Best Biography & Memoir Books

Anthony Doerr and his wife win the Rome Prize and spend a year at the American Academy in Rome with their newborn twin sons. A memoir about learning to see in a city built from layers of history, trying to write with two newborns, and what the death of John Paul II looks like from inside Rome.

The second volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography, covering her late teens in post-war California — working as a cook, a dancer, a madam, and eventually a prostitute, while raising her young son alone.

Bourdain's follow-up to Kitchen Confidential — a decade later, more famous, more conflicted, and harder on the food world and on himself.

Naipaul's account of his first visit to India — the ancestral homeland he had carried as an idea throughout his Trinidadian childhood. What he found was a place of overwhelming complexity, poverty, and social denial that he could neither embrace as home nor dismiss as foreign. A devastating and controversial travel memoir.