autobiography

“One never… asks is it a novel,” wrote John Cheever in 1977. “One asks is it interesting.” Definitely not a novel – whatever its publishers say – but definitely very interesting is Jack Hilton’s 1935 book Caliban Shrieks, equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant, now reissued in hardback by Vintage Classics and lauded last week as a lost literary masterpiece in the New Yorker.Channelling Shakespeare’s monstrous Caliban (“the red plague rid you for learning me your language”), Hilton’s narrator uses…

Gary Stevenson had a meteoric rise from the rags of east London to the riches of Citibank, and his new book charts that journey. This is not a sleazy tell-all along the lines of the 2008 bestseller Cityboy, or the 2013 box-office hit The Wolf of Wall Street. Stevenson is exceedingly smart and a man with a conscience. Since leaving the bank at the age of 27, he started the YouTube channel GarysEconomics to explain, among other things, how massive money creation by the Bank of England has favoured the wealthy, while warning…

Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character…

Juano Diaz’s elegant and heartbreaking memoir immediately brings to mind Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain, which told a fictional tale of similar territory – Glasgow tenements and moments of sublimity balanced against the brutality of a breadline existence. Slum Boy manages descriptions of grinding poverty also alongside images of extraordinary beauty and is a book in which the reader feels that a large part of the redemptive arc lies in the author’s artistic skill in describing his past with clarity and…

To westerners, the public beheading of the US journalist James Foley in Syria was grim confirmation of the brutality of Islamic State and, more specifically, of the cruelty of a trio of British militants nicknamed “the Beatles”. For Foley’s mother, Diane, who since his kidnapping two years earlier had been pressing Barack Obama’s government to rescue him or negotiate his release, his death was incomparably more painful. But that didn’t deter her from meeting Alexanda Kotey, the man found guilty of conspiracy to murder her…

Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the magnitude of those experiences. Frequently repeated words may gain a carapace that resists our scrutiny: take “dignity”, for example, which Marianne Brooker regards with “mild suspicion” as “too clean-cut and classed”, with “none of the chaos that makes us human”.Brooker’s mother, Jane, had experienced a certain amount of…

With notable, largely historical exceptions, literary lives can be disappointingly dull to read about. Not so Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s. Better Broken Than New is the novelist and memoirist’s first book since 2007 and its vivid, sometimes chaotic narrative details – adventures and misadventures enough for multiple lifetimes – leave the reader wondering not from where she derives her creative material but how she’s lived to tell the tale.Cheating death thanks to a premonition, cooking for a cannibal and surviving the…

‘But isn’t it boring?” asked my partner. I had just explained the concept of Alphabetical Diaries, a book which delivers almost exactly what its title promises. The novelist Sheila Heti kept a journal for more than 10 years; she then culled sentences from the pages and arranged those sentences in alphabetical order. The book proceeds from A to Z: in the first chapter, each sentence starts with A, in the second each starts with B, and so on. The structure of the book is slick and oddly captivating. I read it over the…

If you crave romances about beekeepers in the Algarve, or sagas of whimsical poisoning in Kensal Green, Nicolas Lunabba’s memoir probably isn’t for you. The clue is very much in the title. Will You Care If I Die? is a raw, intimate story of desperate trust and betrayal, of people perpetually balanced above a terminal abyss. Elegantly translated by Henning Koch, the prose juggles twisted humour, poetry, love and polemic in an aching, challenging journey. Lunabba anatomises what happens when a guarded heart surrenders and…

Patrick Joyce is emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester and one of the leading social historians of his generation. The illustrious referees for his first academic job in the 1970s were Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson. In his 70s, Joyce has found a new non-academic audience combining memoir and history. His new book, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, follows in the footsteps of Going to My Father’s House, which looked at themes of emigration, home and war. Joyce lives in…