Biographies & Memoirs

If somebody had said to me, "Your wife will go mad, she'll go missing, you'll end up bringing up your children alone, you're going to search for her for years and years," I would have thought they were the ones going insane.

In spare, rhythmic prose, this book describes the nightmarish sequence of events that surrounded the sudden illness and subsequent death of Laure Adler's nine-month old child. The child's resilience as the story is told feeds a desperate kind of hope in both Adler's family and the reader.

The faux memoir of George W. Bush, from the creators of WeeklyRadioAddress.com, featured on TheOnion.com one of the highest rated podcasts in America.

In 1880, Ada Curtis bore Gerald Howard, the first of several illegitimate children. Ada was a housemaid, the daughter of a Lincolnshire butcher. Inspired by the stories Ada's great-granddaughter sets out to trace the criss-crossing lines of their history. She wonders if the history offered any explanation of what had happened in her own life.

Twenty-three years old, forensic archaeologist Courtney Brkic joined a UN-contracted team excavating mass grave sites in eastern Bosnia, drawn there by her family history. This is a book belonging and nationality and sheds light on the roots of violence and genocide.

A biography of the great 18th-century novelist, Tobias Smollett, by the author of "Cyril Connolly: A Life". It is filled with curious details from the worlds of publishing, medicine, politics and literary life.

Honest and deeply felt and thought, Family Wanted sheds a fascinating and surprising light on identity, family, love and belonging.

This is Blake Morrison's memoir of his father, Dr Arthur Morrison. It shows a son asking who his father really was. Was he the man seen through a seven-year-old's eyes, jumping queues, or the sexual charmer seen by a 17-year-old? Or was he the figure, so hard to recognize, on his death-bed?

Twenty-three years old, forensic archaeologist Courtney Brkic joined a UN-contracted team excavating mass grave sites in eastern Bosnia. She was drawn there by her family history-her father is Croatian - and she was fluent in the language.

When Laure Adler learned from a colleague that her nine-month-old son had been taken ill, she rushed to the hospital. So began months of battling - with uncommunicative doctors and nurses, and with her own feelings of guilt, terror and hopelessness. Here, she describes the nightmarish events.

This is a collective biography of three generations of the Komissarzhevsky family, whose artistic activities are generally regarded to have had an enormous impact on Russian and world theatre. It is based on archive material, unpublished memoirs and letters, and theatre reviews and interviews.