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Brilliant New Memoirs

In 2015 Text has published some captivating memoirs.

For a wonderful mix of humour and pathos don’t miss Antonia Murphy’s hilarious Dirty Chick: Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer or New Yorker comma queen Mary Norris’s pencil-sharp wit in Between You & Me. Gerald Murnane combines his fascination with horse racing and a life immersed in literature in his candid and droll Something for the Pain. And playwright Hannie Rayson’s warmth and humour shine through in her memoir-in-parts, Hello, Beautiful!

Kids of the eighties will undoubtedly relate to Michael W. Clune’s obsession with computer games in GamelifeWhile those still overwhelmed by teenage confusion, will take heart from David Burton’s How to Be Happy—a funny, sad and serious memoir of growing up and working out how to have a true and meaningful life. 

Ramona Koval, Magda Szubanski and Miranda Richmond-Mouillot all travel back through time and around the globe in their journeys of self discovery. Ramona Koval digs deep to unearth her real father in Bloodhound. In Reckoning, Magda Szubanski reconciles memories of her father with his life as an assassin during the war. While Miranda Richmond-Mouillot escapes to her grandparents’ French farmhouse to unravel family secrets in A Fifty-Year Silence. The trauma of war and displacement are central to these deeply moving stories.

And in one of the most widely acclaimed books of the year, Ta-Nehisi Coates shines a light on racism in America in his brilliant Between the World & Me. Described in the New York Times as ‘a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today’, it grapples with the reality of inhabiting a black body in a country with a fraught racial history.