Ever since Frank McCourt and Dave Pelzer first strummed the heartstrings with their tales of family hardship and abuse, the memoir has been big business. And it's not just about misery, as a new batch make clear. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, the potter Edmund de Waal follows a "hidden inheritance" of small japanese ornaments from the glittering salons of turn-of-the-century Paris to a maid's mattress in Nazi Germany. He describes his journey and shows off some of the netsuke in his London studio.
The novelist Maggie Gee explains why she turned away from fiction for her latest book, the memoir My Animal Life. And the Jewish writer Adina Hoffman, in London to receive a prize for her biography of a little-known Palestinan poet, explains why Taha Muhammad Ali's story is so important, and how she had to put herself in the frame in order to lead her readers into the contested territory of the Middle East.
Reading list
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus)
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness by Adina Hoffman (Yale)
My Animal Life by Maggie Gee (Telegram Books)
