Biographies & Memoirs

Diana Athill met Hakim Jamal when she edited his book, From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me, published by Andre Deutsch. Against all odds, they became friends, sometimes lovers.

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.

Affecting memoir of a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, to rank alongside The Diary of Anne Frank