My life is split in two: half as a stateless Somali refugee and half a British citizen. But Kakuma is crucial to everything that came after it. It is the foundation of who I am

The earliest memories of my life are from the Kakuma refugee camp. I remember walking through a marketplace, staying close to my mother’s side. It is hot, the Kenyan sun’s rays so fierce I can’t stop squinting. At one point I turn to my left and see an incredibly thin man sitting on the floor. I stop and stare at him until my mum tells me off. I’m too scared to look back at him as we walk farther ahead, but I feel both drawn to him and terrified by his suffering.

I have another memory of asking my mum if we could get a drink, either a Fanta or a juice shake, during a warm evening. The heat doesn’t feel unpleasant. There are others in the living room of our shanty accommodation. My mum is in a deep conversation, but it goes over my head. She agrees, but I am not sure if she takes me herself or someone else does.

At eight months old she was left on a blanket in the Villa Borghese, Rome. More than 50 years later, prize-winning poet Maria Grazia Calandrone set out to discover the truth behind her abandonment

On 24 June 1965 a young woman sat her eight-month-old baby girl on a blanket in the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome, and walked quickly away. Within minutes, a passerby spotted the tiny child, alone, with no identifying documents, no note, not even a name. When the mother did not return to claim her that evening, the baby was handed over to the nuns at Rome’s adoption services. Three days later, the mother’s body was found floating in the Tiber.

Before she died, the woman had sent a letter to the press, containing a brief account of the terrible choice she had made. The letter, handwritten, gave the baby’s name and date of birth, and concluded: “Finding myself in a desperate situation, I have no other choice than to leave my daughter to the compassion of all, And I with my friend will pay with our lives for what we did, or, got right or, got wrong.” The letter was signed “Lucia Galante, now Greco”. Her “friend” was presumed to be the baby’s father, whose body surfaced in the river a week later.

A mother reveals her mysterious past in a tale of choice and the roads not taken

If you thought Ann Patchett snagging Tom Hanks to read the audiobook of her 2019 novel The Dutch House was a coup, for her ninth novel she has lured Meryl Streep into the recording booth. Tom Lake sees a family brought together during the 2020 pandemic on a farm in Michigan. As Lara’s three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, pitch in and help with the annual cherry harvest, they insistently quiz their mother about her mysterious youth.

Lara, they learn, once had ambitions to become an actor, and played Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a theatre on the edge of a lake. During an idyllic summer, she had an intense romance with her leading man, Peter Duke, with the pair spending all their time rehearsing or swimming in the lake: “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat,” Lara recalls. But she quit acting soon after, had a family and threw herself into small-town life; Peter, meanwhile, became an Oscar-winning film star who died prematurely.

The drummer, DJ and Oscar-winning director is a key custodian of Black culture, with 200,000 records to prove it. So why does he think he’s getting too old for rap music?

With a sigh, Ahmir Thompson – better known as Questlove – turns his laptop around, so I can see the inside of his apartment, rather than the beautiful view of the New York skyline through the window behind him. It is a chaos of overflowing boxes and furniture covered with papers. “An ex-publicist of mine decided that they didn’t need their 8x10 photographs and old articles from the NME any more, so they gifted them to me,” he shrugs.

Thompson seems equivocal about this state of affairs. On the one hand, he can barely contain his delight: “Look at this!” he enthuses, showing me a newly acquired invite to the 1984 premiere of Prince’s Purple Rain movie. But, on the other: well, look at the place. “People are saying: ‘I got kids, but they won’t care about this stuff like you will. If this needs to go in a museum or something, I can trust you with history.’ The universe has put me in the position of keeper of the record. So, you know, be careful what you wish for.”

The singer’s memoir recounts a life of ups and downs, with record-breaking success accompanied by critical snobbery and racial bias

Darius Rucker will be the first to admit his memory can be hazy – he says on page one of his memoir that his years as the lead singer of the American rock band Hootie & Blowfish were a blur of fame, drugs and his “close personal friend Jim Beam” – but he’s still armed with numbers. There’s the wild success of the band’s debut album Cracked Rear View, which became the most popular record of 1994 and remains the 11th bestselling album of all time in the US. There’s the backlash to the band’s mid-90s ubiquity and their precipitous downslide in fame, playing to 8,000 people in a 14,000-seater just two years after rocking stadiums. Then there are the odds Rucker faced as a middle-aged Black man trying a second career in country music, when he became the first Black artist to score a #1 hit in 25 years.

Rucker, now in the second decade of his country career and a bona fide Nashville star, deploys these figures and more casually in Life’s Too Short, his new memoir, and in amiable conversation peppered with a barreling laugh. Among them: the number of times he sang Nanci Griffith’s I Wish It Would Rain on his mother’s deathbed (at least 100); the amount his largely absent father asked for when he got back in touch at the height of the band’s popularity ($50k); the number of radio stations he personally visited in 2008 to get his first country single any airplay (110); the number of ecstasy pills bought off a dealer on a whim during a Hootie stadium tour (2,000, for $30,000 in cash – “and we did ‘em all”, he laughs over Zoom from his home in Nashville). “I thought about about taming it down, but then I always said if I wrote the book I was going to tell the truth,” he says of that last stat, “and the truth is when we were going, I don’t think anybody went harder than us.”

There’s great joy as well as pain in this luminous story of Indigenous life and the battle against exploitation

When Nemonte Nenquimo was little, she and her sisters and brothers would hear planes flying over their village in the Amazon and race one another to the nearby landing strip to see who was arriving. Only white people – known as cowori – travelled by plane, and they would bring gifts of candy, clothes, earrings and dolls with blond hair. Over the years, they brought other things too: God, polio, alcohol and oil executives waving contracts allowing them to plunder indigenous land for its oil reserves. One village elder reported signing papers with his thumbprint after being given bread and Coca-Cola and assured that the oil companies would build schools and medical clinics.

In her richly detailed memoir, written with and translated by her American partner Mitch Anderson, Nenquimo documents her path from early childhood in a Waorani village deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest to becoming an environmental activist, named in 2020 as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. The Waorani tribes, which live traditionally as nomadic hunter-gatherers, once claimed the largest territories of all Indigenous Amazonians in Ecuador – land that was among the most biodiverse on Earth. But that was before it was reduced by settlement, cattle grazing, oil extraction, gold mining and logging, and its rivers poisoned with oil. In 2019, Nenquimo helped win a historical lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government protecting more than[LJ add] half a million hectares of Waorani ancestral territory from being auctioned to oil companies.

In this intimate study of a period of upheaval, a Chinese-born writer uncovers the stories of four young citizens whose lives were transformed by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – and the obstacles they strove to overcome

When Yuan Yang was four years old, she tells us, her parents brought her from China to the UK as they pursued new educational opportunities. Although Private Revolutions, her vivid and detailed memoir, is not primarily the story of her own family, they, too, exemplify the theme of the book: a close look at how China’s citizens responded to the potentially transformative opportunities that four decades of rapid growth afforded.

Under Mao, Yang’s father’s family laboured as peasants in western China; as a child, her father paid his school fees with sweet potatoes, and when the sweet potato season was over he ate watermelon. From this unpromising beginning, he made it to university and later to a doctorate in computer science in the UK. Yang writes of his departure from China: “It was a simple decision for him: all the students who could leave were doing so. Chinese academia lagged behind the west, especially in the sciences, and the Beijing government’s massacre of students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had left many questioning the future of China’s universities.”

This revealing memoir about the author’s 20 years in the City of Light identifies the complex codes of behaviour that newcomers are obliged to master

In 1990 the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo published a short essay called Paris, Capital of the 21st Century. By the end of the 20th century, he had decided that Paris was exhausted. The city of avant gardes, ideas, revolutions and class struggle, which had defined so much of European and world history, was now no more than a museum. As almost a lifelong Parisian and a lover of the place, Goytisolo desperately wanted Paris in the 21st century to retake its place as a great metropolis. But this could only happen, he argued, if Paris reinvented itself by “de-Europeanising” itself. By this, he meant it had to look towards the world beyond Europe, welcoming its sometimes dissident non-French, non-European voices to make itself a truly global city. Only in this way could Paris be brought back to life.

More than 30 years on from that essay, Simon Kuper has written a book about what it has actually been like to live in Paris during the past two decades. I have lived in the city for exactly the same period, in the working-class district of Pernety, and seen all the changes that Kuper has. The view from Pernety and the view from his hipster right bank world have not always been the same. He often underestimates, for example, the severity of racial and class tensions in Paris. To his credit, however, he is always aware of his limitations as a foreigner and as an apprentice Parisian.

In this evocative, amusing memoir, the author and podcaster recounts her 1990s fling with a guitarist – and considers whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict could have been foreseen

In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, author and podcaster Viv Groskop found herself dreaming of a train trip she made as an undergraduate in 1994. The three-day journey took her from St Petersburg, where she’d spent frozen months grappling with Russian grammar as part of her study year abroad, to the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, where a guitarist she’d fallen for had promised to take her on tour with his band, “Ukraine’s answer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers”. When the train finally crossed the border, it was fields of sunflowers that greeted her, “a glorious blur of yellow against the blue of the sky, like a firestorm”.

The trip becomes the fulcrum of this redolent, wryly honest memoir, in which she comes of age and chases love while striving for immersion in a region that was recalibrating its own identity, newly liberated by the collapse of the USSR to pursue its passion for Levi’s and all things western. As Groskop recalls: “People were anxious and sad and humiliated all at once, but also overexcited about Uncle Ben’s and Bounty.”

The Indigenous campaigner won a historic legal victory to protect Waorani land in the Amazon rainforest. Now she has written a groundbreaking memoir

When Nemonte Nenquimo was a young girl, experience began to reinforce what she had come to know intuitively: that her life, and those of the Waorani people of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, were on a collision course with forces it would take all their strength and determination to resist. “Deep down, I understood there were two worlds,” she remembers in We Will Not Be Saved, the book she has written with her husband and partner in activism Mitch Anderson. “One where there was our smoky, firelit oko, where my mouth turned manioc into honey, the parrots echoed ‘Mengatowe’, and my family called me Nemonte – my true name, meaning ‘many stars’. And another world, where the white people watched us from the sky, the devil’s heart was black, there was something named an ‘oil company’, and the evangelicals called me Inés.”

In 2015, Nenquimo, now 39, co-founded the Ceibo Alliance, a non-profit organisation in which she united with members of the A’i Cofán, Siekopai and Siona peoples of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia to fight for rights over their territories. Since then, she has won numerous awards for her activism, including the prestigious Goldman environmental prize; she was featured in Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2020, and has been named a United Nations Champion of the Earth.

From dinner with Queen to watching Ozzy Osbourne run wild, a child-eye’s view of life at a 70s recording studio

Would you like to know exactly what the members of Queen were eating as they recorded the endless “Galileos” of Bohemian Rhapsody? What David Bowie had for dinner, or which item was most prized when hardworking rockers had a food fight in the studio? The answers might all be found in Tiffany Murray’s highly entertaining memoir of a rock’n’roll childhood; or might not, depending what you think of the fallibility of memory.

Murray’s formative years were spent spying on 1970s rock nobility because her mother, Joan, was the prized cordon-bleu chef at two recording studios, serving gourmet dinners to sometimes unappreciative musos. Joan’s elegant cream-enhanced seafood dishes were regularly rejected by those whose facial hair alone precluded them from making judgments of taste. The bands with the most terrifying reputations were frequently the most polite, though Joan did have to issue certain rules: “No barging into the kitchen and chatting me up … And don’t grab the cook’s tits from behind.” Ozzy Osbourne was suitably chastened, having been spotted through the window by young Tiffany cavorting around the nearby churchyard at midnight, howling and unclothed. Her panicked tears were swiftly assuaged by a large consignment of fluffy toys from the soft-hearted hellraiser.

In this extract from her memoir, A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen, Sally Abé recalls the job she had to leave
• Read the interview with Sally Abé

‘You’ll never amount to anything, young lady.” These are words that no one, no matter what industry they are in, ever wants to hear. If you’re a chef, it’s likely someone will have screamed them in your face at least once. For me, it happened at a restaurant I don’t include on my CV. I have never admitted that I worked for this chef in interviews and rarely speak about my experience, even to friends and family. Because I don’t want to trash someone’s reputation for the sake of my own, I’m not going to use the real name of the restaurant or of anyone who worked there. However, people need to understand that places like this exist, and that the experience was formative, if awful. So, let’s call the restaurant “Jeff’s” after the chef patron, then let me tell you about the worst time of my career.

I wanted to work at the Ledbury, a restaurant in Notting Hill that everyone was talking about but after trying to arrange a trial a couple of times and not being able to make the dates work, I looked elsewhere as my notice period at Claridge’s was coming to an end and I needed to have money coming in. I settled on Jeff’s.

A thoughtful meditation on love and loneliness via an AI-based sex doll; an outstanding debut memoir of infidelity’s aftermath; and a passionate and insightful botanical study

Sarah Crossan
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp320

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