Archives de catégorie : Memoir

ODE TO JOY de Sarah Gavron & Sophie Herxheimer

A gorgeous and moving graphic novel about one family’s struggle to survive in a concentration camp, and the persistence of art-making through the bleakest times.

ODE TO JOY
by Sarah Gavron & Sophie Herxheimer
Pushkin Press, May 2026

In 1943, Ib Katznelson was deported with the rest of his Jewish family to Terezín, also called Theresienstadt. Terezín was repurposed by the Nazis as a ‘show camp,’ a ghetto for the Jewish cultural elite, designed to deceive the prying Red Cross and conceal the horrifying truth behind Hitler’s death camps.

Ib didn’t speak about his experience for many years, but when he did, it was an incredible tale: in spite of the dreadful daily life of the camp, a rich cultural life proliferated. The incarcerated artists sustained their humanity by secretly continuing to make imaginative work that opposed the propaganda they were forced to produce for the ‘show camp’ by day. And, while many of these prisoners didn’t survive, much of their art does.

ODE TO JOY is a collaboration between Ib’s daughter-in-law, Sarah Gavron, and artist Sophie Herxheimer. Through stunning illustrations and text filled with pathos and peppered with wit, it blends the story of Ib and his parents and fellow prisoners along with that of his modern-day family, learning about the camp and their links to it for the first time.

Sarah Gavron is a British film director. Winner of a BAFTA and BIFA, among other awards, her films include Brick Lane, Suffragette, Village at the End of the World and Rocks.

Sophie Herxheimer is an artist and poet. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, on a giant mural along the seafront at Margate and at her allotments! She has illustrated six collections of mythology and fairy tales. Her collection Velkom to Inklandt (2017) was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her book 60 Lovers to Make and Do (2019) was a TLS Book of the Year.

I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME de Hala Alyan

The rich and deeply personal memoir by the award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement.

I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME: A Memoir
by Hala Alyan
Avid Reader, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan decides to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities. Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, which makes for emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: how to honor ancestors and future generations alike in the midst of displacement? How to impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?

A stunningly lyrical and brutally honest quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME is a powerful story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

“A beautiful and intimate memoir of a life in the embrace of stories, Alyan weaves the fine threads of torn and fragmented lives into an irresistible, intergenerational tapestry. I was spellbound from the first page.”
—Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

Hala Alyan is the Palestinian-American author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back, both published by Ecco. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

FREE RIDE de Noraly Schoenmaker

The debut memoir by the massively popular female adventure travelers and the creator behind the 2.4-Million follower YouTube account Itchy Boots, taking readers behind the scenes of her first 20,000 mile motorcycle journey through the world’s most remarkable and remote places.

FREE RIDE:
Heartbreak, Courage, and the 20,000-Mile Motorcycle Journey that Changed my Life
by Noraly Schoenmaker
Atria, June 2025
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

In 2018, Noraly Schoenmaker was a thirty-something geologist living in the Netherlands when she learned that her live-in partner had been having a long-term affair. Suddenly without a place to stay, she quit her job, sold her house, and flew to India, planning to spend a year exploring before returning home. But an excursion on a rented motorcycle through the Himalayas changed her life forever—she had found a new obsession. Soon, she decided to purchase a motorcycle and a GoPro, and set off on more unconventional adventures.

When she first left Delhi, climbing mountain passes and crossing rickety wooden bridges into Myanmar, she had no idea that her journeys would come to surpass one-hundred-sixty-thousand kilometers (and counting) through sixty countries on five continents. All she knew was that on the back of her motorcycle, she felt instantly and profoundly free while riding.

FREE RIDE recounts Noraly’s first twenty thousand miles from India to Southeast Asia, then the Middle East, Central Asia, and finally back through Russia and Europe to the Netherlands. More Bruce Chatwin, Cheryl Strayed, and The Motorcycle Diaries than Elizabeth Gilbert, FREE RIDE is a travel memoir like no other because Noraly is a traveler like no other.

Noraly Schoenmaker is the creator of Itchy Boots, a YouTube channel with more than two million loyal subscribers. A motorcycling obsessive, her journeys have taken her the length of the American continent, from Argentina to Alaska; from the northernmost point of Europe to the southernmost point of Africa; and to some of the least traveled regions of the globe. Trained as a biologist and geologist, she is based in the Netherlands.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY de Susan Swan

Where do we belong if we don’t fit in? A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY:
A Memoir About Taking Up Space
by Susan Swan
foreword by Margaret Atwood
HarperCollins Canada, April 2025

Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.

In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.

Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.

“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex living entity that is the world. » —Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk

Susan Swan is a novelist and non-fiction writer and a professor emerita at York University. Her books include The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, What Casanova Told Me, The Western Light and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST de Melissa Arnot Reid

A searching, uplifting memoir by the celebrated, groundbreaking climber: a journey of overcoming where the mountain’s highest peaks can only be reached by traversing the dark crevasses of the soul.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST
by Melissa Arnot Reid
Sugar23, April 2025

At twenty-seven, when Melissa Arnot Reid accepted a tank of oxygen just short of the summit of Mt Everest, she felt ravaged by defeat. Driven by a relentless, lifelong quest to prove to herself, her family, and the world that she was enough, she had set herself an incredible goal to be become the first American woman to summit Everest without oxygen, in the manner of history’s greatest alpinists. The failure battered her spirit and left her struggling to keep her tenuous grip on hope.

In the candid and adventurous spirit of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST is a story of a life in which the most dangerous mountain faces became a refuge until suddenly Ithey, too, no longer seemed safe. From a childhood marked by conflict, betrayal, and predation, Reid propelled herself to the top of the mountain climbing world, summiting and guiding on the world’s most challenging peaks, and establishing herself as woman unafraid to throw elbows in a milieu dominated by men. And yet for every summit she attained, her valleys of inner turmoil–over her estrangement with the family she believed she’d destroyed as a child; over relationships that cycled through deception and infidelity grew deeper and more self-destructive. Eventually, she could not keep these worlds from colliding, especially after a series of tragedies at dangerous elevations took the lives of her mentors and friends. Forced at last to face herself, Reid made her most perilous climb vet -toward the uncertain promise of forgiveness and self-acceptance

A beautiful, aching memoir of a journey with life-and-death stakes on the mountain and off, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST bares the soul of one of the world greatest climbers, offering views on the awesome, rarified heights visible only at thin-air altitudes and the dark depths home to demons at once personal to Reid and yet familiar to anyone who has struggle to love themselves.

Melissa Arnot Reid is the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. It was her sixth summit of the highest ground on earth, cementing her place in mountaineering history. In doing so, she became a media star, in demand from many publications, television shows, and organizations looking for inspirational speakers.