Fiona Sturges reviews the best memoirs and biographies of 2023, including Blake Morrison’s Two Sisters (Borough), John Niven’s O Brother (Canongate), Natasha Walter’s Before the Light Fades (Virago), Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls (4th Estate), Stay True (Picador), by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (Penguin), Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton), M John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here (Serpent’s Tail), Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap (Chatto & Windus), Anna Funder’s Wifedom (Penguin), Tania Branigan’s Red Memory (Faber), Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie & Nelson (William Collins), Roger Lewis’s Erotic Vagrancy (Riverrun), and Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon (4th Estate).
About the latter, Sturges writes: “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.”
For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/07/the-best-memoirs-and-biographies-of-2023
Fiona Sturges reviews the best memoirs and biographies of 2023, including Blake Morrison’s Two Sisters (Borough), John Niven’s O Brother (Canongate), Natasha Walter’s Before the Light Fades (Virago), Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls (4th Estate), Stay True (Picador), by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (Penguin), Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton), M John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here (Serpent’s Tail), Laura
