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Biography and Memoir February 2026 |
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The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII
by Mark Braude
In 1925, the Indianapolis-born Janet Flanner took an assignment to write a regular 'Letter from Paris' for a lighthearted humor magazine called The New Yorker. She'd come to Paris to with dreams of writing about Beauty with a Capital B. Her employer, self-consciously apolitical, sought only breezy reports on French art and culture. But as she woke to the frightening signs of rising extremism, economic turmoil, and widespread discontent in Europe, Flanner ignored her editor's directives, reinventing herself, her assignment, and The New Yorker in the process.
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Seriously Silly: The Life of Terry Jones (the Authorised Biography)
by Robert Ross
From his Welsh upbringing in Colwyn Bay, to meeting his lifelong friend Michael Palin at Oxford through revue sketches, anarchic children's shows and the creative genius of Monty Python, this is the story of a comedy legend. Throughout this journey, Terry's extraordinary determination and resilience shine through, not least in his final years as he battled with dementia.
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Two Women Living Together: The Bestselling Korean Memoir
by Kim Hana
When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence--savoring solitude, quiet mornings, and the unmitigated freedom of living alone. But in their forties, something shifted, and they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Refusing to settle for the outdated choice between marriage or isolation, Hana and Sunwoo made a radical decision: to buy a home and live together--not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family. Now a bustling household of two women and four cats, Hana and Sunwoo still value solitude, but can do so while sharing a life and its meaning with someone else. Together they navigate the challenges and comforts of cohabiting in midlife, the growing pains of interdependence and the unexpected rewards of compromise when you've grown set in your ways.
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Winter: The Story of a Season
by Val McDermid
Val McDermid has always had a soft spot for winter: the bitter clarity of a crisp cold day, the crunch of frost on fallen leaves, and the chance to be enveloped in big jumpers and thick socks. McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. Recalling in parallel memories from her own childhood - of skating over frozen lakes and carving a “neep” (rutabaga) for Halloween to being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square - McDermid offers a wise and enchanting meditation on winter and its ever-changing, sometimes ephemeral, traditions.
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If Only Love: A Memoir of Second Chances
by Shelley Saywell
In 1973, a seventeen-year-old Canadian girl meets an American boy on her first day of school in Japan and falls in love, not realizing that he is also a goner for her. When they finally connect, they only have two months together before school's out and she has to head home. Bad timing and swirling emotion botch their attempt to stay together and they fall out of touch. Long after she loses him, she still thinks of him, and even sets out on a journey to find him, one that fails in the most traumatic of ways. Thirty years later--after her award-winning documentary career has taken her to the most dangerous of places pursuing the toughest of stories--Daniel Peterson's name pops up in an email in Shelley Saywell's inbox, delivering them both a second chance at love.
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Focus on: Black History Month |
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In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community
by Marie Carter
Illuminating two hundred years of lost Black History through the lens of an iconic abolitionist settlement In the Light of Dawn shines a spotlight on the Dawn Settlement, a historic abolitionist community in rural Ontario led by Reverend Josiah Henson (the real Uncle Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark anti-slavery novel), and reveals how the town's scope and impact eclipses previously narrow interpretations as a failed utopian colony at a terminus of the Underground Railroad.
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Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History
by Rich Benjamin
A piercingly powerful memoir, a grandson's account of the coup that ended his grandfather's presidency of Haiti, the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family, and his urgent efforts to know his mother despite the past.
Rich Benjamin's mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero--a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country's president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle's parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration.
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My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and the Battles That Made Us
by Morgan Campbell
Finalist for the 2025 Trillium Book Award, the 2025 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and the Balcones Prize - Named a National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Book of 2025 The debut memoir from award-winning journalist Morgan Campbell: an incredible history of a family's battles across generations, a hilarious and emotional coming-of-age story, and a powerful reckoning with what it means to be Black in Canada--particularly when you have strong American roots.
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Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir
by George Elliott Clarke
A vibrant, revealing memoir about the cultural and familial pressures that shaped George Elliott Clarke's early life in the Black Canadian community that he calls Africadia, centred in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
As a boy, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendant of a highly accomplished lineage on his paternal side--great-grandson to William Andrew White, the first Black officer (non-commissioned) in the British army--George felt called to live up to the family name. In contrast, his mother's relatives were warm, down-to-earth country folk. Such contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing--Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. With vulnerability and humour, George shows us how these dualities shaped him as a poet and thinker.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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