Read Kitchen Confidential

Trevor Noah on being the mixed-race child of an illegal union in apartheid South Africa.

Michael Lewis at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s; the Wall Street memoir.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel; the memoir of a friendship.

Bill Bryson attempts the Appalachian Trail with an unfit friend and a fear of bears.

Bryson's farewell tour of Britain before moving back to America; the Britons' favourite book about themselves.

Anne Lamott on shitty first drafts and taking writing one bird at a time.

Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.

Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.