Childhood Memoir

When Misty was six years old, her family started to live and dress like the Amish. Misty and her sister were kept as slaves on a mountain ranch where they were subjected to almost complete isolation, sexual abuse, and extreme physical violence. When Misty reached her teens, her parents feared she and her sister would escape and took them to an Amish community where they were adopted and became baptized members. Misty was devastated to once again find herself in a world of fear, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse. 

Kristin Battista-Frazee was only four years old in 1974 when her father, Anthony Battista, was indicted by the federal government for distributing the now famous porn film Deep Throat. As her father unexpectedly became an early pioneer in the emerging porn industry and transformed himself from Philadelphia stockbroker to porn broker, this indictment threatened his family's stability.

Read by the author, Frank Cottrell-Boyce. A British Childhood is at once a searing account of our failure to look after the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, and a call to arms to all of us to protect the innocence of childhood. During his time as Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce...

When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy and played by the tracks with the Railway Children.

A Holocaust survivor from Belgium recounts memories of her childhood and her escape from the Nazis in hiding and on the run, reflecting on the nature of memory and on the enduring effects of the Holocaust and trauma.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood - of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and of his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods. His joy in her presence is recovered with great lyrical tact.

“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear.” –Oprah.com The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation. The Liars’ Club took the...

It was an ordinary day in 2016. In Gatwick Airport, Jonathan and his wife, Anna, were having breakfast with their two little children while waiting for their flight to be called. And then it happened, a familiar sensation that Jonathan hadn't had for decades: an out-of-body experience that transported him to another place, the safe place he used to escape to in his mind when he was a boy.

This audiobook is beautifully read by the author, Jill Halfpenny, and includes an exclusive powerful and heartwarming conversation between Jill and her niece, Chelsea. I made myself a promise very early on that I was going to walk straight through the centre of my grief. No shortcuts and...

A memoir of trauma and transformation by a man who was haunted by childhood abuse but who fought his way back—a journey from vengeance and prison to freedom and redemption. For a boy growing up in the 1970s, rural northern New Jersey was a year-round playground, filled with secret fishing...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness.' In China she was the daughter of professors. In Brooklyn her family is illegal. Qian is just seven when she moves to America, the 'Beautiful Country', where she and her parents...

They degraded her to the point where she'd become this sex thing - this thing that wasn't human, but an object - to the point where she believed that's what she was. The world of abuse and grooming gangs couldn’t have seemed further away from Kate’s start in life but, as so many young women...

In the Blood is Andrew Motion's beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England—an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life. It also tells the story of how these worlds are shattered, when his mother suffers a terrible riding accident. The tragedy shadows the book, feeding its mood of elegy as well as its celebratory vigilance. Written from a teenage child's point of view, without the benefit of adult hindsight, Motion captures the pathos and puzzlement of childhood with great clarity of expression and freshness of memory. 

Published in 1913, My Childhood is the first in an autobiographical trilogy by the Russian writer and five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Painfully moving in places, the book tells of the experiences of a young boy who goes to live with his grandparents following the death of his father. Gorky’s depiction of 19th-century Russia through the eyes of his younger self is remarkable. As he recalls memories of his youth, contrasting themes and emotions are revealed, from barbaric joy to dark gloom, genuine cruelty and saint-like forbearance.

Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war, six million had been killed. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a 15-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade from a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers below – he felt he had come of age. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment. Wounded the day after his 16th birthday, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad.

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples.

“One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” –The New Yorker “A Childhood has been widely recognized as a masterpiece, a Dickensian document of survival and blight in Depression-era Georgia.” –Harper’s The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the...

Bloomsbury presents My Sand Life, My Pebble Life written and read by Ian McMillan. My sand life, my pebble life. My life measured out in tides, coming in and going out. My life measured out in games of trying to spot the sea first. My life measured out in the delicious and indulgent sadness that...

By the age of nine, I will have lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities. I’ll know how a document is forged, how to withstand an interrogation, and most important, how to disappear . . . To the young Cheryl Diamond, life felt like one big...

‘The Grip of Childhood Sexual Abuse’ tells the story of our healing journey to overcome the impacts of our abuse. Tragically victims unknowingly accrue many syndromes and disorders as a direct result of enduring sexual abuse over a long period of time. We believe we can help victims by sharing what we've learned. Through recognizing our own strengths, we can encourage others to shed the self-limiting beliefs trauma survivors often unconsciously own.