Category Notable Nonfiction

Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand Memoir On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean…

Same Kind of Different As Me Ron Hall & Denver Moore Memoir Meet Denver, raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana until he escaped the “Man” in the 1960’s by hopping a train. Untrusting, uneducated, and violent, he spends 18 years…

First They Killed My Father Loung Ung Memoir One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol…

Half Broke Horses Jeannette Walls Memoir For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The…

Left To Tell Immaculee Ilibagiza Memoir Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was…

Tuesdays With Morrie Mitch Albom Memoir “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”   Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague. Someone older,…

The Glass Castle Jeanette Walls Memoir  The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his…

Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil John Berendt  True Crime Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting…

Heart Berries Terese Marie Mailhot Memoir Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins…

Educated Tara Westover Memoir Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure…