Biography & Memoir Ebooks
Grow your digital library with some of the best biographies and memoir ebooks here on Everand. With fresh and layered memories and language, biographies & memoirs open our eyes to astonishing and inspiring lives, experiences, and places. These intimate and honest non-fiction accounts make us close confidants as the authors reveal personal and poignant stories that shape our heroes and ourselves. Start exploring our highly rated biographies and memoir ebooks today.
Grow your digital library with some of the best biographies and memoir ebooks here on Everand. With fresh and layered memories and language, biographies & memoirs open our eyes to astonishing and inspiring lives, experiences, and places. These intimate and honest non-fiction accounts make us close confidants as the authors reveal personal and poignant stories that shape our heroes and ourselves. Start exploring our highly rated biographies and memoir ebooks today.
Spotlight
Xiaolu Guo has been lauded as a “voice . . . speaking with full freedom” (Wall Street Journal), which has made her one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation. She is the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Nine Continents and a Granta Best Young British Novelist. Her new memoir, Radical, is an exploration of a city, an electrically honest rendering of what it means to be an outsider, and the sojourn that upended her sense of self as a woman, partner, mother, and artist. The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have built for yourself. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019, Guo traveled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. What she experienced, however, amidst excursions throughout the city and time spent on her own, was solitude and a destabilizing of self. Her encounter with American culture and people threatened her sense of identity and threw her into a crisis—of meaning, desire, obligation, and selfhood. Radicals, or bushous, are the building blocks of Chinese characters; they are the “root” from which all words get their meaning. In this feminist lexicon, as she threads together her search for creative and personal freedom, Guo illuminates the integral role language plays in forming our sense of self. Radical is an individual and etymological journey, and an ardent love letter. It is an expression of one artist’s fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between.
Trending ebooks
Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Moveable Feast Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Stolen Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Child Called It: One Child's Courage to Survive Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kitchen Confidential Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Glad My Mom Died Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Me: Elton John Official Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dry: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elon Musk Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fear: Trump in the White House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yes Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Hope They Serve Beer In Hell Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Discover more in Biography & Memoir
Adventurers & Explorers
Artists and Musicians
Business Biographies
Cultural, Ethnic & Regional Biographi…
Criminals & Outlaws
Entertainers and the Rich & Famous
Historical Biographies
LGBTQIA+ Biographies
Literary Biographies
Medical Biographies
Military Biographies
Personal Memoirs
Political Biographies
Religious Biographies
Royalty Biographies
Sports Biographies
Buzzy new favorites
The Night Parade: a speculative memoir In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated lyrical memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyō — the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons — to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance. ‘Are these the only two stories? The one where you defeat your monster, and the other where you succumb to it?’ Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a Japanese Taiwanese American woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and self-medicating, an ever-evolving array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships with those she loved — especially her father — suffered as a result. Frustrated with the tidy arc of the typical mental illness memoir, the kind whose trajectory leads toward being ‘better’, Lin sought comfort in the Japanese folklore she’d loved as a child, tales of supernatural creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yōkai and other East Asian mythology, she set out to interrogate the Western notion of conflict and resolution, grief, loss, mental illness, and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people. Divided into four acts in the traditional Japanese narrative structure and featuring stunning watercolour illustrations, Jami Nakamura Lin has crafted an innovative, genre-bending, and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between worlds. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, and other haunted topics with the folkloric tradition, The Night Parade shines a light into dark corners in search of a new way, driven by the question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCacophony of Bone From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and finding home. Two days after the winter solstice in 2019, Kerri and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways 2020 was unlike any year we had seen before. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected. Intensely lyrical, fragmentary in subject and form, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that transformed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri’s elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. This is a book for the reader who wants to slow down, guided by a voice that is utterly singular, “rich and strange,” (Robert Macfarlane). A book about home—the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Life and Lies of Charles Dickens A radical reassessment of the famed Victorian author, revealing the true story behind the creator of some of literature's best-known novels. This dynamic new study of Charles Dickens will make readers re-examine his life and work in a completely different light. First, partly due to the massive digitalization of papers and letters in recent years, Helena Kelly has unearthed new material about Dickens that simply wasn't available to his earlier biographers. Second, in an astonishing piece of archival detective work, she has traced and then joined the dots on revelatory new details about his mental and physical health that, as the reader will discover, had a strong bearing on both his writing and his life and eventual death. Together these have allowed her to come up with a striking hypothesis that the version of his life that Dickens chose to share with his public—both during his lifetime and from beyond the grave in the authorized biography published shortly after his death—was an elaborate exercise in reputation management. Many of the supposed formative events in his life—such as the twelve-year-old Dickens going to work in a blacking factory—may not have been quite as honestly-related as we have been led to believe. And, in many respects, who can blame him? Dickens's celebrity was on a scale almost unimaginable to any author writing today, with the possible exception of J. K. Rowling, and, like many people who become suddenly famous, he soon realized what a mixed blessing it was.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWandering through Life: A Memoir The internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells her own adventurous life story as she enters her eighties In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned. Following a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather’s farm and its beloved animals, and summers spent selling homegrown tomatoes by the roadside, Leon got her first taste of the classical music and opera that would enrich her life. She also developed a yen for adventure. In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before finding herself swept up in the early days of the 1979 Revolution. After teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia, she finally landed in Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, from her first magical dinner when serving as a chaperone to a friend, to the hunt for the perfect cappuccino, to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market. Some things remain constant throughout the decades: her adoration of opera, especially Handel’s vocal music, and her advocacy for the environment, embodied in her passion for bees—which informs the surprising crux of the Brunetti mystery Earthly Remains. Even as mass tourism takes its toll on the patience of residents, Leon’s passion for Venice remains unchanged: its outrageous beauty and magic still captivate her. Having recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, Leon poignantly confronts the dual challenges and pleasures of aging. Complete with a brief letter dissuading those hoping to meet Guido Brunetti at the Questura, and always suffused with music, food, and her sharp sense of humor, Wandering through Life offers Donna Leon at her most personal.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Expert recommendations
Spotlighting TIME’s Women of the Year View 11 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Spotlighting TIME’s Women of the Year
TIME Magazine’s Women of the Year for 2024 include Ada Limón, Greta Gerwig, Taraji P. Henson, and more. Hear more from these incredible figures with this list of books, podcasts, and articles.
Roxane Gay’s favorite books View 34 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Roxane Gay’s favorite books
Gay — an author, opinion writer, and active Goodreads user — always champions the books she loves.
Books by Muslim authors View 28 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Books by Muslim authors
Notable books in honor of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting and reflection.
Uplifting books that celebrate Black joy View 24 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Uplifting books that celebrate Black joy
Stories of love, hope, family, and resilience within Black communities to inspire you and spark joy.
The best books and audiobooks of 2023 View 44 titlesCurated by Lanie Pemberton
The best books and audiobooks of 2023
Read the most notable fiction and nonfiction titles of the year.
Editors’ Picks: Biography & Memoir View 18 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Editors’ Picks: Biography & Memoir
Works that delve into the lives of people our editors find utterly fascinating.
Current New York Times bestsellers View 51 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Current New York Times bestsellers
These books are topping the charts right now.
There’s more to discover in Biography & Memoir
Read what you want, how you want
Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.
About Biography & Memoir
Biographies and memoirs are non-fiction narratives that satisfy a few intense human desires: to be known and understood, and to know and understand another person. You can delve into the lifespans and reflections of some of the world’s most fascinating and influential icons with our archive of bestselling biography and memoir ebooks. Biographies and memoirs are non-fiction narratives that satisfy a few intense human desires: to be known and understood and to know and understand another person. You can delve into the lifespans and reflections of some of the world’s most fascinating and influential icons with our archive of bestselling biography and memoir ebooks. These books explore the private and profound memories of our beloved heroes, powerful leaders, and world-changing social activists. That said, some of the best memoirs are written about everyday people who do extraordinary things. Wild, illuminating, and full of heart, some top memoir and biography titles include Kindness & Wonder, Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More than Ever, Just Kids, and The Year of Magical Thinking. Whether historical or contemporary, ebook memoirs and biographies give us an intimate look at the inner lives of inspiring people, including poet and feminist Maya Angelou, award-winning artist Joan Didion, and athlete & activist Muhammad Ali. Raw and unflinching or thoughtful and humane, these are books that ask big questions and let us find answers through someone else’s eyes. At their best, these narratives are entertaining and honest chronicles of how some of us prosper, fail, dream, and survive.
Biographies and memoirs are non-fiction narratives that satisfy a few intense human desires: to be known and understood, and to know and understand another person. You can delve into the lifespans and reflections of some of the world’s most fascinating and influential icons with our archive of bestselling biography and memoir ebooks. Biographies and memoirs are non-fiction narratives that satisfy a few intense human desires: to be known and understood and to know and understand another person. You can delve into the lifespans and reflections of some of the world’s most fascinating and influential icons with our archive of bestselling biography and memoir ebooks. These books explore the private and profound memories of our beloved heroes, powerful leaders, and world-changing social activists. That said, some of the best memoirs are written about everyday people who do extraordinary things. Wild, illuminating, and full of heart, some top memoir and biography titles include Kindness & Wonder, Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More than Ever, Just Kids, and The Year of Magical Thinking. Whether historical or contemporary, ebook memoirs and biographies give us an intimate look at the inner lives of inspiring people, including poet and feminist Maya Angelou, award-winning artist Joan Didion, and athlete & activist Muhammad Ali. Raw and unflinching or thoughtful and humane, these are books that ask big questions and let us find answers through someone else’s eyes. At their best, these narratives are entertaining and honest chronicles of how some of us prosper, fail, dream, and survive.