The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere: a Memoir

The Fields of Home

Ralph Moody · 335 pages

Cider With Rosie

Laurie Lee · 259 pages

Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity and cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past. 'It sings in the memory' Sunday Times Laurie Lee's matchless

I Can Jump Puddles

Alan Marshall · 256 pages

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · 353 pages

Choose the good -- The midwife -- Cream shoes -- Apache women -- Honest dirt -- Shield and buckler -- The Lord will provide -- Tiny harlots -- Perfect in his generations -- Shield of feathers -- Instinct -- Fish eyes -- Silence in the churches -- My feet no longer touch Earth -- No more a child -- Disloyal man, disobedient heaven -- To keep it holy -- Blood and feathers -- In the beginning -- Reci

A Girl from Yamhill

Beverly Cleary · 279 pages

Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.

Kampung Boy

LAT (Mohammad Nor Khalid) · 141 pages

Cross Creek

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings · 368 pages

Warm, leisurely account of author's neighbors, and her everyday affairs while living for thirteen years in a remote section of the Florida hammock at Cross Creek.

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

Elspeth Huxley

Just Kids

Patti Smith · 336 pages

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel

Nicolaia Rips · 272 pages

"'Hysterically droll, touching, elegant, and wise--a coming-of-age story from someone who possibly came of age before her parents' (Patricia Marx, New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old's darkly funny, big-hearted memoir about growing up in New York City's legendary Chelsea Hotel. New York's Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens

Somebody's Daughter

Ashley C. Ford · 264 pages

In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country

Kim Barnes · 264 pages

Poet Kim Barnes grew up in Northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of t

I Am Hutterite: The Fascinating True Story of a Young Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Heritage

Mary-Ann Kirkby · 241 pages

Bad Boy: A Memoir

Walter Dean Myers · 224 pages

In his own words...As a boy, Walter Dean Myers was quick-tempered and physically strong, always ready for a fight. He also read voraciously-he would check out books from the library and carry them home, hidden in brown paper bags in order to avoid other boys' teasing. He aspired to be a writer. But growing up in a poor family in Harlem, his hope for a successful future diminished as he came to rea

The Orchard: A Memoir

Theresa Weir · 227 pages

The story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the pride of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards are said to be cursed. Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband's family as an outsider, she

Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

Elva Trevino Hart · 236 pages

Autobiography. Latino/a Studies. BAREFOOT HEART is a vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. Elva Trevino Hart was born in south Texas to Mexican immigrants and spent her childhood moving back and forth between Texas and Minnesota, eventually leaving that world to earn a master's degree in computer science/engineering. This is a

To the Is-land: An Autobiography

Janet Frame · 253 pages

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth." Thus opens this first volume of autobiography by Janet Frame, one of the most highly regarded writers of today. Recounting her childhood in N

Blankets

Craig Thompson · 592 pages

Loosely based on the author's life, chronicling his journey from childhood to adulthood, exploring the people, experiences, and beliefs that he encountered along the way.

One-Woman Farm: The Seasons of Life Shared with Sheepdogs, Goats, Woodstoves, and a Feisty Fiddle

Jenna Woginrich · 207 pages

Jenna Woginrich's inspiring journey from city cubicle to rural homestead has captivated readers of her blog and previous books. Now, in One-Woman Farm, Woginrich shares the joys, sorrows, trials, epiphanies, and blessings she discovers during a year spent farming on her own land, finding deep fulfillment in the practical tasks and timeless rituals of the agricultural life.

Hippie Boy: A Girl's Story

Ingrid Ricks · 244 pages

For years Ricks yearned to escape the poverty and the suffocating brand of Mormon religion that oppressed her at home. Her chance came when she was thirteen and took a trip with her divorced dad, traveling throughout the Midwest, selling tools and hanging around with the men on his shady revolving sales crew. It felt like freedom from her controlling mother and cruel, authoritarian stepfather. But

Sky of Stone

Homer Hickam · 432 pages

Homer Hickam won the praise of critics and the devotion of readers with his first two memoirs set in the hardscrabble mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia. The New York Times crowned his first book, the #1 national bestseller October Sky, "an eloquent evocation ... a thoroughly charming memoir." And People called The Coalwood Way, Hickam's follow-up to October Sky, "a heartwarmer ... truly beaut

Dirty Chick: Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer

Antonia Murphy · 335 pages

"An uproarious memoir chronicling the misadventures of a San Franciscan woman who leaves city life to become an artisan farmer in New Zealand"-- "Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliche, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner. But then she became a mother. And when

All Things Wise and Wonderful & The Lord God Made Them All

James Herriot