Biography and Memoir January 2026 |
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Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival
by Trina Moyles
When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as "the bear guy," brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina’s lifelong fascination with the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a hindrance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace River in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, she understood bears to be invisible always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings' hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.
Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect wild ecosystems, as well as the people we hold closest.
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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. When they finally connect, they only have two months together before school's out and she must 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. Soon they are edging towards each other in an exchange of emails that slowly confirms that their teenage love was real. For fifteen years, they share life and love, only to have their marriage cut short when Daniel gets a diagnosis of terminal cancer. In his last moments, she asks Daniel, 'Can we do this again?' and he replies, 'We'll do it again, only better.'
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The Family Snitch: A Daughter's Memoir of Truth and Lies
by Francesca Fontana
Francesca's parents represented opposing views of the world. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only “My life started when you were born.” Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know but often the stories were full of lies. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away.
The first in her family to attend college, The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation, as Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?
In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can’t be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices.
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Homeschooled: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir
by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were 'stifling his creativity.' Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects, and when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan re-entered the public school system in Plano as a first-year student, he was in for a jarring awakening.
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The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service
by Grant Harrold
"From an early age, Grant Harrold was always obsessed with the royal family. Glued to the television screen watching countless documentaries on Her Majesty the Queen, it seemed the most unlikely outcome that this working-class boy from Scotland would end up walking the corridors of royal palaces and households. Starting out as a young and naive under-butler in stately homes and working his way up to the highest honour of serving the King and Queen, this memoir charts Grant's extraordinary journey to the highest levels of royal society. The relationship between the king and his staff has always been shrouded in mystery, but in this compelling autobiography, one of Britain's top royal experts reveals his story for the first time and shares insight and never-before-heard stories about his time in royal service."
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Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
by Margaret Atwood
Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents, entomologist father and dietician mother, Atwood spent much of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated, but also thrilling and beautiful.
From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin, where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.
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The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
In the Summer of 1856. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband Joshua were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win a race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. First however they had to make one last dangerous transit into the most treacherous waters in the world. As their ship, Neptune's Car, left New York Harbour and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua became deathly ill and delirious. With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, Mary Ann Patten becomes the first woman to command a merchant vessel.
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Star of the Show: My Life on Stage
by Dolly Parton
Featuring engaging stories and memories from Dolly Parton’s dynamic life behind the microphone, this book spotlights her signature performances and star-making moments, from singing in front of her family to premiering on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Her formative years performing with country legend Porter Wagoner are detailed as she learns hard lessons from life on the road. Breaking out on her own at state fairs and critically acclaimed venues, she toured the world performing for millions of fans. From making her on screen debut in the blockbuster film 9 to 5 to playing the Dallas Cowboys’ 2023 Thanksgiving halftime show, this global superstar knows no limits. Along her journey, Dolly shares the stage with Kenny Rogers, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and others.
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Against the Wind: Reflections on a Self-Determined Life
by Reinhold Messner
The Mountain King looks back on eight decades, summit controversies, and his lasting legacy of climbing for the experience and the journey Reinhold Messner is one of history's greatest mountaineers, a man who pushed the frontier of what is possible for a whole generation of climbers and beyond. In his new memoir, Against the Wind, Messner looks back on a life of accomplishments and recounts some of the most important episodes after turning eighty in 2024. He also addresses darker times and infamous controversies, including being discredited as a young mountaineer, his divorce and remarriage, Guinness stripping him of his world records in 2023, the recent revisions to measurements of 8000-meter summits, and the discovery of his brother Gunther's remains on Nanga Parbat.
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The Bottomless Cup: A Memoir of Secrets, Restaurants, and Forgiveness
by Kevin Boehm
James Beard Award–winning restaurateur Kevin Boehm, has opened forty restaurants in his 30-year career. He has worked with hard-core line cooks and celebrity chefs, suffered embarrassing setbacks, and won Michelin stars. Today his Boka Group is one of the most successful restaurant companies in the world.
But Boehm’s path was a complicated one. A turbulent family life and a shocking revelation about his father drove him out into the world in search of a home. He found one in restaurants. Amidst other gifted and damaged people, he discovered the magic of hospitality and the thrill of a dining room on the edge of chaos.
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