What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAngela's Ashes
Frank McCourt · 384 pages
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish im
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls · 296 pages
A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J.D. Vance · 272 pages
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over fo
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc · 424 pages
The result of over ten years of immersion reporting, "Random Family" charts a tumultuous decade in which girls become mothers, mothers become grandmothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation.
My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King
Reymundo Sanchez · 299 pages
Autobiographical account of the early life of a member of the Latin Kings of Chicago.
All Over But the Shoutin'
Rick Bragg · 329 pages
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the hab
Bound for Glory
Woody Guthrie · 320 pages
First published in 1943, this autobiography is also a superb portrait of America's Depression years, by a man who saw it all.
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
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages
A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.
Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography
Mark Mathabane · 354 pages
A Black writer describes his childhood in South Africa under apartheid and recounts how Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith helped him leave for America on a tennis scholarship.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages
"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi
Change Me into Zeus's Daughter: A Memoir
Barbara Robinette Moss · 319 pages
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.
Jade Legacy
Fonda Lee · 713 pages
For Bread Alone
Mohamed Choukri · 152 pages
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in
The Sound of Gravel
Ruth Wariner · 352 pages
The true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist family. Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world
Working Class Boy
Jimmy Barnes · 384 pages
Working Class Boy is a powerful reflection on a traumatic and violent childhood, which fuelled the excess and recklessness that would define, but almost destroy, the rock'n'roll legend. This is the story of how James Swan became Jimmy Barnes. It is a memoir burning with the frustration and frenetic energy of teenage sex, drugs, violence and ambition for more than what you have. Raw, gritty, compas
A Walk on the Wild Side
Nelson Algren · 346 pages
With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern
Mr. Nice
Howard Marks · 466 pages
THE BOOK: During the mid 1980's Howard Marks had forty three aliases, eighty nine phone lines and owned twenty five companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealingMarks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosopy course at Oxford and soon he was moving much
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
Helen Forrester · 223 pages
Helen Forrester had a childhood most of us would like to forget. Bought up for the first twelve years of her life in the wealthy middle class of southern England, she was suddenly ejected from her pampered hot-house existence into the bleak realities of Liverpool during the Depression years. In the first two volumes of her autobiography – 'Twopence to Cross the Mersey' and 'Liverpool Miss', Helen
The Elephant Tree
R.D. Ronald · 258 pages
The Elephant Tree is the 2010 debut novel by British crime and transgressive fiction author R.D. Ronald. Set in the fictional city of Garden Heights, the novel follows Scott, a 24-year-old working for his brother while running a small-scale drug dealing operation; Angela, 23, whose father, a career criminal, supplies Scott with cannabis; and Mark Fallon, a detective investigating a spate of attack