PREVIEWER’S PERSPECTIVE Previewer’s perspective


Human stories lie at the heart of the coming season’s highlights


There may not be as many memoirs scheduled for 2023 compared with last year but the ones that have been lined up encompass a diversity of revelatory personal stories that are worthy of note


y


Caroline Sanderson Associate editor


H


appy spring! Memoirs were the mainstay of my highlights this time last year. Now for 2023 the numbers are fewer although I’m ecstatic to


report that in July we are to have a new “kaleidoscopic” memoir by Laura Cumming, the author of the most marvellous On Chapel Sands. Entitled Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life and Sudden Death, it blends the art history of the Dutch Golden Age with a portrait of the author’s father.


Another elementally entitled memoir of


note is the terrific Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Povert, Nature and Resilience by Natasha Carthew. It pulls no punches but also teems with hope and a love of the natural world. And then there’s Killjoy, a fabulously upliſting memoir by Jo Cheetham, an erstwhile shrinking violet PhD student, moved to join the “No More Page 3” campaign. Her story shows that we all have the power to stand up for what we believe in and bring about change. Come to think of it, revelatory personal


It is this sh diversity of


heer of


human storiesori that means I look forwardar to every newnew non-fiction season withith glee


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stories also lie at the heart of other titles in this season’s most compelling offerings, even when they aren’t memoirs. As we learn in Breathe: Tackling the Climate Emergency, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan came to realise that tough action on climate change was needed aſter developing asthma in his forties, the result of decades of breathing London’s polluted air. In Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, Tania Branigan draws on hundreds of hours of interviews and writen testimonies as she brings to the fore many rarely heard personal stories of the Cultural Revolution, and illuminates present-day China in the process. And in Mother Tongue, the palate-pleasuring début cookbook by food writer Gurdeep Loyal, we discover via 100 recipes, how he came to embrace the “delicious contradictions”


EXPLORES ‘DELICICIOUS CONTRADICTIONS’ IN HIS DÉBUT COOKBOO


CONTRADICTI NS’ IN HIS DÉBUT COOKBOOK


EXP


YAL US


GURD GURDEEP LOYA


of his plural British Indian identit through food. It is this sheer diversit of human stories that means I look forward to every new non-fiction season with glee and I’m eager to see what you make of this wealth, too.


Have your say


You can find Caroline on Twitter (@carosanderson), or make contact via email (caroline.sanderson@thebookseller.com)


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The Bookseller Buyer’s Guide Non-Fiction


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