and relatable story of strength and spirit.

Love, Pamela: A Memoir of Prose, Poetry, and Truth

There’s so much we never knew about Anderson and Love, Pamela provides a deep look into a woman who is much smarter, kinder, and more creative than she’s ever been given credit for. Those who have followed her for years will love seeing her full story told for the first time while others will benefit from understanding the way the media misrepresented her.

The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival

Those who recognize Saint John as a superstar executive at Netflix, Apple Music, and PepsiCo will be amazed by the level of candor and emotion she brings to her very personal story. While she was building a career as one of the most prominent Black women in business, Saint John quietly dealt with the loss of a child, a separation from her husband, and his death from cancer. Her ability to persevere is incredible and The Urgent Life is a heartbreaking example of how much invisible grief those around us can be carrying.

Stash: My Life in Hiding

We know addiction defines class but do we really? At the peak of her pill use, Cathcart Robbins, now the host of the podcast The Only One in the Room , was a full-time mom married to an entertainment executive and living a high-end Los Angeles lifestyle. She was also dealing with the challenges of being a Black woman in an exceedingly white world. As a recovery story, Stash is both distinct and universal.

Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming

Chin grew up knowing very little about her family’s history or the long path her relatives took from China to New York City. Mott Street came from years of research into her roots that covered the Chinese Exclusion Act and the transcontinental railroad labor and mirrors the history of so many families.

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

Bringley has had an unusual view into the art world. In 2008 he left his job at The New Yorker to become a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All the Beauty in the World is his account of over a decade spent working at one of world’s most famous institutions filled with his simple appreciation for wondrous things.

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Most Anticipated Memoirs of 2023

The magic of memoirs lies in the way they encourage the author to delve deeply in to personal experiences, excavating truths they may not have discovered otherwise, as well as allowing to reader to experience the author’s truth alongside the author. If you love exploring true stories directly from the people who experienced them, don’t miss these truly exceptional memoirs coming to booksellers in 2023.

Spare by Prince Harry (1/10)

In this honest and powerful memoir, Prince Harry shares the story of his life after the death of his mother, the beloved Princess Diana. Only 12 years old at the time, millions mourned alongside Harry and wondered how he and his brother would cope with this loss—and what it would mean for their futures. Insightful, compelling, and unflinchingly truthful, Harry’s story is a poignant depiction of love, grief and resilience.

Buy the book: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman (1/10)

Renowned collegiate athlete and national champion Lauren Fleshman is taking a stand for young women in the sporting world. Fleshman’s experiences coaching young female runners and representing brands like Nike and Oiselle have exposed her to all of the ways in which our sports systems work against women. She discusses injuries, eating disorders, and mental health struggles that many female athletes experience as they attempt to push through natural dips in performance after a certain age. She also shares her own stories of how she fell in love with running, pushed her limits, and sustained multiple catastrophic injuries. Both a memoir and a call to action to rebuild the world of competitive sports, Good for a Girl is uplifting, inspiring, and revelatory.

Call Me Anne by Anne Heche (1/24)

In this personal, vulnerable and post-humous memoir, Emmy-award winning actress Anne Heche opens up about her rise to fame. She includes details about her time working with Harrison Ford, her relationship with Ellen Degeneres, her experience with Harvey Weinstein, her childhood history of sexual abuse, her relationship with God, and her journey of self-love. Also included are poems and exercises that helped Anne through hard times. Along with personal anecdotes, Anne encourages readers to embark on their own journey of self-love and acceptance.

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan (1/24)

Iliana Regan’s successful debut  Burn the Place  helped Iliana and her new wife, Anna, create a culinary destination located in Michigan, the Milkweed Inn. Here, Regan forages a lot of the food, and has been given the chance to return to their rural roots. The youngest of three older sisters, Regan’s childhood relationships were shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Treating her like the son he never had, Regan’s father would take her foraging and fishing, sharing stories of his own parents as she got older. Regan learns to navigate Michigan’s boreal forest, trying to conceive a child, and keeping a new business afloat during the peak of the pandemic, all while loggers decimate surrounding areas.

Love, Pamela by Pamela Anderson (1/31)

This unforgettable memoir by actress/model Pamela Anderson reveals personal truths about her life before superstardom, her rise to fame, and her time in the spotlight. Growing up in Vancouver, Pamela was initially a shy girl with a deep love of nature and a powerful imagination—which is what eventually led to her glamorous life in Hollywood. But along with the glamour came the struggles of maintaining her image during a time when paparazzi was determined to destroy it. Resolute and resilient, Pamela continued to push through the dark side of fame, seeking comfort in art and literature. Now a devoted mother, activist, and Broadway performer, Pamela is sharing her journey of growth and self-discovery.

Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Toshio Meronek and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (1/31)

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy has lived a legendary life seeking justice, survival and freedom. A lifetime of struggle as a transgender and activist, having participated in the Stonewall Riots, living through the HIV/AIDS crisis, and helping found one of America’s first needle exchange programs from the back of her van, this book showcases a woman in search of trans liberation, as well as collective liberation. Miss Major Speaks is a documentation of these struggles, a roadmap for the challenges that Black, brown, queer, and trans youth will face, told through intimacy and offering a vision of hope.

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H (2/7)

Born in South Asia, Lamya H has always felt out of place in the Middle East. When she realizes she has a crush on her female teacher at age fourteen, she does everything she can to hide her feelings. Lamya learns the story of Maryam in Quran class, and how she insisted she had never been touched by a man, and yet was pregnant. From that moment, Lamya wondered if they were similar. She soon uses other famous stories from the Quran, making sense of her life and her choices by owning her queerness, and figuring out what it means for her to be a devout Muslim immigrant.

My What If Year: A Memoir by Alisha Fernandez Miranda (2/7)

CEO of her own consulting firm, Alisha Fernandez Miranda is almost forty, at the peak of her personal and professional success. Exhausted, Miranda decides to take a break, pausing her career. When her family, husband and eight-year-old twins, hesitantly give their blessing for her to explore her dream jobs for a year, she leaves her home in London in search of the answers to “What If?” What ensues is a hilarious journey that involves yoga, million-dollar artwork, and Broadway as we experience what it means to always have a beginner’s mind, and never say no to second chances.

The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival by Bozoma Saint John (2/21)

Live life urgently: Even in her brokenness, that is Bozoma Saint John’s main goal when she loses her husband, Peter, to cancer. Knowing his cancer was terminal, Peter gave Bozoma a list of two things: cancel their divorce and fix the wrongs immediately. But Bozoma is no stranger to adversity, having lost her college boyfriend to suicide, an interracial marriage, a premature child, and a separation from Peter. Through outstanding courage, she navigates multiple griefs, while holding strong to her desire for a remarkable life.

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung (4/4)

After fleeing from her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown to an East Coast university, Nicole Chung finally found a sense of community she’d always wanted as an Asian American adoptee. But as her life progresses, the middle-class world she begins to raise a family in—large homes and disposable income—is much different from what she thought was her middle-class childhood, where people often live paycheck to paycheck and safety nets hard to come by. When a family death and cancer diagnosis brings up deep feelings of rage at the lack of accessibility to health care and financial instability, Chung explores class, inequality and grief in this searing memoir.  

The Big Reveal by Sasha Velour (4/4)

Crafting together real life stories with rich queer history, The Big Reveal is a celebration of an expressive art form and the ways it has revolutionized over time. As Sasha Velour uncovers her life and journey as a drag queen, she weaves herself into the history of it, revealing how she learned the craft while bringing substance to our understanding of queer liberation.

Chita: A Memoir by Chita Rivera (4/25)

Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero but renamed by the entertainment world, Chita takes us behind the curtain to show how Dolores inspired some of her most famous Broadway roles, and the highs and lows through it all. A front row seat to Chita’s career that gives gratitude to her loyal and longstanding fans, we are invited into rehearsals, on stage, and to work next to some of the greatest talents of their time. Documenting her childhood and heritage as well as her work and career life, Chita shows how she managed to inspire so many people to forge their own unique paths.

Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto by Zachary Zane (5/9)

In this series of essays, a sex and relationship columnist tells their personal coming out and coming-of-age stories, while also exploring the idea of sex without shame. Even as a young boy, Zachary Zane felt ashamed by the thoughts that popped into his head. Through the lens of self-proclaimed sluttiness and bisexuality, Zane highlights the ways shame negatively impacts our relationships. With essays of personal experience, Boyslut shows how we can begin to detach from the harmful messages that society sends us, and begin to embrace our sexuality to live healthier, happier lives.

Pageboy by Elliot Page (6/6)

Elliot Page was on the brink of discovering himself as a queer person when the massively successful movie,  Juno , came out. Forced to play the role of glossy, young starlet both on and off the screen, Elliot found himself suffocating. Where acting once had been an outlet for his imagination, it soon became a bitter reality, and Elliot felt those dreams of finding himself as a trans person become further out of reach, until enough was enough. With Hollywood behind the scenes and personal insights, Pageboy is a winding journey of what it means to be ourselves when society is trying to create a different version of us.

A Place for Us by Brandon J. Wolf (6/6)

Brandon Wolf grew up in rural Oregon, grappled by the loss of his mother and the ongoing homophobia and racism within his community. Moving to Orlando, he finally found a community where he felt he belonged, a safe space and a chosen family. When his new normal is shaken up by unimaginable tragedy, the chaos and pain involved gave Brandon a new power, the power of purpose. Turning this purpose into a transformative journey of healing, Wolf showcases the power of community and how there’s hope where there is compassion.

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen (7/4)

When Beth Nguyen was just eight months old, her family fled Saigon for America, leaving their mother behind. It wasn’t until Beth was nineteen that they would meet again, and over the course of her adult life, they’ve spent less than twenty-four hours together. Framed through a series of visits between mother and daughter, this memoir explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee, and finding belonging amongst the two.

If You Would Have Told Me by John Stamos (Fall 2023)

In this long-anticipated memoir, actor John Stamos shares stories of his life that are both heartbreaking and heartening. He discusses Hollywood, fame, fortune, and the mistakes he made along the way, and honors all of the people that helped him become who he is today. Honest and powerful, Stamos encourages readers to find moments of beauty in their own lives, practice gratitude, and trust in something bigger than themselves.

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About the author: she reads editors.

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The 14 fall 2023 pop culture memoirs and biographies we're most excited to read

From Barbra to Peloton instructors, there's no shortage of great pop culture reads this fall.

Here at EW, we're pop culture junkies.

If there's a behind-the-scenes story or a personal hot take from a celeb, we are here for it. Chances are, if you're reading this you are too. And this fall, there is no shortage of engrossing, juicy new memoirs and biographies shedding light on all corners of the entertainment industry.

From Old Hollywood (Charlie Chaplin, Lena Horne, Greta Grabo) to the music industry (Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears, Geddy Lee) to the virtual gym (Cody Rigsby), pop culture figures across the gamut are telling their stories (or receiving new evaluation) in a slew of new titles hitting shelves this season.

Here are the 14 pop culture memoirs and biographies we're most excited about in fall 2023.

Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Lois W. Banner

Historian and biographer Lois Banner ( Marilyn: The Passion and The Paradox ) takes one of Hollywood's most enigmatic figures as her latest subject. Drawing on over a decade of research in archives across ​​Sweden, Germany, France, and the United States, Banner examines the shadowy personal life of the woman most famous for stating, "I want to be alone." While Garbo captivated audiences with her beauty and mysterious persona, this book offers an insightful portrait of her private life, interrogating her feminism, sexuality, mental health, and more. Garbo rose to fame on the silent screen, but this new biography gives voice to her life in unparalleled fashion. (Sept. 5) — Maureen Lee Lenker

XOXO, Cody by Cody Rigsby

With XOXO Cody , the beloved Peloton instructor shows he has range. His memoir aims to make readers laugh and tear up in equal measure. He delivers his hot takes and humorous advice about living life right while also diving into the difficult moments in his life that shaped the adult he is. As he delves into growing up gay and his issues with his parents, Rigsby provides an opportunity for folks to get to know him better. XOXO Cody is inspiring and raw, but also a great reminder that laughing our way through something is a solid option. (Sept. 12) — Alamin Yohannes

Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones

Saturday Night Live alum Leslie Jones is known for her disarming frankness, and in her new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones , the comic invites readers even deeper inside her brutally honest thoughts. Jones' sense of humor is intact even as she opens up about her experiences with childhood sexual abuse, abortion, and family tragedy, as well as the racism and sexism she's fought in stand-up comedy and from online trolls who made her life hell after she was cast in the women-led Ghostbusters . SNL fans will be especially interested in her tales from the show, including who she did and did not get along with, and hilarious details of an unaired sketch about killing Whoopi Goldberg . (Sept. 19) —Jillian Sederholm

Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy by Stephen M. Silverman

Stephen Sondheim may have died in 2021, but his spirit lives on among the Broadway faithful. This month alone marks the premiere of the third Sondheim revival since his passing, as well as the premiere of Here We Are , a posthumous presentation of the Luis Buñuel-inspired musical he was working on until the end. Somewhere between a biography and a coffee-table book, Stephen M. Silverman's new title makes a perfect companion to our current age of Sondheim remembrance. The master of the modern musical is chronicled with textual highlights of his life story (with Sondheim's sardonic wit on display in frequent direct quotes), but also helpfully accompanied by many, many photos of his legendary Broadway career — and the actors, artists, and celebrities he crossed paths with along the way. (Sept. 19) — Christian Holub

Thicker Than Water by Kerry Washington

In her memoir, Kerry Washington bares it all. After a long-kept family secret is revealed, the actress and producer looks back at her life to share what she has overcome and learned over the years. From past traumas to wisdom she's received through her roles, Washington is bringing fans into her world like never before. Through these stories, she tells readers of her fight to redevelop her own understanding of family as she started her own. Thicker Than Water is a poignant and captivating exploration of how she became the woman she is today. (Sept. 26) — A.Y.

Worthy by Jada Pinkett Smith

Though Jada Pinkett Smith has spent the last couple of years peeling back the layers on Red Table Talk , she still feels like people misunderstand her. In Worthy, she attempts to tell her story, her way. From Baltimore to Hollywood, and through suicidal ideation to self-acceptance and healing, Pinkett Smith recounts her journey to reflection and healing. (Oct. 4) — Yolanda Machado

Thank You: Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin by Sly Stone

In the late '60s, Sly Stone was the embodiment of cool, an impossibly stylish funk master and preternatural hitmaker. He was also a man who carted around a violin case filled with cocaine wherever he'd go. If his drug use could conjure magic in the studio, it also destroyed the Sly and the Family Stone frontman's relationships, wiped out his earnings, and made him a recluse. Now 80 years old and sober, the living legend is finally releasing his memoir, a cautionary tale and the story of one of rock's true great visionaries. (Oct. 17) — Jason Lamphier

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

Britney Spears is finally ready to tell her story the way she's never been able to before. One of the world's biggest and most misunderstood pop icons is releasing her memoir, The Woman In Me , a little over two years after revealing harrowing details in open court about how her life wasn't her own under the conservatorship of her father for over 13 years. Now that the court-ordered conservatorship has been dissolved, Spears' chronicles her "brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope," allowing her fans to finally see the woman behind the music. (Oct. 24) — Sydney Bucksbaum

Being Henry: The Fonz...and Beyond by Henry Winkler

The guy who played one of the coolest characters ever on-screen is also known as one of the nicest ever off it. So how exactly did mild mannered Henry Winkler transform himself into the Fonz? The Emmy-winning actor takes us inside his original Happy Days audition as part of a memoir that goes through Winkler's entire career — from The Lords of Flatbush through Barry . And yes, he explains in full detail why in the world he jumped that damn shark. (Oct. 31) —Dalton Ross

Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed by Donald Bogle

Donald Bogle, revered historian of Black Hollywood, tackles one of the most iconic Black Golden Age stars — Lena Horne. Using a combination of interviews, press accounts, studio archives, and historical research, Bogle offers up a lush portrait of Horne, from her professional triumphs and bitter disappointments to her activism and role in breaking barriers for Black performers and Black women throughout her career. Bogle tells Horne's story accompanied by stunning photographs in this coffee table-style book that allows for never-before-published images of Horne to shine. (Oct. 31) — M.L.L.

Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman

While Charlie Chaplin's life has been chronicled many times, biographer Scott Eyman ( John Wayne: The Life and Legend; Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise ) drills down on Chaplin's fall from grace and exile from America in the back half of the Little Tramp's career. In the wake of the Red Scare and Chaplin's own sexual scandals, he was denied re-entry into the United States in 1952 following a trip to Europe. Eyman examines the events leading to this exile, the political turmoil at play, and Chaplin's years making his final two films in London. It's both a fascinating historical study and a cautionary tale about the perils of hysteria and extremism pervading government practices. (Oct. 31) — M.L.L.

My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

For years now, Barbra Streisand has spoken of her long-gestating memoir, and it's finally here. In her inimitable way, Streisand tells the story of her life, from her childhood in Brooklyn to her legendary Broadway breakout in Funny Girl to her success in Hollywood as an actress and director. Full of her signature frankness and dry humor, the memoir gives fans an unprecedented look at Streisand's life, from her personal struggles to her professional triumphs, all with a reminder that through the decades, nobody was going to rain on her parade. (Nov. 7) — M.L.L.

My Effin' Life by Geddy Lee

Living in the limelight may be the universal dream for some, but for Rush frontman Geddy Lee, it's simply another chapter in his effin' excellent life. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer — who played bass, keyboards, and sang on the progressive rock band's biggest hits — holds nothing back in his highly-anticipated memoir. From being named after his grandfather who was murdered during the Holocaust to sharing intimate tales of life on the road with bandmates Alex Lifeson and the late Neil Peart, Lee puts aside the alienation and gets on with the fascination surrounding his extraordinary life in an honest, hilarious, and heartfelt way all his own. (Nov. 14) — Emlyn Travis

The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story by Sam Wasson

If he had only made The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola would already be remembered as one of the most successful American directors of all time. But his ambitions always went far beyond that, and the filmmaker promises he has one more masterpiece on the way in the form of the mysterious utopian magnum opus Megalopolis . This new book by Sam Wasson (who already proved himself one of the great modern chroniclers of the New Hollywood era with the Chinatown making-of story The Big Goodbye ) chronicles the road to heaven Coppola trod after descending to Hell with Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War epic is already the subject of much reporting, but Wasson boasts unprecedented access to Coppola's personal archive — as well as a first-hand look at the making of a movie we can't wait to see. (Nov. 28) — C.H.

Related content:

• RuPaul gets emotional announcing new memoir about his life before Drag Race : 'I reveal so much of myself'
• Patrick Stewart's 'intense' theater training led to him having a tantrum on Star Trek set
• David Letterman auditioned for Airplane! against his better judgment: 'I can't act'

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The Best Books of 2023

By Chloe Schama , Taylor Antrim , Elise Taylor , Lisa Wong Macabasco , and Liam Hess

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.

If 2023 was a lot of fun—frothy delights like Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street , a cool and compelling new novel from Emma Cline, heartfelt family sagas like Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful , and effervescent debuts like Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident —it was also a year that was perhaps a bit fractured in the book world. Where was the big fall novel that everyone seemed to be reading? If you can think of a book that checks this box, it was probably Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, her first foray into historical fiction—a book that took two real-life characters and imagined an epic and emotional landscape for them. But many year-end lists have immediately sent us to the bookstore, searching for titles we seem to have missed. All this has led us to believe that the book world is a bit weirdly, and maybe wonderfully, decentralized at the moment. You may not be reading the same book as five other commuters in your subway car, but you’re likely to be able to find a book that absolutely captures you. Here’s what we loved.

The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis (January)

Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero , published in 1985, is hard to shake—a drifting, menacing story about Los Angeles private school kids with monosyllabic names (Clay, Blair, Trent, Rip) who go to parties, do drugs, have sex and try to feel something about any of it. The Shards , Ellis’s hypnotic, prodigious, and unsettling new novel—his first in 13 years—is a time machine back to that early 80s milieu. It stars none other than Ellis himself, a prep school senior writing a novel called Less Than Zero and surrounded by a pack of rich, beautiful friends who are themselves shadowed by a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler. Ellis holds nothing back through these 600 pages: baroque violence, startling eroticism, relentless cataloging of mood-specific song and movie titles. His gothic predilections are not for everyone (the Trawler’s kills are grotesque), but the evocation of a certain kind of vacant privilege—a buried longing overlaid with studied dissociation—is masterful.—Taylor Antrim

Sam by Allegra Goodman (January)

There are books that assail you with their importance, and then there are those, like Allegra Goodman’s Sam (The Dial Press), whose modest-seeming ambitions blossom into sweeping works of emotional resonance. Goodman’s novel tells the deceptively simple story of a girl, Sam, growing into a young woman. Her life has many deprivations and few points of brightness—but from these bare contours, a powerful portrait emerges. Goodman’s writing mimics the voice of her subject, with earlier chapters echoing the staccato thought patterns of elementary years and later chapters channeling the tender vulnerabilities of young adulthood. Sam may investigate the most acute of emotional growing pains, but there is nothing awkward here.—Chloe Schama

The Survivalists: A Novel by Kashana Cauley (January)

The Survivalists

Community gardeners meet doomsday preppers stockpiling weapons above a trendy coffee shop in The Survivalists (Soft Skull Press), a darkly funny look at how people form communities to care for one another amid institutional failures and scarcity. Set in a mostly Black Central Brooklyn, this debut novel from Kashana Cauley— a former lawyer, Daily Show With Trevor Noah writer, and New York Times contributor—finds humor in our hostile, uncertain present while outlining starkly different visions of the future—and how we might prepare for them.—Lisa Wong Macabasco

Spare by Prince Harry (January)

Spare by Prince Harry

It’s almost unheard of for a book to dominate public conversation well before even being published. Yet Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare , has done just that after several explosive and intimate claims about his life within the royal family came to light. Of course, we haven’t read it yet, but the talent of his ghost-writer, J.R. Moehringer , who also wrote the biographies of Nike’s Phil Knight and Andre Agassi, has us excited. The Pulitzer Prize winner has an astonishing ability to plumb the depths of his subjects—crafting a raw, nuanced portrait of a person in the process. “He’s half psychiatrist,” Knight said of Moehringer . “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.”—Elise Taylor

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (February)

Jen Beagin writes with a zany, overflowing energy, her enthusiasm in stark contrast to the halting, static nature of her protagonist in Big Swiss. Set in a very recognizable Hudson, New York, brimming with metropolitan expats and locals who have settled into their roles as the native color, the novel tells the story of a woman running from her past while excavating the emotional travails of others. She is doing this quite literally, as the transcriber for a local sex therapist, ignoring all professional ethics as she does so by falling for one of the clients. She may be privy to the innermost desires of the client—whom she nicknames Big Swiss—but that doesn’t make her more sure-footed when it comes to affairs of the heart. Big Swiss is a comic novel, but it is one with a very tender core. Already in development as a series set to star Jodie Comer, you are sure to hear more about this one.—C.S.

Pat in the City by Patricia Field (February)

Pat in the City: My Life of Fashion, Style, and Breaking All the Rules

Patricia Field’s memoir covers the territory you’d expect it to cover: how she got her gig as the costume designer for Sex In the City (including a charming anecdote about how she convinced showrunner Darren Star that a tutu was far superior to a shift dress for Carrie’s ensemble in the opening credits), her more recent exploits as the force behind the eyeball-scorching outfits on Emily In Paris . But it also covers her more tender years growing up in New York City and Long Island, how her early store, Pants Pub, ignited a small revolution in downtown fashion, and how subsequent boutiques became a refuge for fantastic misfits of all stripes. You didn’t need to have a lot of retail experience to work for Patricia Field, it seems, but you did need to have a whole lot of the right kind of attitude. This is a book for the SATC superfans, but it is also for anyone curious about the lived experience of Downtown culture in the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond.—C.S.

Cold People by Tom Rob Smith (February)

Cold People

What is the author of a trilogy of elegant historical espionage novels (the bestselling Child 44 books) doing writing a sci-fi monster novel set in Antarctica? I read the summary of Tom Rob Smith’s Cold People (Scribner)—an alien invasion wipes out Earth’s population, driving the lone survivors to Antarctica to set up a new society—with bemusement. Had Smith, who pivoted into TV writing with The Assassination of Gianni Versace and other shows, lost his way? Nope. Cold People is a zany, wildly gripping, dark futuristic fantasy that never remotely achieves plausibility but achieves escapist lift-off nonetheless. The alien invasion that begins the book and prompts a desperate evacuation to Antarctica—the only place the aliens will let humans live—is bizarrely cursory, but Smith is getting it out of the way. The bulk of the book, set in the resulting society of human survivalists on the icy continent, tells a story of genetic experimentation that recalls H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . I loved this wild, imaginative, fast-moving book and can’t wait to see the inevitable screen adaptation.—T.A.

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z by Tamar Adler (March)

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z

Vogue contributing editor Tamar Adler’s new cookbook is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated, and gracefully written resource for what to do with basically anything in your fridge, larder, or on your chopping board. A kind of spiritual sequel to her 2011 volume, An Everlasting Meal , this hefty, companionable resource suggests new life for, say, overcooked beans, or undercooked ones, discarded crab shells, leftover ramen soup, uneaten waffles (or flat beer, or broken aioli, or pickle brine—seriously, nothing is left unconsidered). There are recipes and strategies for everything you can imagine, and a no-waste ethos permeates these many pages with goodwill, humor, and hope. As with all things Adler, the writing is fantastic: expert and unfailingly elegant.—T.A.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (March)

Hello Beautiful

Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful is a tribute to Little Women , telling the story of four sisters and the man who enters their orbit when he marries the oldest daughter. So far, so similar. But William Waters’s tragic past is rendered, on the first page of this novel, with such heartbreaking specificity—his three-year-old sister died in her crib the week he was born, plunging his parents into a state of mourning they never escape—that readers will be forewarned that they have a distinct experience ahead of them. In college William becomes involved with Julia Padavano, a relentlessly ambitious young woman from a boisterous Chicago family, and is quickly subsumed by her desires and trajectory. Napolitano has an uncanny ability to pack her paragraphs with rich detail, painting entire landscapes—interior and exterior—with startling emotional economy. This is a warm blanket of a book, one that reminds you of the enveloping power of literature and leaves you very grateful to have encountered it.—C.S.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (March)

Birnam Wood

Set in modern-day New Zealand, Birnam Wood (Macmillan) is a multi-layered book that reads, at times like a far-left anti-capitalist manifesto, at times like a techno-futurist manual, at times like suburban ennui-driven domestic fiction—in short, it’s a book of contemporary ideas, somehow woven together into a thriller that is subtly poking fun at the absolutism all those perspectives entail. No matter how assured the characters are that they possess the most righteous framework through which to understand the world, their blindspots lead them into sometimes criminal entanglements that they can’t philosophize their way out of. Catton is not just a master at spinning a web of competing philosophies, though; her characters are deeply flawed, but you can’t help but root for them. I was one of the few who missed this young New Zealand novelist’s best-selling and critically acclaimed 2013 novel, The Luminaries , but this new book has convinced me that I won’t let that happen again.—C.S.

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (March)

Pineapple Street

Jenny Jackson’s new novel Pineapple Street (Pamela Dornan) is a delicious new Gilded Age family drama—almost a satire—set in the leafy enclaves of Brooklyn Heights. The book follows three women in the Stockton family, a clan that made their money in real estate and left subsequent generations to alternately indulge in and wring their hands over it, their angst inflected with a very New York 1% class consciousness. Family members make their way from their non-profit jobs and school fundraisers to tennis clubs and private planes. It’s a lighthearted book that captures a slice of New York society, a guilty pleasure that also feels like a sociological text, punctuated with very particular references to restaurants, preschools, nightclubs, and other pillars of urban life in 2023.—C.S.

The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew by Maggie Bullock (March)

The Kingdom of Prep The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew

Maggie Bullock’s cultural history is nominally the story of the rise and fall of one of America’s most iconic retailers, but it’s also a sociological text and a personal one, charting the brand’s influence in popular, commercial, and deeply individual terms. Bullock, who has spent a large part of her career working in fashion magazines, is intimately acquainted with this terrain, not just as an editor but as a former boarding school novice, transplanted to the Northeast from a decidedly unpreppy family in the South, forced to navigate the choppy social dynamics among her rollneck-sweater-wearing peers. Most everyone is familiar with the Jenna Lyons–era J.Crew aesthetic, which extended its influence to no less prominent spheres than the White House, but fewer people are familiar with the ups and downs of the brand before its hot pink, sequined phase. Bullock unravels it all in this lively, entertaining book.—C.S.

The Lost Wife by Susana More (April)

The Lost Wife

It’s fitting that The Lost Wife (Knopf), Susanna Moore’s first work of fiction in over a decade, should directly follow Miss Aluminum , her lustrous 2020 memoir; this book, like that one, tells the story of a woman continuously transformed by difficult relationships and sweeping changes of circumstance. In the new novel, Moore’s protagonist is Sarah, a 25-year-old wife and mother who leaves an unhappy home in Rhode Island for a fresh start in Minnesota, where white settlers have forged an uneasy peace with the Sioux people. Sarah’s new marriage to a respected (if repressed and opium-addicted) local doctor grants her money and status for the first time in her life—but when she’s abducted during the US-Dakota War of 1862, her loyalty to him, and to so-called civilized society in general, is tested. Even transposed onto the 19th-century American prairie, Moore’s voice is cool and sure, rich with detail.—Marley Marius

Independence Square by Martin Cruz Smith (May)

Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine

Martin Cruz Smith has been writing highly diverting detective novels starring the Moscow-based investigator Arkady Renko since his 1981 breakthrough Gorky Park . Each is fast-paced enough to read on a beach towel but so full of detail about Russian life and politics that you leave equally edified and entertained. His tenth Renko mystery, the highly enjoyable Independence Square, is set in the tumultuous months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. Renko takes on the case of a missing dissident girl, leading him from Moscow to Kyiv to the Crimean peninsula, where menacing revanchist biker gangs dream of a return to Soviet times. Smith keeps his plot ticking along but makes room for affecting character work too. In Independence Square the intrepid Renko must face a Parkinson’s diagnosis (Smith has lived with the disease since the ‘90s) along with a rising body count.—T.A.

The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane (May)

The Half Moon

Keane’s 2019 novel Ask Again, Yes was a breakthrough: a best-selling portrait of a pair of hard-working Irish American families in suburban New York whose lives intersect and fall apart. Her deft, satisfying fourth novel The Half Moon returns to a similar milieu and tells a more concentrated story: of Malcolm Gephardt, bar owner, 40-something, as personable as he is emotionally hapless, struggling to save his business and marriage—to an attorney wife who justifiably wants more. Keane writes in a sturdily realist vein—the vivid, domesticated world of Anne Tyler, of William Trevor, of Elizabeth Strout —but her insights into matters of the heart, longing, and restlessness especially, have astonishing delicacy.—T.A.

The Postcard by Anne Berest (May)

The Postcard

Anne Berest’s novel, The Postcard (Europa), falls loosely into the category of what we might call, in this country, autofiction. (The French probably have another term!) The protagonist, a Paris-based writer named Anne, receives a postcard from an anonymous sender inscribed only with the names of four relatives who died in Auschwitz. All this happened to the author as well. But what transpires after is a testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy—because far from haunting her, Berest’s murdered relatives were largely absent from her life, in part because she had never fully considered her Jewish heritage. The Postcard goes on to spin a full and textured rendering of these relatives’ lives before they were cruelly killed, rendering the horrors of the Holocaust horrifically fresh. Once the novel has covered this ground, however, it becomes almost a modern-day thriller, circling in on the mysterious mail at its center. The Postcard is a somewhat strange book, not without the occasional infelicity of translation, almost experimental in its form. But even with all its layered complication, it is undeniably compelling.—C.S.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith (May)

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

I devoured this gimlet-eyed account of painfully recent history–the dizzy rise of digital media rivals such as Buzzfeed and Gawker, companies fueled on human attention, rapacious for virality and traffic, a word that has totemic power in this well-paced narrative. Smith, former Politico star, former Buzzfeed News Editor, former New York Times media columnist, and now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, is well placed to tell the stories of ambitious, restless characters such as Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and Gawker’s Nick Denton and the Faustian bargains they made on the way to enormous valuations, and equally precipitous turnabouts in fortune. Smith, of course, is a protagonist here too, having controversially decided to publish the notorious Steele dossier about President Trump at Buzzfeed when other outlets would not (an episode he recounts and reflects on here). I am not sure I wholly bought Smith’s conclusion—that the harnessing of virality by the likes of Buzzfeed led to the ubiquity of an increasingly remorseless right-wing populism. And yet the argument is made with force and gives this book the shape of a (irresistibly readable) tragedy.—T.A.

The Guest by Emma Cline (May)

Emma Cline’s new novel—her first since her breakthrough debut in 2016, The Girl s—is a grifter tale for the post-Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself. Exiled from her quasi-boyfriend’s Hampton’s home, she convinces herself that all will be forgiven if she can simply hang on for the week and make an unbidden appearance at his weekend party. Like The Girls, and several of the stories in Cline’s short story collection, Daddy , Cline is here investigating the power and peril of being female and young, telling a story in which who is being used, and for what, is slippery and ill-defined. Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb.—C.S.

Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (May)

Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop

I’m many years off from having kids (I...hope?), but if and when I do, I’ll be ushering them into adolescence with a copy of this brilliant, incisive, and funny meditation on sex, consent, and desire from Food & Wine editor Yagoda. In the book, Yagoda gets at an essential truth (too many of us are having bad, or at least meh, sex) without being remotely prescriptive; her journalistic perspective is fresh enough to make an age-old complaint feel new and deeply relevant.—Emma Specter

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donohue (June)

The Rachel Incident

Caroline O’Donohue’s delightful novel, The Rachel Incident , is set in the Irish city of Cork in the early-ish 2010s and is narrated by a woman looking back at her university years a decade later. But The Rachel Incident is as much an investigation of how the events of early adulthood shape us as it is about the events themselves; this is a sneakily philosophical book about growing up that offers its insights with charming, effervescent ease. And about those events—one can’t help but feel a bit bad for O’Donohue, whose characters and plot will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney . (One setup involving two college-age students and an older, glamorously intellectual couple bears uncanny resemblance to the setup of Rooney’s Conversations With Friends .) But O’Donohue is a unique and exciting talent, allowing her characters to puncture their solipsistic preoccupations with humor and self-awareness, even if it arrives after their glittering self-involved young adulthood has faded into the past. I galloped through this book, enchanted by its characters and its full-hearted vision of friendship. This is a book full of love, and it is extremely easy to love reading it.—C.S.

The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon (June)

The Quiet Tenant

Clémence Michalon’s dark and juicy thriller is set in upstate New York. More precisely, it’s set mainly within the confines of a rural house where a serial killer is keeping a victim he has mysteriously decided to keep instead of kill—fun stuff! And yet, like Emma Donohue ’s Room , the novel takes this creepy and claustrophobic premise and spins a paradoxically expansive plot from it, told from the perspective of his victim, his daughter, and a local restaurant owner. The killer is presented not just as a monster but as a member of polite society—something of a stretch, but in Michalon’s assured telling, a compelling one.—C.S.

Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur (June)

Little Monsters

Adrienne Brodeur knows her way around a family drama; in her first book, 2019’s Wild Game , she recalled abetting her own mother’s long affair with the married man who later became her stepfather. Now, with the novel Little Monsters (Avid Reader Press), Brodeur weaves a story dense with stinging secrets and simmering resentments, rooted in another context that she knows well: the manicured towns and wild fringes of Cape Cod. (Brodeur divides her time between the Cape and Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Unfolding between April and October of 2016—with that year’s looming election offering its own grim disquiet—the book centers on the Gardner clan, anchored by patriarch Adam, a formerly esteemed, now dangerously flailing marine biologist staring down the barrel of 70; son Ken, a tightly wound aspiring politician concealing great depths of childhood trauma; and daughter Abby, an oddball artist slowly emerging from her father and brother’s towering shadows. (Rounding out the central cast are Jenny—Abby’s best friend from RISD and Ken’s wife—and Steph, a police officer from Boston lingering on the periphery.) Set against the island’s rippling dune grasses and scrub pines, their narrative is as elegantly rendered as it is compulsively readable.—M.M.

The Imposters by Tom Rachman (June)

The Imposters

Tom Rachman’s bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer’s life ending, quietly, lonesomely—even as it bursts with characters, plots, humor, and drama. The writer is Dora Frenhofer, a prickly Dutch novelist in her seventies, living alone in London, who is determined to write another novel, a final act of creation in the face of the literary world’s indifference. The Imposters is that manuscript, a novel-in-stories interrupted by diary entries from Frenhofer herself, who can’t quite find her subject so she tries many—like a young man adrift in India (inspired by Dora’s lost brother), a linguist who lost her children in a horrific crime (a double of a London friend), a comedy writer in L.A. who longing for affection and company (Dora’s estranged daughter). Rachman, a former A.P. foreign-news editor, has a far-and-wide imagination, and his novel is ingenious: investing a protagonist at the twilight of her life with grand, restless vision.—T.A.

Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions by Mattie Kahn (June)

Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions

Mattie Kahn’s Young and Restless feels born of the current moment: a book about the Gretas and the Xiyes of the world, and the outsized role they seem to play in fixing our broken world. But it is also an interrogation into why we pay these captivating young women such attention—are young women seemingly over-represented in the climate fight because that cause is generally associated with the need to make altruistic sacrifice and women have traditionally been more associated with those tendencies? The book is also a look at why and how girls have been sidelined by history in the past—turned into objects of cultural fascination while simultaneously being denied agency and power, especially in the historical record.—C.S.

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie (June)

Holding Pattern

In Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern, Kathleen Cheng has moved back home to Oakland, reeling from a devastating breakup and having dropped out of a graduate program. There she finds her Chinese immigrant mother somehow newly engaged to a tech entrepreneur. Signing up to be a cuddle therapist at a curious start-up moves Cheng to reconsider the relationships in her life. Driven by Xie’s irresistible voice, this is a warm and funny debut about longing and belonging, the mother-  daughter bond, and finding intimacy in an increasingly alienated world.—L.W.M.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (June)

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Lorrie Moore’s darkly funny and occasionally unhinged new novel is a bit of a collage, a jittering, syncopated series of narrative sequences that add up to something sneakily profound–a suggestion of an afterlife that could be more joyous than our own. It starts with a letter written by the owner of a 19th-century boarding house named Libby to her sister. For fans of Moore, whose slim short story collections of contemporary life— Self-Help, Like Life, Bark —are masterclasses of compression, Libby’s antique register (“A good scalawag sticks to the late-night cipher of her diary”) is startling, musical if knotty. (One senses Moore had fun writing these pages, which are about a handsome, flirtatious boarder who has come to stay.) Soon enough, though, the mood darkens as we leap forward to 2016: A high school teacher named Finn is visiting his dying brother Max in hospice in New York, preparing himself to say goodbye. As soon as you’ve settled into that mordant, bleakly funny sequence, it is interrupted again as Finn is called back to his midwestern home, where his ex-girlfriend has committed suicide. This is Lily, who dominates the second half of this book as a decaying zombie. Are you still with me? If you’re new to Moore, this is perhaps not the book of hers to start with, but over nearly a 40-year career, she has more than earned the loyalty of her fervent fans. This lunar, screwball novel is brief and unexpectedly powerful in its meditations and riffs on love and purgatory as it swerves and skids toward an offbeat finish.—T.A.

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley (July)

After the Funeral and Other Stories

Ghosts of the short story masters—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield among them—haunt the wonderful new collection from Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories . Hadley published her first novel just 20 years ago. Since then we’ve been treated to a steadily growing body of work—eight novels and four collections in total—all of it astonishing in its consistency. Hadley writes graceful domestic narratives, generally set in England—stories of daughters and wives and widows and sisters and lovers, whose lives are upended by emotional reversals. What’s not captured in any summary is how gripping her work is. In the title story, a mother and two daughters find their way after the death of their husband and father, while a love affair with a prosperous local doctor upends their domestic equilibrium. In “Dido’s Lament” an unsteady encounter between two former lovers ends in an especially unsparing way. “Funny Little Snake” conjures extraordinary tension from the rivalry between a young wife named Valerie—who is all middle-class propriety—and the shambolic bohemian Robyn, with a nine-year-old girl caught between them. The quality of suspense and satisfaction in Hadley’s stories—quiet, patient, exquisitely wrought—is miraculous.—T.A.

The Last Ranger by Peter Heller (July)

The Last Ranger

What could be more companionable than a suspenseful novel set in Yellowstone and starring a sturdily capable park ranger (Ren) who drives a truck, loves a flat white, and is determined to protect the wolves, elk, foxes, and bears from tourists and poachers alike? Peter Heller’s sixth novel, The Last Ranger (Knopf), is a lovingly written mystery populated by wildlife and militiamen and starring a mid-30s loner who can’t help but fall for an expert wolf researcher named Hilly. Heller draws a spirit of romance from the Montana landscape even as he keeps his plot ticking along. When Hilly is nearly killed by a deliberately laid poacher’s trap, Ren must untangle the motives of a group of locals, driven by revenge or rebelliousness or simply a common desire to escape into the wild.—T.A.

The Spider by Lars Kepler (July)

Some readers fill their summers with narratives of love and romance; others need a serial killer to pass the time. Fresh from Sweden, The Spider (Knopf) is the latest thriller from Lars Kepler (the pseudonym for a best-selling husband-wife team), and like Kepler’s other breathless procedurals, it stars the preternaturally brilliant detectives Joona Linna and Saga Bauer. In The Spider, they’re on the trail of an elusive killer who sends eerie figurines and cryptic riddles before striking. Everything is turned up to 11 in Kepler’s novels, which are wry, fast-moving, and ever so slightly perverse. A beach read for the dark-hearted, The Spider is vivid, wicked fun.—T.A.

The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush (August)

The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening is one part memoir, one part reporting from the edge—think Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction —a book that feels as though it was written from the brink. In this case, the extreme scenario is literal: Rush, a journalist, joins a crew of scientists aboard a ship headed for a glacier in Antarctica that is, like much of the poles, rapidly disappearing. The book brings the environmental crisis into a personal sphere, asking what it means to have a child in the face of such catastrophic change. Threaded throughout this intimate investigation are the stories of the scientists and crew, each with their own take on the challenges they are facing. Rush writes with clarity and precision, giving a visceral sense of everything from the gear required to traverse an arctic landscape to the interior landscape of a woman facing change both global and immediate.—C.S.

Learned by Heart by Emma Donohue (August)

Learned by Heart

Inspired by the real correspondence and (extensive) diaries of Anne Lister—an English landowner often dubbed “the first modern lesbian”—and her erstwhile lover Eliza Raine, Learned By Heart (Little, Brown and Company) is Emma Donoghue’s richly imagined novelistic account of a 19th-century love affair. (Donoghue, the Booker Prize–winning author of Room , has also produced several significant works of historical fiction, including 2016’s The Wonder , recently adapted for Netflix.) Raine, the Madras-born daughter of an English surgeon, first meets the rule-flouting, Latin-spouting Lister at their small boarding school. With time, the intimacies of isolated schoolgirls yield to full-tilt desire. That first fire eventually sputters, but not without leaving behind some beautiful embers.—M.M.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (September)

Zadie Smith ’s searingly original sixth novel, The Fraud, is also her first foray into historical fiction. Set in 1873, some 40 years after Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act, it masterfully depicts post-emancipation Britain as it ruptures along fault lines of class and race. At its center are the real-life figures of William Ainsworth, a successful and prolific, if hopelessly bloviating author (and something of a rival to Charles Dickens), and Ainsworth’s cousin’s widow, Eliza Touchet, who serves as his housekeeper and sometime lover. Just as you think the novel might be a Victorian comedy of manners—and it is certainly very funny in parts—Smith introduces Andrew Bogle, a former slave who is now the key witness in a controversial trial of fraudulent identity that gripped England in 1873. As Bogle unfurls his past to Touchet in a chophouse over a hot meal, the whole rancid history of England’s involvement with the slave trade—its plantations steeped in human misery and blood—comes crashing to the fore like a rush of blood to the head.—Zing Tsjeng

Omega Farm: A Memoir by Martha McPhee (September)

Omega Farm: A Memoir

Martha McPhee ’s spirited and ruthlessly honest memoir, Omega Farm, begins with a familiar COVID scenario: a daughter sheltering in place with her aging mother (and her husband and kids) on a rural, densely forested family farm, thinking it’s just a temporary measure. But McPhee finds herself stuck, not just by the pandemic, but by the needs of her dementia-stricken mother and those of the hopelessly neglected property—and by her own whirlpool of memories. McPhee describes her 1970s childhood, which was presided over by her mother, her Gestalt therapist stepfather, and her nine siblings, as a kind of bohemian chaos, where boundaries were crossed in the name of freedom. There’s a darkness to these recollections, and McPhee’s willingness to reckon with them and with the needs of the shambolic property form the memoir’s hypnotic narrative. McPhee’s adventures in forestry are as involving as her unearthing of family secrets.—T.A.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (September)

Loved and Missed

Susie Boyt ’s Loved and Missed (New York Review Books) is a disarming and heartrending little book—little in the sense that the scale is small and the text less than 200 pages. It is the story, essentially, of a grandmother raising her granddaughter when her addict daughter relinquishes parental control. Ruth—the grandmother—is proud, exacting, strong, insecure, and damaged; she pours all this into raising the baby, Lily, who grows up under her watch. Ruth saves Lily, but her granddaughter returns the favor, giving her love and purpose. Like a painterly miniature, Loved and Missed contains a wide-ranging emotional landscape within its precise and intricate scenes. Boyt packs her writing with such intensity it is sometimes difficult to read; there’s no filler here, just the soaring and plunging sensations that come along with unrelenting love—and what could be a bigger topic than that?—C.S.

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto (September)

How I Won a Nobel Prize

Julius Taranto’s razor-sharp debut, How I Won a Nobel Prize (Little, Brown), comes with an intriguing premise: Helen, a prodigiously talented graduate student, decides to follow her professor and mentor after he is booted from their university following a sex scandal. Their destination is an institute for “canceled” academics on an island off the coast of Connecticut, where a protest movement aiming to bring the high-flying academic pariahs to their knees has taken root. That might sound like the start of a clunky cancel culture diatribe, but Taranto’s compelling dissections of moral gray areas and nail-bitingly tense passages on Helen’s superconductivity experiments make the novel bracingly clever. A viciously funny page-turner with plenty of surprises up its sleeve.—Liam Hess

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (September)

The Vaster Wilds

Lauren Groff has long been fascinated by stories of female survival, and in her new novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead), she places her protagonist in extreme circumstances: an early period of the Jamestown colony, when famine decimated almost the entirety of that settlement. Our heroine flees to the surrounding wilderness, where, by wits and tenacity, she manages to maintain a tenuous purchase on life. The Vaster Wilds is a page-turner with a built-in engine: What will she have to do to survive? Inspired by the language of Elizabethan English, the book takes a minute to metabolize. But once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.—C.S.

The Secret Hours by Mick Herron (September)

The Secret Hours

Spy novelists are often hailed as successors to the late John le Carré. Mick Herron with The Secret Hours (Soho Crime), his teemingly complex story of the British Secret Service, rife with post-Brexit infighting and festering Cold War secrets, earns the comparison. The novel has exciting set pieces and plenty of cloak-and-dagger maneuvering, but what elevates it is Herron’s clear-eyed portrait of state power, in which lowly civil servants joust with formidable MI5 leaders who may, in turn, be toppled by spies who have long ago come in from the cold. Amid his careful plotting Herron manages to be acidly funny too, a quality that fans of his best-selling Slough House novels (adapted by Apple TV+ as the terrific series Slow Horses ) know well.—T.A.

Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (September)

I’m a sucker for a sister story, and this novel (which follows three granddaughters of the titular matriarch Candelaria as they come of age in Guatemala and the US) is spooky, sweet, stunningly well-written, and the perfect thing to slip into your ultra-literary sibling’s stocking this Christmas.—E.S.

P eople Collide by Isle McElroy (September)

People Collide

If you’re a fan of the body-swap genre (think Freaky Friday, the fun one with Lindsay Lohan) but wish it had more musings on gender, self, identity, and love, then this is indisputably the book for you. McElroy is a skilled novelist, and their gift for laying out a seemingly improbable story with realism and grace shines in this follow-up to their 2021 debut, The Atmospherians .—E.S.

The Children’s Bach: A Novel by Helen Garner (October)

The Children’s Bach

This one is a bit of a cheat since it was originally published in 1984. It’s the story (loosely) of two families in Melbourne, Australia: Athena and Dexter, a married couple with two boys, and Elizabeth, a single adult woman whose teenage sister, Vicki, comes to live with her. Dexter had a relationship of sorts with Elizabeth when they were in college, and a chance encounter brings them all back together. But it is Vicki who ends up moving in and Elizabeth’s current boyfriend who most disrupts the seemingly set domestic arrangements of the nuclear family. But the plot is really beside the point (and actually sort of hard to follow); Garner is gesturing to entire lives with a few spare strokes, a master of incredibly fluid and intimate free indirect discourse. This is a modernist book set against an arid Australian landscape, and it’s like nothing else I’ve ever read.—C.S.

A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel (October)

A Memoir of My Former Self

Oh, the joys of the finely tuned 800-word essay! Against concerns over the fragmentation of media—alongside the fetishization of the long-form—it’s a tonic to recall just how potent a short (but not too short!) text can be. Mantel, the best-selling and beloved author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, was for decades, before her death last year, a journalist as well as a novelist—relying on the regular deadlines to clear out the cobwebs. The works collected in A Memoir of My Former Self (Holt) are simultaneously sharp and shapely, models of economy and density of thought. They also cover an expanse of emotional and geographic terrain. Here is the story of her time as the wife of an oil-company exec in Saudi Arabia and her struggles with that rich and claustrophobic culture; her lifelong compulsion to write; and her endometriosis—which becomes a moving meditation on women’s pain, the way it is diminished and ignored. Whether you are a Mantel completist or have never heard of her, this book is an utter delight.—C.S.

Absolution by Alice McDermott (October)

Absolution: A Novel

From the start, Alice McDermott’s Absolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) assumes the warm and winning tone of a letter from an old friend, full of glorious detail and teasing asides. And that is exactly what it is: Decades after a stint in Saigon, Vietnam, with her engineer husband, our primary narrator, Patricia, has reconnected with the younger Rainey, whose mother—the wily, benzo-popping Charlene—had been a friend (and a mild source of terror) to her in that faraway city. As they catch up and exchange memories of life in Vietnam (Patricia’s encounter with a young burn victim is especially piercing), McDermott compiles a heady study of war, marriage, patriotism, religion, and the compulsion to do good in the face of overwhelming suffering, her prose accomplished and assured. —M.M.

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (October)

Roman Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri ’s Roman Stories (Knopf) is a delectable, sun-washed treat: a series of tales set in and around the Italian capital, told from the perspective of natives, expats, migrants, and other transplants. When a city invites you in—with all its alluring splendor—who ultimately gets to lay claim to it? Lahiri wears that geopolitical question lightly, enveloping the reader in birthday parties and summer heat waves; the adrenaline of teenage delinquents and the anxieties of nonnas keeping a watchful eye; flings that are mere flights of imagination and real, life-transforming affairs. Like Lahiri’s two most recent books, this collection was written in Italian and translated for an English audience, and the stories have the beating heart of the city itself, a place of magnificent decay and vibrant, varied life. —C.S.

Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye (October)

Vengeance Is Mine

The unsettling Vengeance Is Mine (Knopf) from Marie NDiaye, winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, has the magnetism of a thriller and the mysteriousness of an existential riddle. Maître Susane, a lawyer of middling success in Bordeaux, is asked by the husband of an imprisoned woman to defend her. What has she done? Murdered her three children—an unimaginable crime that NDiaye allows to sit in the background of her storytelling like an ominous dream. What concerns NDiaye’s heroine is a flickering memory from her child- hood that involves the defendant’s husband, a passive-aggressive relationship with her Mauritian housekeeper, a sense of rejection by her parents, and her too-modest car. This is a novel of unraveling certainties and of a middle-class life encroached upon by nightmares. You may not fully unlock its mysteries—it’s slim, a good length for a reread—but you won’t be able to put it down.—T.A.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (October)

Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend (Scribner), the latest novel from Jesmyn Ward —the virtuosic author of 2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, both winners of the National Book Award for Fiction—takes its title from a passage in Dante’s Inferno, verses of which Ward’s protagonist, an enslaved teenager named Annis, can hear through the door as her white half-sisters sit for their lessons. It resonates: Working in her sire’s house feels distinctly like hell—dark, endless, full of dangers—the only grace, Annis’s fierce bond with her mother, Sasha. Yet after Sasha is sold, and Annis herself is sent on a harrowing walk from the Carolinas to Louisiana, she descends to yet another circle, enduring the searing loneliness and fresh terrors of life on a sugar plantation. The novel is not for the faint of heart, but Annis’s story, told in Ward’s musical prose, is nothing short of epic, magical, and intensely moving.—M.M.

Sonic Life by Thurston Moore (October)

Sonic Life: A Memoir

In 2015, Kim Gordon ’s memoir, Girl in a Band , gave Sonic Youth fans a tantalizing glimpse into the group’s past—but a fractured one. Gordon’s book was written in the aftermath of her divorce from her bandmate Thurston Moore and the breakup of the group after decades of defining a beautifully angular, frequently dissonant art-house, post-punk sound. Girl in a Band , powerful and personal as it was, felt hurt and a little angry, even withdrawn. Now comes Moore’s exuberant and widescreen memoir, Sonic Life , a book that details Sonic Youth’s New York City origin story in a fascinatingly fine-grained way—and fans will devour every page. Moore is a music obsessive, a Connecticut kid who came to Manhattan in the 1970s to talk his way into Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s to gawk at punk bands, and his account of those years is meticulous, romantic, and transporting. Sonic Life packs in seemingly every gig, every night out, every record Moore saved up for and bought as he moved to the East Village and eeked out an existence in a downtown scene that was evolving by the day. It’s a vivid recollection of a lost world, a feral, scuzzy Manhattan where artists and musicians and fans were mixing and colliding and getting fucked up and trying new things. Moore would eventually meet Gordon , Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley, and they would tour and make records as Sonic Youth that would change music forever. That road is well mapped here; the demise of his marriage and the breakup of his band is not. Sonic Life is withholding in its own way, a book that can’t seem to face the unhappy endgame of a band that meant so much to so many.—T.A.

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (November)

The Vulnerables: A Novel

Sigrid Nunez has achieved something wonderful at this later stage of her career: a talent for slim, companionable novels that have a kind of gossamer delicacy and tremendous emotional power. There was The Friend from 2018, a surprise bestseller and National Book Award winner, followed by 2020’s What Are You Going Through , a wry and moving story about mortality. And now we have The Vulnerables (Riverhead), which is set in Manhattan during the first months of COVID and has the spry pace of a diary and a kind of welcome gallows humor in its examination of our general communal distress. Our narrator is a writer of Nunez’s age, and she holes up in a friend’s apartment during the lockdown and passes the time in memory and musings—with a sociable house parrot for company and then a slouching 20-something (her friends’ son) who first annoys and then shakes her, somewhat hilariously, to life. —T.A.

My Name Is Barbra (November)

My Name Is Barbra

Fans of Barbra Streisand had been promised a memoir for years (also a DVD set called My Life in Words and Music that never materialized, but I digress), and My Name Is Barbra , released this fall, delivered on every front. Ruminative and dishy, funny and smart, it deftly captures the voice that first bewitched American audiences some 60 years ago—plus her weird dynamic with Marlon Brando, the nightmare of making Yentl with Mandy Patinkin, her lifelong fondness for baked potatoes, and other delicious bits. Oh, and speaking of Streisand’s voice: You’ve never heard an audiobook performance quite like the one she gives for this—full of wry asides and snatches of music—which clocks in at a magisterial 48 hours. As it should! —M.M.

Ilium by Lea Carpenter (December)

Ilium: A Novel

Lea Carpenter’s novel Ilium (Knopf), about a clandestine operation to take out a Russian asset on the French peninsula of Cap-Ferrat, has the surface tension of an espionage thriller, but it’s really a psychological study of a young British woman who is swept into a world of intelligence and finds herself undone by it. Reminiscent of the spare, strobe-lit storytelling of the late Joan Didion, Carpenter shows how wealth and sophistication paper over moral rot and how human attachment is a vulnerability when only posing and posturing keep you alive. —T.A.

Listen to Vogue editors share more must-reads on this episode of The Run-Through here.

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15 Memoirs and Biographies to Read This Fall

New autobiographies from Jemele Hill, Matthew Perry and Hua Hsu are in the mix, along with books about Martha Graham, Agatha Christie and more.

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By John Williams ,  Joumana Khatib ,  Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter

• Published Sept. 8, 2022 Updated Sept. 15, 2022

Solito: A Memoir , by Javier Zamora

When he was 9, Zamora left El Salvador to join his parents in the United States — a dangerous trek in the company of strangers that lasted for more than two months, a far cry from the two-week adventure he had envisioned. Zamora, a poet, captures his childhood impressions of the journey, including his fierce, lifesaving attachments to the other people undertaking the trip with him.

Hogarth, Sept. 6

A Visible Man: A Memoir , by Edward Enninful

The first Black editor in chief of British Vogue reflects on his life, including his early years as a gay, working-class immigrant from Ghana, and his path to becoming one of the most influential tastemakers in media.

Penguin Press, Sept. 6

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman , by Lucy Worsley

Not many authors sell a billion books, but Christie’s nearly 70 mysteries helped her do just that. Born in 1890, she introduced the world to two detectives still going strong in film adaptations and elsewhere: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Her life even included its own mystery, when she vanished for 11 days in 1926 . Worsley, a historian, offers a full-dress biography.

Pegasus Crime, Sept. 8

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands , by Kate Beaton

This graphic memoir follows Beaton, a Canadian cartoonist, who joins the oil rush in Alberta after graduating from college. The book includes drawings of enormous machines built to work the oil sands against a backdrop of Albertan landscapes, boreal forests and northern lights.

Drawn and Quarterly, Sept. 13

Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir , by Jann S. Wenner

In 2017, Joe Hagan published “Sticky Fingers,” a biography of Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Now Wenner recounts his life in his own words, offering an intimate look at his time running the magazine that helped to change American culture.

Little, Brown, Sept. 13

Stay True: A Memoir , by Hua Hsu

A New Yorker staff writer reflects on a life-changing college friendship cut short by tragedy. Hsu — interested in counterculture, zines and above all music — seemed to have little in common with Ken, a Dave Matthews Band-loving fraternity brother, with the exception of their Asian American heritage. In spite of their differences, they forged a close bond; this is both a memoir of their relationship but also Hsu’s journey to adulthood as he makes sense of his grief.

Doubleday, Sept. 27

Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover , by Graham Boynton

A biography of the photographer Peter Beard, who had a fondness for risk, drugs and beautiful women. Boynton, a journalist and author, was a friend of Beard’s for more than 30 years.

St. Martin’s, Oct. 11

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir , by Paul Newman

When Newman and his iconic blue eyes died in 2008, the actor left behind taped conversations about his life, which he had put together with hopes of writing his life story. Now, with the participation of Newman’s daughters, the transcripts have been turned into this book, which sees Newman on his early life, his troubles with drinking and his shortcomings as a husband and parent, as well as his decorated career.

Knopf. Oct. 18

Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman

Rickman, the English stage and screen actor who died in 2016, was famous for his roles in “Die Hard,” the Harry Potter movies, “Love Actually” and many other films. He kept a diary for 25 years, about his work, his political activism, his friendships and other subjects, and they promise to be “anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid.”

Henry Holt, Oct. 18

README.txt: A Memoir , by Chelsea Manning

Manning, a former Army analyst, shared classified documents about the U.S. military’s operations in Iraq with WikiLeaks. In this memoir, she explores her childhood and what drew her to the armed services, her eventual disillusionment with the military and her life as a trans woman.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 18

The White Mosque: A Memoir , by Sofia Samatar

Samatar, a novelist, turns to nonfiction in this complex work combining religious and personal history. Raised in the United States, the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, Samatar recounts her life while relating a pilgrimage she undertook retracing the route of German-speaking Mennonites who founded a village in Central Asia in the 1800s.

Catapult, Oct. 25

Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern , by Neil Baldwin

The biographer Baldwin’s eclectic list of subjects has included William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Here he turns his attention to Martha Graham, the American choreographer who revolutionized modern dance and founded her own company, which is still going strong, in 1926.

Knopf, Oct. 25

Uphill: A Memoir , by Jemele Hill

Hill, now a contributing writer at The Atlantic, rose to fame as a TV anchor on ESPN. Her memoir covers the time in 2017 when ESPN suspended her (she had criticized the politics of the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, and had called President Trump a white supremacist). But the book offers a much broader canvas that includes her upbringing in Detroit and the trauma of generations of women in her family.

Henry Holt, Oct. 25

Friends, Lovers and the Terrible Thing: A Memoir , by Matthew Perry

Perry, who played Chandler Bing on “Friends,” has been candid about his substance abuse and sobriety. In this memoir, he returns again to discussions of fame and addiction, but also reaches back to his childhood.

Flatiron, Nov. 1

I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki: A Memoir , by Baek Sehee. Translated by Anton Hur.

A best seller in South Korea, Baek’s memoir recounts her struggles with depression and anxiety, told through discussions with her therapist, which she recorded over a 12-week period. The therapy sessions are interspersed with short essays that explore her self-doubt and how feelings of worthlessness were reinforced by sexism.

Bloomsbury, Nov. 1

Elizabeth A. Harris writes about books and publishing for The Times.  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

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The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

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Protests, poisoning and prison: The life and death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Friday in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, Russia’s prison agency said. (Feb. 16)

A coffin of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is carried to the entrance of the Borisovskoye Cemetery during the funeral ceremony, in Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 1, 2024. Under a heavy police presence, thousands of people bade farewell Friday to Alexei Navalny at his funeral in Moscow after his still-unexplained death two weeks ago in an Arctic penal colony. (AP Photo)

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Relatives and friends pay their last respects at the coffin of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, in Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 1, 2024. (AP Photo)

FILE - In this handout photo taken from video provided by the Moscow City Court on Feb. 2, 2021, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny shows a heart symbol while standing in a defendants’ cage during a hearing in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia. Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony on Feb. 16, spent months in punishment cells for infractions like not buttoning his uniform properly or not putting his hands behind his back when required. (Moscow City Court via AP, File)

FILE - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen via a video link to a courtroom in Moscow, Russia, on Oct. 18, 2022. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Feb. 16, 2024, spent months inside a punishment cell for such infractions as not buttoning his uniform properly or not putting his hands behind his back when required. (AP Photo, File)

Follow the latest updates on this story .

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s top opposition leader and President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, was buried Friday in a Moscow suburb in a funeral that drew thousands of mourners amid a heavy police presence.

Navalny, who was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, died Feb. 16, according to Russia’s prison service. He was moved in December from his former prison in central Russia to to a “special regime” penal colony — the highest security level — above the Arctic Circle.

In a span of a decade, he went from being the Kremlin’s biggest foe to Russia’s most prominent political prisoner .

Here’s a look at key events in Navalny’s life, political activism and the charges he has faced through the years:

June 4, 1976 — Navalny is born in a western part of the Moscow region.

1997 — Graduates from Russia’s RUDN university, where he majored in law; earns a degree in economics in 2001 while working as a lawyer.

2004 — Forms a movement against rampant overdevelopment in Moscow, according to his campaign website.

2008 — Gains notoriety for alleging corruption in state-run corporations, such as gas giant Gazprom and oil behemoth Rosneft, through his blogs and other posts.

2010 — Founds RosPil, an anti-corruption project run by a team of lawyers that analyzes spending of state agencies and companies, exposing violations and contesting them in court.

2011 — Establishes the Foundation for Fighting Corruption, which will become his team’s main platform for exposing alleged graft among Russia’s top political ranks.

December 2011 — Participates in mass protests sparked by reports of widespread rigging of Russia’s parliamentary election, and is arrested and jailed for 15 days for “defying a government official.”

FILE - Alexei Navalny speaks to journalists after being released from a police custody on the outskirts of Moscow early Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2011. Russian authorities on Friday, Feb. 16, 2023, say Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison. He was 47. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, File)

March 2012 — Following President Vladimir Putin’s reelection and inauguration, mass protests break out in Moscow and elsewhere. Navalny accuses key figures, including then-Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Chechnya’s strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, of corruption.

Police detain Alexei Navalny, a prominent anti-corruption whistle blower and blogger during protests in Moscow, late Tuesday, May 8, 2012 a day after Putin’s inauguration. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev, File)

July 2012 — Russia’s Investigative Committee charges Navalny with embezzlement involving Kirovles, a state-owned timber company in the Kirov region, while acting as an adviser to the local governor. Navalny rejects the allegations as politically motivated.

December 2012 — The Investigative Committee launches another probe into alleged embezzlement at a Navalny-linked Russian subsidiary of Yves Rocher, a French cosmetics company. Navalny again says the allegations are politically motivated.

2013 — Navalny runs for mayor in Moscow — a move the authorities not only allow but encourage in an attempt to put a veneer of democracy on the race that is designed to boost the profile of the incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin.

July 2013 — A court in Kirov convicts Navalny of embezzlement in the Kirovles case, sentencing him to five years in prison. The prosecution petitions to release Navalny from custody pending his appeal, and he resumes his campaign.

September 2013 — Official results show Navalny finishes second in the mayor’s race behind Sobyanin, with 27% of the vote, after a successful electoral and fundraising campaign collecting an unprecedented 97.3 million rubles ($2.9 million) from individual supporters.

FILE - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny listens to a question while speaking to the media in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2013. Russian authorities on Friday, Feb. 16, 2023, say Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison. He was 47. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

October 2013 — A court hands Navalny a suspended sentence in the Kirovles case.

February 2014 — Navalny is placed under house arrest in connection with the Yves Rocher case and banned from using the internet. His blog continues to be updated regularly, presumably by his team, detailing alleged corruption by various Russian officials.

December 2014 — Navalny and his brother, Oleg, are found guilty of fraud in the Yves Rocher case. Navalny receives a 3 ½-year suspended sentence, while his brother is handed a prison term. Both appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

December 2015 — Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption releases its first long-form video — a YouTube documentary called “Chaika,” which means “seagull” in Russian but is also the last name of then-Prosecutor General Yury Chaika. The 44-minute video accuses him of corruption and alleged ties to a notorious criminal group and has piled up 26 million views on YouTube. Chaika and other Russian officials deny the accusations.

February 2016 — The European Court of Human Rights rules that Russia violated Navalny’s right to a fair trial in the Kirovles case, ordering the government to pay his legal costs and damages.

November 2016 — Russia’s Supreme Court overturns Navalny’s sentence and sends the case back to the original court in the city of Kirov for review.

December 2016 — Navalny announces he will run in Russia’s 2018 presidential election.

February 2017 — The Kirov court retries Navalny and upholds his five-year suspended sentence from 2013.

March 2017 — Navalny releases a YouTube documentary accusing then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption, getting over seven million views in its first week. A series of anti-graft protests across Russia draw tens of thousands and there are mass arrests. Navalny tours the country to open campaign offices, holds big rallies and is jailed repeatedly for unauthorized demonstrations.

April 27, 2017 — Unidentified assailants throw a green disinfectant in his face, damaging his right eye. He blames the attack on the Kremlin.

October 2017 — The European Court of Human Rights finds Navalny’s fraud conviction in the Yves Rocher case to be “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”

December 2017 — Russia’s Central Electoral Commission bars him from running for president over his conviction in the Kirovles case, a move condemned by the EU as casting “serious doubt” on the election.

July 2019 — Members of Navalny’s team, along with other opposition activists, are barred from running for Moscow city council, sparking protests that are violently dispersed, with thousands arrested. Navalny’s team responds by promoting the “Smart Voting” strategy, encouraging the election of any candidate except those from the Kremlin’s United Russia party. The strategy works, with the party losing its majority.

2020 — Navalny seeks to deploy the Smart Voting strategy during regional elections in September and tours Siberia as part of the effort.

Aug. 20, 2020 — On a flight from the city of Tomsk, where he was working with local activists, Navalny falls ill and the plane makes an emergency landing in nearby Omsk. Hospitalized in a coma, Navalny’s team suspects he was poisoned.

Aug. 22, 2020 — A comatose Navalny is flown to a hospital in Berlin.

Aug. 24, 2020 — German authorities confirm Navalny was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent. After he recovers, he blames the Kremlin, an accusation denied by Russian officials.

Jan. 17, 2021 — After five months in Germany, Navalny is arrested upon his return to Russia , with authorities alleging his recuperation abroad violated the terms of his suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case. His arrest triggers some of the biggest protests in Russia in years. Thousands are arrested.

Feb. 2, 2021 — A Moscow court orders Navalny to serve 2 ½ years in prison for his parole violation. While in prison, Navalny stages a three-week hunger strike to protest a lack of medical treatment and sleep deprivation.

June 2021 — A Moscow court outlaws Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and about 40 regional offices as extremist, shutting down his political network. Close associates and team members face prosecution and leave Russia under pressure. Navalny maintains contact with his lawyers and team from prison, and they update his social media accounts.

Feb. 24, 2022 — Russia invades Ukraine . Navalny condemns the war in social media posts from prison and during his court appearances.

March 22, 2022 — Navalny is sentenced to an additional nine-year term for embezzlement and contempt of court in a case his supporters rejected as fabricated. He is transferred to a maximum-security prison in Russia’s western Vladimir region.

July 2022 — Navalny’s team announces the relaunch of the Anti-Corruption Foundation as an international organization with an advisory board including Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, and the European Parliament member and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. Navalny continues to file lawsuits in prison and tries to form a labor union in the facility. Officials respond by regularly placing him in solitary confinement over purported disciplinary violations such as failing to properly button his garment or to wash his face at a specified time.

2023 — Over 400 Russian doctors sign an open letter to Putin, urging an end to what it calls abuse of Navalny, following reports that he was denied basic medication after getting the flu. His team expresses concern about his health, saying in April he had acute stomach pain and suspected he was being slowly poisoned.

March 12, 2023 — “Navalny,” a film about the attempt on the opposition leader’s life, wins the Oscar for best documentary feature.

April 26, 2023 — Appearing on a video link from prison during a hearing, Navalny says he was facing new extremism and terrorism charges that could keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. He adds sardonically that the charges imply that “I’m conducting terror attacks while sitting in prison.”

June 19, 2023 — The trial begins in a makeshift courtroom in the Penal Colony No. 6 where Navalny is held. Soon after it starts, the judge closes the trial to the public and media despite Navalny’s objections.

July 20, 2023 — In closing arguments, the prosecution asks the court to sentence Navalny to 20 years in prison , his team reports. Navalny says in a subsequent statement that he expects his sentence to be “huge … a Stalinist term,” referring to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Aug. 4, 2023 — Navalny is convicted of extremism and sentenced to 19 years, and he says he understands he’s “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, 2nd left, and his lawyers Alexander Fedulov, left, Olga Mikhailova, right, and Vadim Kobzev, second right, are seen on a TV screen standing among his lawyers, as he appears in a video link provided by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, during a hearing in the colony, in Melekhovo, Vladimir region, about 260 kilometers (163 miles) northeast of Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Aug. 4, 2023. (AP Photo, File)

Oct. 13, 2023 — Authorities detain three lawyers representing Navalny after searching their homes, and his ally Ivan Zhdanov says on social media the move is a bid to “completely isolate Navalny.” The raids targeting Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser are part of a criminal case on charges of participating in an extremist group, Zhdanov says. Navalny’s spokesperson says if the opposition leader has no access to lawyers, “he will end up in complete isolation, the kind no one can really even imagine.”

Dec. 2, 2023 — New charges are filed against Navalny. In comments passed to associates, Navalny says he has been charged under Article 214 of the penal code, covering vandalism. “I don’t even know whether to describe my latest news as sad, funny or absurd,” he writes on social media via his team. “I have no idea what Article 214 is, and there’s nowhere to look. You’ll know before I do.”

Dec. 7, 2023 — Navalny’s team erects billboards across Russia featuring QR codes that lead smartphones to a hidden website urging Russians to take part in a campaign against Putin, who is expected to run for reelection in March 2024. Navalny’s team say the vote is important for Putin as a referendum on his war in Ukraine , rather than a real contest for the presidency.

Dec. 11, 2023 — Navalny is scheduled to appear in court via video link but does not appear, and his spokeswoman says prison officials are citing electricity problems. Navalny’s allies express concern, saying neither they nor his lawyers have heard from him in several weeks.

Dec. 25, 2023 — Navalny’s allies say he’s been located in a prison colony in the town of Kharp , north of the Arctic Circle, notorious for long and severe winters. It’s about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.

Jan. 10 — Navalny appears via video link from Kharp for the first time. Russian news outlets release images of him in black prison garb and with a buzz cut, on a live TV feed from the “special regime” penal colony in Kharp, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. At the hearing, Navalny cracks jokes about Arctic weather and asks if officials at his former prison threw a party when he was transferred.

Feb. 16 — Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service says Navalny died at the penal colony at the age of 47. His team later cited paperwork that his mother saw that listed the cause of death as “natural causes.”

March 1 — Navalny is buried in a southeastern Moscow suburb amid a heavy police presence in a funeral that draws thousands of people who chanted anti-government slogans.

Associated Press reporter Joanna Kozlowska contributed to this timeline.

Geschichte der O (Unzensierte Neuauflage 2023‪)‬

Publisher description.

Geschichte der O & Rückkehr nach Roissy | Unzensierte Neuauflage 2023 | Eine junge Frau und erfolgreiche Pariser Modefotografin, nur O, genannt, lässt sich von ihrem Geliebten René auf das abgeschiedene Schloss Roissy, nördlich von Paris bringen. Es ist ein exklusives Privatanwesen, in dem sich Frauen dem Willen der Männer unterwerfen. Im Rahmen ihrer »Erziehung« muss O jedem Mann auf jede Art zur Verfügung stehen, darf jederzeit gepeitscht werden, muss immer so sitzen oder stehen, dass Mund und Schoß für die anwesenden Männer geöffnet scheinen. Je heftiger sie gequält wird, umso offener, gehorsamer und opferbereiter wird O; gleichzeitig erlebt sie Gefühle der Macht, der Lust und der Selbstbestimmtheit denn schließlich ist sie es, die den Männern ihre Lust erst ermöglicht. Körperteile, die bisher verborgen waren, scheinen durch das ständig auf sie gerichtete Begehren auch für O selber immer schöner und begehrenswerter zu werden. Das Buch erregte ungeheures Aufsehen, wurde als pornographischer Exzess geschmäht und gewann gleichzeitig Literaturpreise. Es wurde ein Bestseller in Frankreich, zeitweise der meist verkaufte französische Roman weltweit. Geschichte der O wurde in über 60 Sprachen übersetzt.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Travel and Tourism Industry — The History of Moscow City

The History of Moscow City

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Moscow City Election – 2023

• Introduction to the Candidates
• GUIDE: How to Register to Vote and Vote

This year in the City of Moscow, three City Council seats and school board seats for Zones 1, 3, and 4, are up for election. For the city council race, the winners will be whichever candidates receive the top three sets of votes , while the school board trustees will be decided based on who gets the most votes in their respective districts.

School board

School Board Zone 1: Cody Barr (REP), Jim Frenzel (DEM) School Board Zone 3: Gay Lynn Clyde (REP), Dulce Kersting-Lark (DEM) School Board Zone 4: Jim Gray (REP), Dawna Fazio (DEM)

City Council Candidates:

Get to know the candidates through our Candidate Candids interview series ! These long-form conversations cover more than mere talking points.

Nathan Tupper

Evan Holmes:

Bryce Blankenship

Joe Campbell

Sandra Kelly

While Sandra was unable to conduct an interview with us, you can find more information about her platform and campaign here: https://www.facebook.com/kellyformoscow

Voter Registration Info

Early voting starts Oct 25th, and runs through November 3rd. During this period, citizens can go to the Latah County Courthouse between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and vote. Otherwise, election day is on November 7th, at which time citizens will need to go to their respective precincts to vote ( Precinct Map ), based on their residential address.

If your permanent residence is here in Moscow, Latah County, Idaho:

****************************************************************************************************

To register to vote online (voteidaho.gov) or at the Latah County clerk’s office or at the polls, you must be a citizen of the United States, 18 years of age, a resident of Idaho and your county for 30 days prior to the election. To prove this, you must provide:

• Idaho-issued identification card or Idaho driver’s license or current US passport
• One approved proof of residence document

Any of the above photo identification with correct residence address:

• Lease or rental agreement
• Utility bill (excluding cellular telephone bill)
• Bank or credit card statement
• Paystub, paycheck, government-issued check
• For students: Enrollment papers from current school year. 

Identification

Do you have an Idaho state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license)?

Yes, I have an Idaho state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license). 

Is your address current on it?

If not please update your address online at dmvonline.itd.idaho.gov/   Or in person at Latah County DMV, 1313 S. Blaine Street, Moscow, ID 83843. (No need to pay the $20 new-card fee. The address will be corrected in the state’s system.) 

No, I do not have an Idaho state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license) . 

Follow the Idaho DMV rules for a driver’s license. Or apply for an Idaho photo identification card:

Bring 1 or 2 (2 will allow you to get a Star Card for travel purposes) of these original documents proving residency that are less than a year old in your current name with current address to the DMV:

• Lease, rental agreement, mortgage, or deed
• Account statement from one or two different utilities (no ¾ page or cell phone bills)
• Account statement from a bank or financial institution
• Medical or insurance provider statement, invoice, or explanation of benefits
• Pay stub or employment verification (it must list your legal name.)
• Idaho school enrollment records with current address (college IDs are not accepted)
• Residency affidavit signed by an adult over age 18
• Vehicle, homeowner’s, or renter’s liability information.
• And bring your birth certificate and social security card .

Have you been recently married and need to update your name on your Idaho state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license)?

First, change your name on your social security card by taking to Lewiston Social Security Office:

• Maiden name social security card
• Marriage certificate (not the gold-seal version, but the certified copy)
• Must have State File Number, Groom, Bride, and Family ( maiden ) Name completed
• Birth certificate (recorded copy, not the keepsake copy)
• Maiden name state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license).

Then, change your name on your Idaho state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license) at the Latah County DMV, 1313 S. Blaine Street, Moscow, ID 83843.

I was recently married, but I do not have ANY valid photo identification card

• Follow the Idaho DMV rules for a driver’s license. 

Or apply for an Idaho state-issued photo identification card (see steps above). Wait for the plastic one to arrive in the mail. 

2. Change your name on your social security card by taking to Lewiston:

• New Idaho state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license).

3.  Wait 24-48 hours. Then return to DMV in person for your state-issued photo identification card (or driver’s license).

There is a new, free Idaho voting identification card option for people who do not drive. This program began in July 2023, so there is not much information available on it. 

The signed affidavit is only to be used if the properly registered voter comes to the polls without a picture identification, and his verbally given address matches the roster. If the addresses do not match, the person must re-register to vote (must go and get the photo identification and proof of address).

As a student , where should I register to vote?

From the Idaho Secretary of State’s website :

“College students must establish, as with all other voter registration applicants, that the locale within which they seek to register and vote is their domicile i.e. that they are living in the college community with the intention of abandoning their former domicile and with the intention of remaining permanently, or for an indefinite length of time, in the new location. Some of the factors which may be relevant in determining whether domicile has been established for voting purposes by a student as well as any other applicant, are as follows:

• Has the applicant registered to vote elsewhere?
• Where does the applicant maintain his checking and saving accounts, if any?
• Where does the applicant pay taxes, and what address did he list as his residence on his last income tax return?
• What is the residence listed on the applicant’s driver’s license?
• If the applicant owns an automobile, where is it registered?
• Does the applicant live year round at his claimed domicile, or does he divide it elsewhere? If it is divided, how much time is spent elsewhere and for what reason?

As a student, you should not be registering and voting in your college locale simply because you failed to register and vote at your true domicile. Registering to vote is a serious matter which should only be done after proper reflection. It should be noted that there is no federal right to vote anywhere in the United States for the office of President. State laws control registration and voting and State residency requirements must be met.”

“We need and want all students to vote at their legal domicile.”

If your permanent residence is in another state, contact your home state’s election division to register and vote (absentee?) there.

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Related posts, latah county commissioners meetings debrief from 2/26/23 – 3/4/23.

Aiden Anderson

Which candidates for city council are members of Christ church? They seem to be the most sensible candidates.

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