Christmas 2014: Best memoirs and biographies

Pratchett’s A Slip of the Keyboard sees him on top form discussing sci-fi, fantasy, assisted dying, NHS funding, orang-utans, and Alzheimer’s

Terry Pratchett (Getty Images)

Andrea Levy’s Six Stories and an Essay (Tinder Press, £12.99) slips into this category by virtue of its opening essay, though many of the stories are also drawn from the life of the Orange Prize-winner.

“My heritage is Britain’s story too,” she argues, and this collection deftly shows how modern Britain exists as a result of its immigrant history. It’s worth buying if only for the story in which readers first meet the character who became Hortense in Small Island.

This round-up includes eight memoirs and a biography – and while not all good memoirs need be about “growing up gay and …” it seems to help. Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son (Canongate, £16.99) is a haunting family history woven with empathy for his soldier grandfather but without a trace of self-pity about his abusive father. Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit by Reverend Richard Coles (W&N, £20) is full of wit and humour about finding God, and Jimmy Somerville. Proud, by Gareth Thomas, written with this paper’s columnist Michael Calvin (Ebury Press, £20), is packed with rugby detail, changing-room chat, team spirit (it is spiritual, for Thomas) and strength of character.

Thomas’s memoir will make you cry, and A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett, with (Doubleday, £20) may do too. This collection of Pratchett’s non-fiction sees him on top form discussing sci-fi, fantasy, assisted dying, NHS funding, orang-utans, and Alzheimer’s. However, the most heart-breaking memoir of the year is The Iceberg by Marion Coutts (Atlantic Books, £14.99) – the story of the diagnosis, illness and death from a brain tumour of her husband Tom Lubbock, who was The Independent’s art critic. The writing is raw with grief, and offers no pat lessons or easy answers.

On a more upbeat note, Love, Life and The Archers, by Wendy Cope (Two Roads, £16.99) contains Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose gleaned by an editor from the poet’s archive. Her gentle – and not so gentle – musings are thought-provoking and inspiring. For more fun still, A Curious Career by Lynn Barber (Bloomsbury, £16.99) shows how she turned nosiness into a job. Eleanor Marx by Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury, £25) has nosiness and admiration in spades, from a gifted biographer for the youngest daughter of Karl Marx. The motto of this “mother of socialist feminism” was “Go ahead!” Now there’s a maxim for 2015.