Memoir
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1
A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family's Quest for Justice
In this powerful memoir and work of investigative journalism, Paul Caruana Galizia recounts the assassination of his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist known for exposing corruption and misconduct among the country’s powerful figures. On 16 October 2017, Daphne was killed by a car bomb near her home, following years of intimidation linked to her work.
Her death transformed her family’s lives. Paul and his brothers, together with their father, embarked on a determined search for the truth, seeking to uncover who was responsible for the murder and who had benefited from silencing their mother. Their pursuit of justice reveals the complex relationships between political power, financial interests, and corruption in Malta.
Combining personal grief with investigative reporting, the book is both a tribute to a courageous journalist and an examination of the challenges facing democracy and press freedom. It explores the cost of speaking truth to power and the determination required to hold powerful institutions accountable.
Malta
2023
2
How To Say Babylon
How to Say Babylon is a memoir by Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair about growing up in a strict Rastafari household, where religious beliefs shaped nearly every aspect of family life. Her father, a devoted Rastafari, raises his children according to rigid interpretations of the faith, imposing strict rules on their behaviour, education, appearance, and relationships with the outside world. For Sinclair, these restrictions become particularly difficult as she grows older and begins to question the expectations placed on women.
Books and poetry gradually offer her a way to explore ideas beyond the boundaries of her upbringing. Through education and writing, she discovers the language to challenge the beliefs that have defined her childhood and to develop an independent sense of self. Yet her journey toward freedom is complicated by love for her family and the cultural traditions she does not wish simply to reject.
Written in lyrical prose, the memoir explores religion, patriarchy, colonial history, and the transformative power of literature. It is a deeply personal account of finding one’s voice while negotiating the complex relationship between family, cultural inheritance, and individual freedom.
Jamaica
2023
3
I Love Russia
I Love Russia brings together investigative reporting and personal essays to portray a country through the lives of people often excluded from its official narrative. Journalist Elena Kostyuchenko writes about sex workers, LGBTQ+ people, residents of neglected institutions, and communities affected by violence and political repression. Her reporting also follows the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, examining the human realities behind state propaganda and military aggression. Rather than presenting Russia as a single, uniform society, Kostyuchenko reveals its contradictions through the experiences of individuals whose stories challenge dominant political narratives. The book explores the complicated relationship between love for one’s country and the responsibility to criticise its government, presenting journalism as an act of witnessing, resistance, and moral commitment.
Russia
2023
4
What Have You Left Behind?
What Have You Left Behind? documents the experiences of ordinary Yemenis whose lives have been devastated by the country’s civil war. Writer and journalist Bushra al-Maqtari travelled across Yemen to collect testimonies from civilians affected by violence, displacement, and the destruction of their communities. Rather than focusing on political leaders or military strategy, the book gives space to individuals who have lost family members, homes, livelihoods, and any sense of security. Their accounts reveal the intimate consequences of a conflict often reduced to statistics and geopolitical analysis. By bringing together voices from different parts of the war’s divided landscape, al-Maqtari exposes the human suffering behind competing political narratives. The book explores grief, survival, and the struggle to preserve dignity amid devastation, serving as a powerful record of civilian experiences and a challenge to the international indifference that allows such suffering to continue.
Yemen
2023
5
Free
Free is Lea Ypi’s memoir of growing up in Albania during the final years of communist rule and the turbulent transition that followed. As a child, Ypi believes that her country represents a just and orderly society, interpreting its rules through the limited understanding of childhood. When the communist regime collapses, she begins to discover that the official stories she learned at school concealed a far more complicated reality. Her family history also challenges her assumptions about freedom, revealing how political ideologies and historical circumstances shaped the lives of previous generations. Moving between childhood memories and adult reflection, Ypi examines the meaning of liberty, the relationship between individual choices and political systems, and the difficulty of understanding the past without simplifying it. The memoir offers a nuanced exploration of how people reconstruct their identities when the foundations of their beliefs suddenly disappear.
Albania
2023
6
You Can’t Please All
In You Can’t Please All, Tariq Ali reflects on more than four decades of political activism, intellectual debate, and cultural life, continuing the story begun in his earlier memoir, Street Fighting Years. Moving between continents and pivotal historical moments, Ali recounts witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union, meeting political figures such as Hugo Chávez, and campaigning against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a prominent critic of Western foreign policy.
Combining personal recollections, political commentary, anecdotes, and reflections on literature, theatre, and film, the memoir also offers intimate portraits of influential writers, activists, and friends, including Edward Said and Benazir Bhutto. Ali explores the relationship between personal convictions and public life, tracing the changing fortunes of the political left from the aftermath of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s to the conflicts and ideological struggles of the twenty-first century. The book also looks back at his family’s experiences in the early years of Pakistan, connecting his personal history with the broader political forces that shaped his life.
Pakistan
United Kingdom
2024
7
Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir
When Mako Yoshikawa learns that her estranged father has died on the eve of her wedding, she is overwhelmed by grief, guilt, and unanswered questions. Shoichi Yoshikawa was a brilliant Japanese physicist and nuclear fusion researcher whose life was marked by extraordinary intellectual ambition, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and episodes of violence toward his family. Although Mako loved him, she eventually cut him out of her life, unable to reconcile his brilliance and generosity with the pain he caused. After his death, she begins investigating his past, exploring his childhood in prewar Japan, his experiences as an immigrant in America, and the secrets that shaped his identity. Through personal memories, family stories, and historical research, she confronts the complicated relationship between mental illness and responsibility, love and abuse, and the desire to understand someone who has caused profound harm. Intimate and deeply reflective, Secrets of the Sun is a memoir about family trauma, cultural displacement, and the difficult search for understanding when reconciliation is no longer possible.
Japan
2024
8
Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl
Raised by ambitious Korean immigrant parents in Texas, Hyeseung Song grows up believing that achievement is the price of acceptance. She earns her place at an Ivy League university, striving to embody the model minority ideal while struggling with depression, family expectations, and a fractured sense of belonging. But when academic success and parental approval can no longer sustain her, she faces a painful reckoning with the life she has been taught to pursue. Through mental illness, a psychiatric hospitalization, and her eventual embrace of painting, Song begins to reclaim her identity beyond the expectations imposed on her. Docile is an unflinching memoir about the cost of perfection, the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, and the courage to build a life that feels authentically one’s own.
United States
2024
9
Journey to the Edge of Life
An unnamed Turkish writer embarks on a restless journey across Europe, following the lives and deaths of three writers who have profoundly shaped her imagination: Cesare Pavese, Franz Kafka, and Italo Svevo. Travelling through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and other cities, she seeks out the places where they lived, wrote, and died, hoping to understand the connection between literature, suffering, and the desire to live.
But this is no ordinary literary pilgrimage. Moving between memories, encounters with lovers, and reflections on her own troubled past, the narrator questions marriage, sexuality, political repression, and the expectations society imposes on women. Her travels become an attempt to escape the confines of her former life and discover a freedom that has always seemed just beyond reach.
Blurring the boundaries between autobiography, travel writing, and fiction, Journey to the Edge of Life is an intense meditation on loneliness, mortality, and the search for meaning. Tezer Özlü transforms the European landscape into a map of her inner world, revealing how the lives of writers we admire can become inseparable from our own search for identity and freedom.
Türkiye
Germany
2025
10
Backlight
Set in 1960s Finland, Backlight follows a teenage girl named Pirkko as she navigates the frustrations of adolescence, the tensions of family life, and the gradual discovery of her own identity. She struggles with her relationship with God, her communist father, and the physical changes of growing up. At home, her overworked mother attempts to maintain peace, while her grandfather occupies the room Pirkko had long been promised. Books become an escape, and her rebellious spirit leads her into frequent trouble. When a Finnish teacher recognizes her potential as a writer, Pirkko begins to imagine a future shaped by words and imagination.
The story shifts to the summer of 1968, when Pirkko travels to Switzerland to work at an orphanage. Away from Finland, she experiences homesickness, cultural isolation, and the difficulty of understanding her own sexuality. Against the backdrop of a Europe undergoing political and social transformation, she begins to make sense of the person she is becoming. The second volume in Saisio’s autobiographical Helsinki trilogy, this intimate, witty novel explores family, sexuality, artistic ambition, and the complicated process of growing into oneself.
Finland
2025
11
Days in the Caucasus
Days in the Caucasus is Banine’s memoir of growing up in a wealthy Azerbaijani family in Baku during the turbulent early twentieth century. Born into a family whose fortune came from the oil industry, she experiences a childhood shaped by material privilege, complicated relatives, and contrasting cultural influences. Her German governess introduces her to one world, while her strict Muslim grandmother represents another, creating a household where tradition and modernity coexist uneasily. The Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic eventually transform her family’s circumstances, forcing Banine to confront loss, uncertainty, and the limitations imposed on women. Recalling her first love and an unwanted marriage, she recounts her eventual escape from her homeland. The memoir combines wit and personal reflection with a portrait of a vanished society, exploring independence, cultural identity, and the experience of exile.
Azerbaijan
2025
12
Opening Night
After the isolation of the pandemic, Irish writer and artist Sara Baume discovers a painting at a small exhibition in West Cork that captivates her. Its creator, Mollie Douthit, is an American artist living alone in a remote coastal cabin. The two women form an unexpected friendship, finding common ground in their artistic practices, love of nature, solitary habits, and complicated relationships with other people. They establish a monthly ritual of sharing soup and swimming in the Atlantic, while Mollie prepares a new exhibition inspired by memories of her childhood.
As their friendship deepens, Baume begins writing about Mollie’s paintings, exploring whether words can capture the elusive, dreamlike quality of visual art. But life soon disrupts their quiet routines, bringing loss, pain, and uncertainty. Blending memoir, art criticism, and intimate reflection, Opening Night examines how friendship shapes our understanding of ourselves, our memories, and the world around us. It is a thoughtful meditation on creativity, solitude, and the surprising connections that make life meaningful.
Ireland
2026