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The Haunting of Prince Harry

By Rebecca Mead

Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “ Spare ” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described. We get the red-coated footman attending the heavy front door; the mackintoshes hanging on hooks; the cream-and-gold wallpaper; and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing. Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms—including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view; Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child to scale, a mattress that sagged in the middle, and crisp bedding that was “pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

It was in this bedroom, early in the morning of August 31, 1997, that Harry, aged twelve, was awakened by his father, Charles, then the Prince of Wales, with the terrible news that had already broken across the world: the princes’ mother, Princess Diana, from whom Charles had been divorced a year earlier and estranged long before that, had died in a car crash in Paris. “He was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down,” Harry writes of the moment in which he learned of the loss that would reshape his personality and determine the course of his life. He goes on to describe his father’s appearance with an unusual simile: “His white dressing gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.”

What ghost would that be, and what play? The big one, of course, bearing the name of that other brooding princely Aitch: Hamlet. Within the first few pages of “Spare,” Shakespeare’s play is alluded to more than once. There’s a jocular reference: “To beard or not to beard” is how Harry foreshadows a contentious family debate over whether he should be clean-shaven on his wedding day. And there’s an instance far graver: an account, in the prologue, of a fraught encounter between Harry, William, and Charles in April, 2021, a few hours after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband and the Royal Family’s patriarch, at Windsor. The meeting had been called by Harry in the vain hope that he might get his obdurate parent and sibling, first and second in line to the throne, to see why he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had felt it necessary to flee Britain for North America, relinquishing their royal roles, if not their ducal titles. The three men met in Frogmore Gardens, on the Windsor estate, which includes the last resting place of many illustrious ancestors, and as they walked its gravel paths they talked with increasing tension about their apparently irreconcilable differences. They “were now smack in the middle of the Royal Burial Ground,” Harry writes, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

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King Charles, as he became upon the death of Queen Elizabeth , in September, will not find much to like in “Spare,” which may offer the most thoroughgoing scything of treacherous royals and their scheming courtiers since the Prince of Denmark’s bloody swath through the halls of Elsinore. Queen Camilla, formerly “the Other Woman” in Charles and Diana’s unhappy marriage, is, Harry judges, “dangerous,” having “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.” William’s wife, Kate, now the Princess of Wales, is haughty and cool, brushing off Meghan’s homeopathic remedies. William himself is domineering and insecure, with a wealth of other deficits: “his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time.” Charles is, for the most part, more tenderly drawn. In “Spare,” the King is a figure of tragic pathos, whose frequently repeated term of endearment for Harry, “darling boy,” most often precedes an admission that there is nothing to be done—or, at least, nothing he can do—about the burden of their shared lot as members of the nation’s most important, most privileged, most scrutinized, most publicly dysfunctional family. “Please, boys—don’t make my final years a misery,” he pleads, in Harry’s account of the burial-ground showdown.

As painful as Charles must find the book’s revealing content, he might grudgingly approve of Harry’s Shakespearean flourishes in delivering it. Thirty-odd years ago, in giving the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the future monarch spoke of the eternal relevance of the playwright’s insights into human nature, citing, among other references, Hamlet’s monologue with the phrase “What a piece of work is a man!” Shakespeare, Charles told his audience, offers us “blunt reminders of the flaws in our own personalities, and of the mess which we so often make of our lives.” In “Spare,” Harry describes his father’s devotion to Shakespeare, paraphrasing Charles’s message about the Bard’s works in terms that seem to refer equally to that other pillar of British identity, the monarchy: “They’re our shared heritage, we should be cherishing them, safeguarding them, and instead we’re letting them die.”

Harry counts himself among “the Shakespeareless hordes,” bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the freighted works of Britain’s national author. (“Not really big on books,” he confesses to Meghan Markle when, on their second date, she tells him she’s having an “Eat, Pray, Love” summer, and he has no idea what she’s on about.) Harry at least gives a compelling excuse for his inability to discover what his father so valued, though it’s probably not one that he gave to his schoolmasters at Eton. “I tried to change,” he recalls. “I opened Hamlet . Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper . . . ? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.”

That passage indicates another spectral figure haunting the text of “Spare”—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house—which paid a reported twenty-million-dollar advance for the book—could not have chosen better. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter turned memoirist and novelist, as well as the ghostwriter of, most notably, Andre Agassi’s thrillingly candid memoir, “ Open .” In that book, published in 2009, a tennis ace once reviled for his denim shorts and flowing mullet revealed himself to be a troubled, tennis-hating neurotic with father issues and an unreliable hairpiece. When the title and the cover art of “Spare” were made public, late last year, the kinship between the two books—single-word title; closeup, set-jaw portrait—indicated that they were to be understood as fraternal works in the Moehringer œuvre. Moehringer has what is usually called a novelist’s eye for detail, effectively deployed in “Spare.” That patched, starched bed linen at Balmoral, emblazoned with E.R., the formal initials of the Queen , is, of course, a metaphor for the constricting, and quite possibly threadbare, fabric of the institution of monarchy itself.

Moehringer has also bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon. The language of Shakespeare rings in his sentences. Those wanton journalists who publish falsehoods or half-truths? They treat the royals as insects: “What fun, to pluck their wings,” Harry writes, in an echo of “King Lear,” a play about the fragility of kingly authority. During his military training as a forward air controller, a role in which he guided the flights and firepower of pilots from an earthbound station, Harry describes the release of bombs as “spirits melting into air”—a phrase drawn from “The Tempest,” a play about a duke in exile across the water. Elevating flourishes like these give readers—perhaps British ones in particular—a shiver of recognition, as if the chords of “Jerusalem” were being struck on a church organ. But they also remind those readers of the necessary literary artifice at work in the enterprise of “Spare,” as Moehringer shapes Harry’s memories and obsessions, traumas and bugbears, into a coherent narrative: the peerless ghostwriter giving voice to the Shakespeareless prince.

Moehringer has fashioned the Duke of Sussex’s life story into a tight three-act drama, consisting of his occasionally wayward youth; his decade of military service, which included two tours of duty in Afghanistan; and his relationship with Meghan. Throughout, there are numerous bombshells, which—thanks to the o’er hasty publication of the book’s Spanish edition—did not so much melt into air as materialize into clickbait. These included the allegation that, in 1998, Camilla leaked word to a tabloid of her first meeting with Prince William—according to Harry, the opening sally in a campaign to secure marriage to Charles and a throne by his side. (Harry does not mention that, at the time, Camilla’s personal assistant took responsibility for the leak—she’d told her husband, a media executive, who’d told a friend, who’d told someone at the Sun , who’d printed it. Bloody journalists.) They also include less consequential but more titillating arcana, such as Harry’s account of losing his virginity, in a field behind a pub, to an unnamed older woman, who treated him “not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.” The Daily Mail , Harry’s longtime media nemesis, had a field day with that revelation, door-stepping a now forty-four-year-old businesswoman to come up with the deathless headline “Horse-loving ex-model six years older than Harry, who once breathlessly revealed the Prince left her mouth numb with passionate kissing in a muddy field, refuses to discuss whether she is the keen horsewoman who took his virginity in a field.”

The leaks have done the book’s sales no harm, and neither have Harry’s pre-publication interviews on “Good Morning America” and “60 Minutes”; in the U.K., Harry did an hour-and-a-half-long special with Tom Bradby, the journalist to whom Meghan tearfully bemoaned, in the fall of 2019, that “not many people have asked if I’m O.K.” But “Spare” is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its narrative force, its voice, and its sometimes surprising wit. Harry describes his trepidation in telling his brother that he intended to propose to Meghan: William “predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with an ‘American actress,’ a phrase he always managed to make sound like ‘convicted felon’ ”—an observation so splendid that a reader can only hope it was actually Harry’s.

There is much in the book that people conversant with the contours of the Prince’s life, insofar as they have hitherto been reported, will find familiar. At the same time, Harry bursts any number of inaccurate reports, including a rumored flirtation with another convicted fel— sorry, American actress, Cameron Diaz: “I was never within fifty meters of Ms. Diaz, further proof that if you like reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing.” Not a few of the incidents Harry chooses to describe in detail are centered on images or stories already in the public domain, such as being beset by paparazzi when leaving night clubs—he explains that he started being ferried away in the trunk of his driver’s car so as to avoid lashing out at his pursuers—and being required to perform uncomfortable media interviews while serving in Afghanistan in exchange for the newspapers’ keeping shtum about his deployment, for security reasons. (An Australian publication blew the embargo, and Harry was swiftly extracted from the battlefield.)

Given that what Harry dredges up from his past are so often things that have been publicly documented, one wonders whether Moehringer was obliged to indulge Harry’s extended dilation upon media-inflicted wounds , through Zoom sessions that even sympathetic readers will find exhausting to contemplate. There is a certain amount of score-settling and record-straightening, which, though obviously important to the author, can be wearying to a reader, who may feel that if she has to read another word about those accursed bridesmaids’ dresses—of who said what to whom, and who caused whom to cry—she just might burst into tears herself. More significantly, though, there are broadsides against unforgivable intrusions committed by the press, including phone hacking. (Harry is still engaged in lawsuits against a number of British newspapers that allegedly intercepted his voice mails more than a dozen years ago.)

And then there are pages and pages devoted to Harry’s personal trials, which even the most dogged reporter on Fleet Street would not dare dream of uncovering. Chief among these is Harry’s struggle to overcome penile frostnip after a charitable Arctic excursion with a group of veterans, which ends up in a clandestine visit to a Harley Street doctor; he writes, “North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.” “On the fritz” is an Americanism that we can hope Harry picked up while guiding American pilots—he calls them Yanks—back to base in Afghanistan, rather than the exchange being the ingenious invention of his ghostwriter. Moehringer, on the whole, does a good job of conveying the laddish argot of a millennial British prince, who addresses his friends as “mate” and—repeatedly—calls his penis his “todger.”

Above all, “Spare” is worth reading for its potential historical import, which is likely to resonate, if not to the crack of doom, then well into the reign of King Charles III, and even into that of his successor. As was the case in 1992 with the publication of “ Diana: Her True Story ,” by Andrew Morton—to whom, it was revealed after her death, the Princess of Wales gave her full coöperation, herself the ghost behind the writer—“Spare” is an unprecedented exposure of the Royal Family from the most deeply embedded of informants. The Prince in exile does not hesitate to detail the pettiness, the vanity, and the inglorious urge toward self-preservation of those who are now the monarchy’s highest-ranking representatives.

It’s not clear that even now, having authored a book, Harry entirely understands what a book is; when challenged by Tom Bradby about his decision to reveal private conversations after having railed so forcefully about the invasive tactics of the press, Harry replied, “The level of planting and leaking from other members of the family means that in my mind they have written countless books—certainly, millions of words have been dedicated to trying to trash my wife and myself to the point of where I had to leave my country.” Pity the poor ghostwriter who has to hear his craft compared to the spewing verbiage of the media churn—by its commissioning subject, no less. (Man, what a piece of work.) Remarkably, Prince Harry has suggested that he sees the book as an invitation to reconciliation, addressed to his father and brother—a way of speaking to them publicly when all his efforts to address them privately have failed to persuade. “Spare” is, you might say, Prince Harry’s “Mousetrap”—a literary device intended to catch the conscience of the King, and the King after him.

If so, the ruse seems about as likely to end well for Harry as Hamlet’s play-within-a-play efforts did for him. Moehringer, at least, knows this, even if Harry may hope that his own royal plot will swerve unexpectedly from implacable tragedy to restitutive melodrama. In a soaring coda, Moehringer has the Prince once again reflecting on the royal dead, describing the family he belongs to as nothing less than a death cult. “We christened and crowned, graduated and married, passed out and passed over our beloveds’ bones. Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors,” Harry writes. It’s a powerful motif: the Prince—shattered in childhood by his mother’s death, his every step determined by the inescapable legacy of the countless royal dead—as an unwilling Hamlet pushed, rather than leaping, into the grave.

Recalling the meeting with his father and brother in the Frogmore burial ground with which the book began, Harry invokes the most famous soliloquy from the play of Shakespeare’s that he says he once slammed shut: “Why were we here, lurking along the edge of that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?’ ” Then comes a final, lovely, true, and utterly poetry-puncturing observation: “Though maybe that’s a more apt description of America.” In moving to the paradisaical climes of California, Harry has been spared a life he had no use for, which had no real use for him. The unlettered Prince has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio. You might almost call it Harry’s crowning achievement. ♦

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By Anthony Lane

By James Wood

By Elizabeth Kolbert

The 11 Biggest Takeaways from Prince Harry’s Tell-All Memoir, Spare

Harry bares it all, from how he lost his virginity to why Meghan and Kate fought in the days leading up to the Sussexes’ wedding.

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Leaked excerpts from the explosive book emerged ahead of its official January 10 release date, and now, the real deal has arrived. The chapters reveal one shocking personal truth after another—including the way the duke lost his virginity, the day he re-created his mother's last moments, and the brutal physical fight he had with his brother, Prince William.

Below, we break down all the biggest revelations. Watch this space for updates.

1 | Prince William allegedly attacked Prince Harry.

Harry describes a heated conversation with his older brother, Prince William, which resulted in a physical altercation in 2019.

While at his home in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace, Harry writes that William called Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, "difficult," "rude," and "abrasive."

Insults were exchanged thereafter, Harry writes, and William claimed he was trying to help him. "Are you serious? Help me? Sorry—is that what you call this? Helping me?" Harry recalls asking his brother.

The comment enraged William, Harry says. Attempting to deescalate, Harry offered William a glass of water, saying, "Willy, I can't speak to you when you're like this."

"He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast," Harry writes. "He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog's bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out."

William urged Harry to hit him back, citing the fights they used to have as children, but Harry refused. William left the house but returned "looking regretful, and apologised," Harry writes, recalling that William then told him, "You don't need to tell Meg about this."

"You mean that you attacked me?" Harry said.

"I didn't attack you, Harold," William replied.

2 | He lost his virginity to an "older lady."

The Duke of Sussex included a highly personal anecdote in his memoir: the moment he had sex for the first time.

Harry says he lost his virginity to an "older lady" who "loved horses very much." The moment, he says, was "a humiliating episode" that took place "in a field."

"I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and held me back … one of my mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a busy pub," he writes."No doubt someone had seen us."

3 | Kate made Meghan cry over Princess Charlotte's flower girl dress.

An alleged disagreement that took place between Duchess Meghan and Catherine, Princess of Wales, has been widely scrutinized since Meghan refuted a tabloid story that claimed she made Kate cry in the days leading up to her 2018 nuptials to Harry. In a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan insisted that "the reverse happened." Now, Spare offers more insight into the dispute.

The Daily Mail initially reported that Meghan offended Kate during a phone call in which she said the senior royal, who recently gave birth, had "baby brain." Meghan apologized for the comment, per Harry's memoir, but William "pointed a finger" at her in anger. "Well, it's rude, Meghan. These things are not done here," William allegedly told her, to which she responded, "Kindly take your finger out of my face."

According to Harry, during the week of Harry and Meghan's 2018 nuptials , Kate texted Meghan about a "problem" with Princess Charlotte's flower girl dress (he even included the alleged actual text from the messages in the book). She said Charlotte's dress was "too big, too long, too baggy," and that the little royal "cried when she tried it on." Meghan told Kate that a tailor on standby at the palace could perform the necessary alterations to Charlotte's dress, but Kate told the bride-to-be that all the bridesmaid dresses needed to be completely remade, with just four days left before the wedding. Harry shares that Kate then cited the advice of her own wedding dress designer, Alexander McQueen's Sarah Burton, who agreed that the dresses had to be redone.

Kate ultimately agreed to take Charlotte to the tailor, but Harry writes that he later found his soon-to-be-wife in tears "on the floor" following their argument. The duke also shares that Kate apologized the next day with flowers and a card.

4 | William and Kate encouraged Harry to wear his infamous Nazi costume.

Harry recalls debating between dressing as a Nazi or a pilot for a "Native and Colonial"–themed costume party in 2005. He allegedly sought advice from his older brother and sister-in-law.

"I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said," Harry writes, saying he then tried the costume on in front of them. "They both howled. Worse than Willy's leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point."

Harry went with the Nazi look, and soon after, a photo of him partying in a white military shirt and red swastika armband made headlines in the British newspapers and around the world. The incident came two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

5 | Harry and William urged Charles not to marry Camilla.

The royal brothers allegedly told their father, King Charles III, to not marry Camilla, now queen consort.

" Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings," Harry writes. "We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he'd always loved. Fate might've intended for him in the first place. Whatever bitterness or sorrow we felt over the closing of another loop in Mummy's story, we understood that it was besides the point."

He also reflects on his complicated relationship with his stepmother. "I remember wondering … if she would be cruel to me; if she would be like all the evil stepmothers in the stories," he writes. "Willy had been suspicious of the Other Woman for a long time, which confused and tormented him. When those suspicions were confirmed, he felt agonizing remorse for not having done or said anything before."

Charles and Camilla officially wed on April 9, 2005. Following their union, it was announced that Camilla would not go by the Princess of Wales, the title famously held by Princess Diana.

6 | Harry re-created Princess Diana's final moments.

In one heartbreaking passage, the Duke of Sussex recalls driving through the same tunnel in Paris where Diana got into a fatal car crash in 1997. At the time, Harry was 23 years old and attending the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinal in Paris.

"The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother … I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large. The tunnel is called Pont de l'Alma, I told him," he writes.

Harry says he requested the driver go through the tunnel at 65 miles per hour, "The exact speed Mummy's car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported."

Once they passed through the tunnel, Harry recalls, "We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel's entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy's Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it. As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of water orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side. I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It's … nothing. Just a straight tunnel. I'd always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it ."

He concludes that re-creating her final journey did little to alleviate him from his grief. "It had been a very bad idea. I'd had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived," he writes. "I'd told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn't really. Deep down, I'd hoped to feel in that tunnel what I'd felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away. She's dead, I thought. My God, she's really gone for good. "

7 | Harry spoke with a medium to contact his mother in the afterlife.

Harry writes in his memoir that he sought the help of a woman who "claimed to have powers" that can relay messages from people who have passed on, including his mother, the late Princess Diana.

"You're living the life she couldn't. You're living the life she wanted for you," said the woman, whom Harry does not refer to as a psychic or medium. The woman also told Harry that Diana was with him "right now," a message that made his neck grow warm and his eyes water.

The woman reportedly said that Diana was with the family when his and Meghan's toddler son, Archie, broke a Christmas tree ornament in the shape of Queen Elizabeth II. "Your mother says … something about a Christmas ornament? Of a mother? Or a grandmother? It fell? Broke?" Harry recalls the woman saying. "Your mother says she had a bit of a giggle about that."

8 | He reveals his headcount.

Harry writes in Spare that he killed 25 people while he was stationed in Afghanistan during his service for the British Army.

"Most soldiers don't know exactly how many kills they have to their credit. Under battle conditions, you often fire indiscriminately," he writes. "However, in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two tours of duty was recorded and time-stamped. I could always tell exactly how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed essential for me not to be afraid of that figure. Among the many things I learned in the Armed Forces, one of the most important was to be accountable for my own actions."

The Duke of Sussex spent 10 years in the army and went on two frontline tours to Afghanistan.

He continues, "So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either. Naturally, I would have preferred not to have that figure on my military resume, or in my head, but I would also have preferred to live in a world without the Taliban, a world without war. However, even for a casual practitioner of wishful thinking like myself, there are realities that cannot be changed."

9 | He recalls his last words to Queen Elizabeth II.

Harry flew straight from London to Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, with King Charles III and Prince William when they heard Queen Elizabeth was ill on September 8, but he still didn't make it in time to say goodbye to his grandmother before her death . When he got to see her some hours later, he writes in his memoir, that he whispered that he "hoped she would be happy" and that she would be with his grandfather, Prince Philip, soon. (Philip died on April 9, 2021, at the age of 99, and the queen died on September 8, 2022, at 96.) He also told the queen—Britain's longest-reigning monarch—that he "admired her for having fulfilled her duties until the very end."

10 | William wasn't his best man.

The royal writes in Spare hat he didn't actually choose older brother Prince William to be his best man at his wedding to Meghan Markle, as Buckingham Palace initially claimed. Harry writes that he instead chose his " old mate Charlie " to fulfill the best man duties.

The night before his and Meghan's wedding, Harry claims that William "canceled last minute" on plans to get drinks with him and his friends. "He'd told me, just before he attended tea with Granny: Can't do it, Harold. Kate and the kids," Harry writes. "I'd reminded him that this was our tradition, that we'd had dinner before his wedding, that we'd gone together and visited the crowds. He held fast. Can't do it ."

He continued, "I asked myself what was really going on. Was he feeling bad about not being my best man? Was he upset that I'd asked my old mate Charlie? (The Palace put out the story that Willy was the best man, as they'd done with me when he and Kate married.) Could that be part of it?" Harry adds that William also didn't choose him to be his best man for his wedding to Kate.

11 | Harry thought Princess Diana was "hiding" after her death.

The prince found his mother's untimely passing too difficult to accept, so difficult, in fact, that for a while he completely denied it to himself.

Harry writes in his memoir, "With nothing to do but roam the castle and talk to myself, a suspicion took hold, which then became a firm belief. This was all a trick. And for once the trick wasn't being played by the people around me, or the press, but by Mummy. Her life's been miserable, she's been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she's staged an accident as a diversion and run away."

Rosa Sanchez is the senior news editor at Harper's Bazaar, working on news as it relates to entertainment, fashion, and culture. Previously, she was a news editor at ABC News and, prior to that, a managing editor of celebrity news at American Media. She has also written features for Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Forbes, and The Hollywood Reporter, among other outlets. 

As an associate editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps a finger on the pulse on all things celeb news. She also writes on social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight on workers' rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course), or buying yet another corset. 

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'Spare' review: Prince Harry's memoir is entitled, bitter and maybe a tad boring

It is not the bombshell it was hyped to be

The title, as they say, matters. Perhaps much more to those who have it. At the heart of the most hyped celebrity book in recent times―Spare by Prince Harry―is the title of the writer, as well as his identity as being the ‘spare’.

The book has been ghost-written by J.R. Moehringer, the award-winning journalist and author of Andre Agassi’s Open. As though the infamous Oprah interview and the Netflix documentary were not revealing enough, Spare certainly offers Harry enough space to explore his life in depth. And there are plenty of anecdotes from his life. It begins with the car crash that changed history, and the lives of Harry and his brother, Prince William. Harry writes about how his father broke the news. “Darling boy, Mummy’s been in a car crash,” he writes. He poignantly describes the disbelief that followed, about not being able to cry, and about his aunt Sarah bringing back two locks of Diana’s hair for the boys. And about finally breaking down.

It has been most awaited for some time, and reports suggest that 40,000 copies have already been sold. Spare has everything that would make it a success. There is drama―including the rivalry between the siblings, Harry’s therapy sessions and William’s refusal to let Harry keep his beard for his wedding. “When I informed him that his opinion didn’t really matter, since I’d already gone to Granny and got the green light; he became livid,’’ writes Harry. “He raised his voice.... At one point he actually ordered me, as the Heir speaking to the Spare, to shave.” When he confronted him as to why it mattered so much, William turned around and said, “Because I wasn’t allowed to keep my beard.”

Then there is the battle between the sisters-in-law. While a lot of it has already been revealed by Meghan in Oprah’s show, Spare offers a juicy bit. When the two arrived to clear the air after their honeymoon, it seems that there were things that they were not aware of. “Willy and Kate were apparently upset that we hadn’t given them Easter presents,” writes Harry. No one bothered about Easter except their father, but still, Harry apologised.

There was some unease about William and Kate switching the seating plan at Harry’s wedding. And then, there was a phone conversation between Kate and Meghan in which they discussed the timing of the wedding. “Meg said: ‘Oh yes! I remember: You couldn’t remember something, and I said it’s not a big deal, it’s baby brain. Because you’d just had a baby. It’s hormones’,” writes Harry. “To which, Kate shot back, ‘Yes, you talked about my hormones. We’re not close enough for you to talk about my hormones’.” The incident may sound trivial and in hindsight, possibly funny, but in the landscape of the book, where Harry is determined to be the victim, it offers a glimpse into how trapped he felt in his family.

For the royal family waiting with bated breath to see how far Harry will go to hurt them―and whether they would be able to survive the blow―the book will come as a relief. It talks a lot about feelings―a topic that is not much favoured by the monarchy. Is it a bombshell? No. Instead, it is entitled (pun intended), bitter, and maybe a tad boring.

By Prince Harry

Published by Penguin Random House UK

Price Rs1,599; Pages 407

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• <i>Spare</i> Is Surprisingly Well Written—Despite the Drama Around It

Spare Is Surprisingly Well Written—Despite the Drama Around It

G iven the many shocking, bizarre, and, in some cases, downright untoward leaks from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare before its Jan. 10 publication, readers might open the book expecting the kind of tell-all with no literary merit often churned out by celebrities. Headlines about Harry’s frostbitten penis and his physical altercation with Prince William primed us to expect something akin to a Real Housewives episode.

But Spare is filled with lyrical meditations on royal life. The book’s opening evokes none other than William Shakespeare; Harry awaits his father and brother at the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, where many of his forebears are buried. The three men have agreed to a parley after Prince Philip’s funeral , a last-ditch effort to resolve some of the family conflicts that drove Harry from his ancestral home .

“I turned my back to the wind and saw, looming behind me, the Gothic ruin, which in reality was no more Gothic than the Millennium Wheel,” Harry writes. “Some clever architect, some bit of stagecraft. Like so much around here, I thought.” When his father and brother do arrive, they wander through the cemetery, and find themselves, Harry remembers, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

Perhaps Harry identifies with the morose, dithering prince. But in all likelihood Spare’ s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, fashioned the graveyard scene to evoke the Bard’s tragic tale of succession. Moehringer’s impressive writing propels the reader quickly through the 416-page book. It’s a shame that Spare will be remembered more for the leaks about Harry’s wife Meghan Markle and his sister-in-law Kate Middleton squabbling over bridesmaids dresses than for its lovely prose.

Moehringer, a former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, has spent years helping celebrities like Andre Agassi share their life stories. (Agassi sought him out after reading Moehringer’s own critically acclaimed memoir, The Tender Bar. ) Across Moehringer’s works—or, at least the ones we know about—he manages to spill his subjects’ petty grievances while still entrancing readers with his writing style. Whatever you think of the content, there’s no denying Spare is unflinching, introspective, and well-written.

Read More: How Celebrity Memoirs Got So Good

A good ghostwriter is able to extract memories from the subject and paint a vivid picture of those moments. Moehringer has said he tries to capture his subject’s voice, too. “You try and inhabit their skin,” he said in an interview with NPR about the writing process for Agassi’s Open . “And even though you’re thinking third person, you’re writing first person, so the processes are mirror images of each other, but they seem very simpatico.”

The details in Spare are Harry’s. Some are delightfully mundane, like the one about his father doing headstands every day in his underwear as part of his prescribed physical therapy. Others are weighty: it was made explicitly clear to the boys from birth that if William got sick, Harry, as the spare, might need to provide a “spare part”—a kidney or bone marrow—to save the heir. Moehringer, bringing an outsider’s perspective, is able to ground Harry’s personal feelings in the history of the monarchy and cultural significance of his position. In a moving passage, the two try to reconcile Harry’s tangible memories of his late mother, Princess Diana, with her icon status.

“Although my mother was a princess, named after a goddess, both those terms always felt weak, inadequate. People routinely compared her to icons and saints, from Nelson Mandela to Mother Teresa to Joan of Arc, but every such comparison, while lofty and loving, also felt wide of the mark. The most recognizable woman on the planet, one of the most beloved, my mother was simply indescribable, that was the plain truth. And yet…how could someone so far beyond everyday language remain so real, so palpably present, so exquisitely vivid in my mind? How was it possible that I could see her, clear as the swan skimming towards me on that indigo lake? How could I hear her laughter, loud as the songbirds in the bare trees—still?”

Such passages have so far been missing from the rabid press coverage of Spare . There are too many titillating details to keep the tabloids occupied. Since the book accidentally hit bookshelves in Spain days before its intended publication, outlets like Page Six and the Daily Mail have dug through the memoir’s pages for the most sensational parts. The tidbits were stripped of context. But in the book they do serve a larger purpose than spilling the tea.

The anecdote about Harry’s frostbitten nether regions, for instance, segues into a moment of reflection about the invasiveness of the press. “I don’t know why I should’ve been so reluctant to discuss my penis with Pa,” writes Harry. “My penis was a matter of public record, and indeed some public curiosity. The press had written about it extensively. There were countless stories in books, and papers (even the New York Times ) about Willy and me not being circumcised. Mummy had forbidden it, they all said.” It’s a rich detail, to be sure, but all the richer juxtaposed next to the fact that a paper of record had written about the prince’s penis long before Harry considered writing about it himself.

The rebellious royal is often funny: He jokes about the frostbite incident in an aside when he writes “my South Pole was on the fritz.” He also proves a surprisingly good narrator of his life story in the Spare audiobook: Harry’s voice is calm yet transfixing. His self-awareness is apparent when he chuckles at a line about his grandmother’s corgis. His insecurities shine through when he admits trepidatiously that William told his brother he only made Harry best man at his wedding because it was what the public expected. It is in these moments that Moehringer’s writing and Harry’s disposition find harmony.

The book is far from perfect. It ends with Harry rehashing stories about who in his family leaked what to the press that he has now shared with Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper and Michael Strahan and Netflix. The constant litigation proves exhausting. Still, celebrity memoirs are usually categorized as “well-written” or “revealing.” Rarely both. Spare, in that sense, is special.

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Write to Eliana Dockterman at [email protected]

Despite a week of intense media coverage, you'll still find some surprising moments in Prince Harry's book Spare

You may think you know everything there is to know about Prince Harry's book, Spare.

You may feel there's no need to pick up a copy, because you've heard it all, seen it all, even reacted to it all in the week since it's been published. Think again.

It's one thing to read a bunch of news articles summing up the story. It's quite another to read (or listen to) the story yourself.

Spare, published globally by Penguin Random House, has already witnessed astronomical sales figures. The publisher reports first-day sales of 1.4 million copies (of all formats) in the US, UK and Canada.

King Charles comes across, primarily, as loving and tender

Darling boy . That's the affectionate term King Charles uses to refer to his son Prince Harry throughout Spare.

Even when Harry was in hot water after famously donning a Nazi costume at a dress-up party, Charles's response was: "Darling boy, how could you be so foolish?"

Harry recounts the story of how his father then went on to comfort him – here was a man who understood humiliation, who knew what it was like to have your transgressions held up in front of the world.

He writes about how he believes his father and stepmother, Queen Consort Camilla, have been responsible for leaking information to the media, throwing him "under the bus" to bolster their own reputations publicly.

But for the most part, the King Charles he writes about is loving and tender.

There's a moment when Charles's moniker for Harry frustrates him in adulthood, but it's a term so endearing, it would be hard to imagine it landing in a sinister fashion.

Harry and Meghan — A beautiful love story

In Spare, readers bear witness to the evolution of the love story between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

There are many heart-wrenching scenes – such as when the couple lost their unborn child, as well as the lead-up to when they fled Britain, blaming the "toxic" British press for their departure , — but there are also moments when they're getting to know each other where true romantics will see the blossoming of a beautiful love story.

There's a moment when Harry speaks harshly to Meghan. She simply walks out of the room "disappearing for a full fifteen minutes".

Harry goes to find her. "She was calm, but said in a quiet, level tone that she would never stand for being spoken to like that," Prince Harry writes.

Meghan then goes to on to ask Harry where he'd heard a man speak like that to a woman, going on to say she won't tolerate that kind of partner or co-parent, not wanting to raise children in an atmosphere of anger or disrespect.

It's a learning moment, not only for Harry, but the level of maturity Meghan shows should provide a lesson to readers also. Meanwhile, you can see a bond forming, a love built on attraction, but also mutual respect.

His real frustration is not with his family, but with the press

The overarching theme in Spare is the depth of Harry's angst and disdain for the media.

The source of his deepest frustrations isn't his family, but what he refers to as "the press" and "paps".

It's a searing hatred borne from his belief that the paparazzi were responsible for his mother Princess Diana's death when he was just 12 years old.

"I'd been told that paps chased Mummy, that they'd hunted her like a pack of wild dogs, but I'd never dared to imagine that, like wild dogs, they'd also feasted on her defenceless body. I hadn't been aware, before this moment, that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb," he writes.

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Harry expresses why his account of his own life is so important, after confirming to Colbert that he watches The Crown, answering in the affirmative when Colbert asks him if he fact checks it as he watches it.

"Which by the way, by the way," he said, gesturing towards his book, "another reason why it's so important that history has it right."

Harry also points out on the show why it's so important to read the whole book, in context.

"My words are not dangerous," he told Colbert when referring to sections of the media who erroneously reported that he'd "boasted" in the book about his kill count in Afghanistan.

"But the spin of my words are very dangerous".

Spare is currently a hard copy book, an eBook and an audiobook, read by the author, in which Harry is speaking at the perfect pace, so it will take you all 15-and-a-half hours to get through it.

Listeners will hear the full impact of his words while listening to the audiobook in the tone in which it's intended.

Spare – the 410-page book, which may take you a few days to read — is an engaging account from a sometimes tortured prince.

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Prince Harry’s Memoir Has Record-Breaking Sales

The steady drumbeat of revelations that preceded the book’s release helped push early orders and initial sales, making “Spare,” on its first day, one of the best-selling hardcover books in recent memory.

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By Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris

Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has become a record-breaking success, with first-day sales that exceed some of publishing’s biggest hits, including blockbusters by Barack and Michelle Obama.

“Spare” sold more than 1.43 million copies in all formats in the United States, Canada and Britain, including pre-orders, according to its publisher. The figure marked the largest first-day sales for any nonfiction book ever published by Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher.

The memoir’s strong debut, while extraordinary, wasn’t entirely surprising. An explosive tell-all by a self-exiled prince seemed from the start to be as close to a sure bet as one can get in the fickle publishing business. Sales have been building for months, especially in the days before publication, when the book’s contents started to become public in unintentional leaks and in high-profile interviews .

“We sold books in every location — and we sold a lot of them,” said Shannon DeVito, the director of books at Barnes & Noble. “Some people came in right before work, some people came in on their lunch break, some people came in after,” she continued. “But the velocity of sales throughout the day was gigantic.”

The magnitude of its sales puts “Spare” among some of the best-selling hardcover books in recent memory. Barack Obama’s “ A Promised Land ” sold more than 887,000 copies across formats in the United States and Canada on its first day of publication, according to its publisher, Penguin Random House. Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” also published by Penguin Random House, sold more than 725,000 units in the U.S. and Canada on its first day, the company said.

Only publishers have access to the complete sales data for their books, including the number of print, audio and e-book copies sold, and they tend to release figures only when they are favorable. NPD BookScan tracks print sales independently, and will report the first week of sales for “Spare” on January 19.

In Britain, “Spare” set a record for first-day sales of a nonfiction book, selling 400,000 copies, including pre-orders, according to the publisher, Transworld Penguin Random House. Transworld has already ordered an additional 200,000 copies of the book, according to Larry Finlay, its managing director.

“The only books that have sold faster in a day have been about the other Harry, Harry Potter,” Finlay said. “The public appetite is enormous.”

The critical reception of “Spare” has been mixed, with some reviewers praising the prose but questioning whether Harry went too far into airing petty grievances. “The prince claims to have a spotty memory — ‘a defense mechanism, most likely’ — but doesn’t appear to have forgotten a single line ever printed about him and his wife, and the last section of his tell-all degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why,” the New York Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote in her review .

Some critics in Britain wrote about the book in baffled tones, lobbing superlatives that were not always complimentary. A review in The Guardian called it “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative” that is “by turns sympathetic and absurd.” A critic writing for the BBC called it “the weirdest book ever written by a royal” and said that it sometimes reads like “the longest angry drunk text ever sent.” In The Independent, a reviewer said the memoir was “richly detailed and at times beautifully written,” adding that “if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.”

By the time the book was released, many of its most incendiary claims had already been picked apart in the press. The week before publication, The Guardian ran an article that detailed a physical confrontation between Prince William and Prince Harry; as Harry describes it in the book, William knocked him to the floor. That same week, copies of “Spare” accidentally went on sale early in Spain and were snatched up by news outlets. Dozens of stories followed from around the world: Prince Harry said in the book that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. Prince Harry wrote that his brother encouraged him to dress as a Nazi for a costume party. Prince Harry lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a bar.

The steady drip of revelations led some observers to question whether the book itself would hold any new information. Rather than dissuading buyers, the news media frenzy that followed each new release appeared to help the book sell.

“We were like, is this going to damage sales, do people think they’ve read the story?” Finlay, Transworld’s managing director, said. “The headline grabbing parts are interesting, but it’s not the most interesting thing about the book. I think all it’s done is stoke the public interest.”

ReaderLink, a major book distributor, said pre-orders jumped after the article in The Guardian detailing the scuffle between the brothers. Waterstones, a bookstore chain in Britain, saw a surge of in-store reservations after the article, according to James Daunt, who heads the company.

The question becomes whether “Spare” continues to sell briskly, or if interest will fade as the news media storm calms. Before the book’s publication, some in the industry thought interest would peter out after strong initial sales. But DeVito said Barnes & Noble expects the book to be one of the biggest releases of 2023. She added that the “expertise and talent” of the book’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer , would help make the book’s appeal lasting. (In the acknowledgments, Harry calls Moehringer his “collaborator and friend, confessor and sometime sparring partner.”)

ReaderLink, which supplies books to major retailers like Target and Walmart, said it had ordered about 300,000 copies of “Spare.” But rather than shipping all the books out to ReaderLink at once, Penguin Random House held some of them back so they could rush the books directly to stores in case so much of the book leaked that the publishing date had to be moved up.

That threshold was never crossed, however, and the books went on sale as planned, on Tuesday.

Even that was a victory of sorts for the publisher, which had to contend with shifting publication dates as the memoir was delayed — Harry got cold feet about the process at times, said book industry executives with knowledge of the process. In the acknowledgments, Harry thanked top Penguin Random House executives for their patience and “understanding as timelines changed, not once, but twice.”

Harry’s thorough account of his family’s endless drama has also raised questions about what, if any, material of interest remains for any future projects he and his wife, Meghan, might pursue.

“Spare” was sold for a rumored sum of $20 million as part of a multi-book deal, with flexibility as to the number and type of books Harry and Meghan could produce, according to people with knowledge of the acquisition process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such negotiations are private.

In a series of interviews to promote the memoir, Harry was occasionally asked about the leaks that preceded its publication, and why, if he so despised the media scrutiny that had caused such chaos in his life, he was offering the public more information about his family. His answer was that by publishing a memoir, he was trying to put many of the rumors to rest by speaking up.

“The last few days have been hurtful and challenging,” he said during an interview with Stephen Colbert. “Hopefully now that the book is out, people will be able to see the context.”

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

Elizabeth A. Harris writes about books and publishing for The Times.  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

Highlights from Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare'

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Spare by Prince Harry review – a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative

By turns sympathetic and absurd, this is a memoir that deals in the tropes of tabloid storytelling even as it lambasts them

T he monarchy relies on fiction. It is a constructed reality, in which grown-up people are asked to collude in the notion that a human is more than a human – that he or she contains something approaching the ineffable essence of Britishness. Once, this fiction rested on political and military power, supported by a direct line, it was supposed, to God. Nowadays it relies on the much frailer foundations of habit, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a kind of symbolism without the symbolised. Ceremonials such as the late queen’s funeral are not merely decorative; they are the institution’s means of securing its continuance. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.

All this explains why royals are so irresistible to writers of fiction, from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they are already halfway to myth. And, it seems, no one cleaves harder to the myths than the royals themselves. There’s a fascinating passage in Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his father’s delight in Shakespeare: how he would regularly take his son to Stratford, how he “adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal.” Harry himself tried Hamlet. “Hmm. Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with … parent’s usurper? I slammed it shut.” At Eton, he was cast as Conrade, one of Don John’s comic minions in Much Ado About Nothing. To his surprise, he was rather good. “Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being on stage.”

Prince Harry portrays himself as no great reader. Studying invited reflection; reflection invited grief; emotions were best avoided. But he does himself an injustice. He is a voracious reader – of the press. For years, it seems, he devoured every syllable published about him, in outlets from the London Review of Books to the Sun to the faecal depths of below-the-line on social-media feeds. His father’s most oft-quoted refrain in the book is “Don’t read it, darling boy”; his therapist, he writes, suggested he was addicted to it. Spare is about the torment of a royal in the age of the smartphone and Instagram; a torment of a different order from even that suffered by his mother, and certainly by Princess Margaret, forbidden from marrying the man she loved by her own sister. (For Harry, Margaret is “Aunt Margo”, a cold-blooded old lady who could “kill a houseplant with one scowl” and once gave him a biro – “Oh. A biro. Wow” – for Christmas.)

The fiction of royalty can be maintained only if its characters are visible, hence its symbiotic but rarely straightforward relationship with the media. Spare contends that portrayals of the royals in sections of the press – aside from having at times involved shocking criminality, outright invention, intolerable harassment and overt racism – have also often depended on a kind of zero-sum game, in which one family member’s spokesperson will attempt to protect their client at the expense of another, trading gossip for favours. Harry, in his role as the expendable “spare”, has often been the victim of this process, he argues. Narrative tropes and archetypes as old as the hills have been invoked in the distortions: the wayward son; the warring brothers. In Meghan’s case, something even more corrosive: the witch-like woman.

It is the monarchist press for which Harry reserves special loathing. The Telegraph’s royal correspondent “always made me ill”, he writes; and he cannot bear even to name Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News UK, referring to her anagrammatically as Rehabber Kooks. As for her boss: “I didn’t care for Rupert Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s”. Clueless as Harry may be about the sheer extent of his privilege – early in the book he writes, “It sounds posh and I suppose it was” of childhood meals of fishfingers served under silver domes by footmen – he isn’t remotely a snob, nor, I infer, temperamentally of the right.

A striking passage recounts the prince’s talking to his therapist about Hilary Mantel’s 2013 LRB essay about Kate Middleton. It became notorious, wilfully misread by the tabloids as being anti-Kate, even though it was the monstrosity of the representation of the now Princess of Wales that Mantel was skewering. Harry recalls his disgust at Mantel’s calling the royal family “pandas” – cosseted, fascinating animals kept in a zoo. “If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?”

Still, he half gets what Mantel was driving at. The words “always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous,” he writes. “We did live in a zoo.” Describing his unpreparedness for having his funding cut in 2020, he writes: “I recognised the absurdity, a man in his mid-30s being cut off by his father … But I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never travelled on the Underground.”

In her essay, Mantel remarked that “Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince”. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to claw back personhood, to claim his own narrative. Of his tabloid persecutors, he writes: “I was royal and in their minds royal was synonymous with non-person. Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.” That, of course, is half-remembered Shakespeare: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” says the blinded Gloucester in Lear. The gods in Harry’s version are neither Olympians nor kings, but paparazzi and reporters – and so the circle has turned.

Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes. Had he seen more of the golden jubilee year of 2002, he would have observed that his impression that “Britain was intoxicated … Everyone wore some version of the union jack” was quite wrong; swaths of the UK were indifferent, some hostile. His observations about the darkness of the basement flat he once occupied in Kensington Palace, its windows blocked from the light by a neighbour’s 4x4, will seem insulting to those who can’t find a home, or afford to heat one. The logical corollary of the views he now holds would be a personal republicanism, but needless to say that is not the path he takes: “My problem,” he writes, “has never been with the concept of monarchy.” What he shows, though – whether intentionally or not – is that the monarchy makes fools of us all.

Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex (Transworld, £28). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Prince Harry’s book Spare is most traded-in biography of the year

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It may have been a bestseller, breaking the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time, but Prince Harry’s autobiography Spare has now reached a new, rather less salubrious milestone.

According to We Buy Books, the 416-page tome , which was published on Jan 10, was the most traded-in biography of the year.

A spokesman for the books specialist, which “turns unwanted books into cash”, said: “Prince Harry’s Spare was our most traded-in biography of the year. We’ve accepted 459 copies. We limit how many we accept in a timeframe so chances are if we’d accepted every copy, there’d have been a lot more!”

Customers trade in their books online by typing the ISBN number into the website or scanning it on the app and then accepting the instant valuation offered. Although Spare originally retailed at £28, We Buy Books would offer customers £2.40 for their second hand copies. The hardback edition is currently selling for £14 on Amazon and is priced £19.99 at Waterstones.

The book came out in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into 15 languages. There is also a 15-hour audiobook edition, which Harry narrates himself.

Total sales including audio and e-book editions were around 400,000 copies on the day of its release, making it the UK’s fastest selling non-fiction book ever.

It sold more than 1.4 million copies in the US, Canada and Britain on its first day, which was described by Penguin Random House as the largest first-day sales total for any non-fiction book it ever published.

More sales than Barack Obama

It beat Barack Obama’s 2020 autobiography , A Promised Land, to become the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time.

Sales were fueled by many booksellers including Waterstones, WHSmith, and Amazon offering it to customers at half price.

After selling 467,183 print copies in its first week and 750,000 copies across all formats in the UK, it became the fastest-selling nonfiction book in the UK since Nielsen BookData began recording official printed book sales in 1998. Sales well surpassed Kay Allinson’s Pinch of Nom cookbook , which sold 210,506 copies in its first three days of release in 2019.

In the book, which was ghost written by J. R. Moehringer, Harry details how he played second fiddle to his brother William as the “spare to the heir” and reveals the trauma he suffered as a result of the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

He describes being “assaulted” by William , reveals how the King begged his sons not to “make my finals years a misery” and details losing his virginity by “an older lady” in a field behind a pub.

He also revealed he had killed 25 “enemy combatants” while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan.

The book, which accused his stepmother Queen Camilla of leaking stories to the press and suggests the Princess of Wales was insulted by Meghan referring to her having “baby brain”, received mixed reviews .

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50 best autobiographies & biographies of all time

Enlightening and inspiring: these are the best autobiographies and biographies of 2024, and all time. .

Reading an autobiography can offer a unique insight into a world and experience very different from your own – and these real-life stories are even more entertaining, and stranger, than fiction . Take a glimpse into the lives of some of the world's most inspiring and successful celebrities , politicians and sports people and more in our edit of the best autobiographies and biographies to read right now.

• New autobiographies & biographies
• Inspiring autobiographies & biographies
• Sports autobiographies & biographies
• Celebrity autobiographies & biographies
• Political & historical autobiographies
• Literary autobiographies & biographies

The best new autobiographies and biographies

Charles iii, by robert hardman.

Meet the man behind the monarch in this new biography of King Charles III by royal expert and journalist Robert Hardman. Charting Charles III’s extraordinary first year on the throne, a year plighted by sadness and family scandal, Hardman shares insider details on the true nature of the Windsor family feud, and Queen Camilla’s role within the Royal Family. Detailing the highs and lows of royal life in dazzling detail, this new biography of the man who waited his whole life to be King is one of 2024’s must-reads. 

Sociopath: A Memoir

By patric gagne.

The most unputdownable memoir you’ll read this year, Sociopath is the story of Patric Gagne, and her extraordinary life lived on the edge. With seering honestly, Patric explains how, as a child she always knew she was different. Graduating from feelings of apathy to petty theft and stalking, she realised as an adult that she was a sociopath, uncaring of the impact of her actions on others. Sharing the conflict she feels between her impulses, and her desire to live a settled, loving life with her partner, Sociopath is a fascinating story of one woman’s journey to find a place for herself in the world. 

Lisa Marie Presley's memoir

By lisa marie presley.

Lisa Marie Presley was never truly understood . . . until now. Before her death in 2023, she’d been working on a raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir for years, recording countless hours of breathtakingly vulnerable tape, which has finally been put on the page by her daughter, Riley Keough.

Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary

By nina stibbe.

Ten years after the publication of the prize-winning  Love, Nina  comes the author’s diary of her return to London in her sixty-first year. After twenty years, Nina Stibbe, accompanied by her dog Peggy, stays with writer Debby Moggach in London for a year. With few obligations, Nina explores the city, reflecting on her past and embracing new experiences. From indulging in banana splits to navigating her son's dating life, this diary captures the essence of a sixty-year-old runaway finding her place as a "proper adult" once and for all.

Beyond the Story

In honor of BTS's 10th anniversary, this remarkable book serves as the band's inaugural official release, offering a treasure trove of unseen photographs and exclusive content. With Myeongseok Kang's extensive interviews and years of coverage, the vibrant world of K-pop springs to life. As digital pioneers, BTS's online presence has bridged continents, and this volume grants readers instant access to trailers, music videos, and more, providing a comprehensive journey through BTS's defining moments. Complete with a milestone timeline, Beyond the Story stands as a comprehensive archive, encapsulating everything about BTS within its pages.

Hildasay to Home

By christian lewis.

The follow-up to his bestselling memoir Finding Hildasay , in Hildasay to Home Christian Lewis tells the next chapter of his extraordinary journey, step by step. From the unexpected way he found love, to his and Kate's journey on foot back down the coastline and into their new lives as parents to baby Marcus, Christian shares his highs and lows as he and his dog Jet leave Hildasay behind. Join the family as they adjust to life away from the island, and set off on a new journey together. 

by Carolyn Hays

This moving memoir is an ode to Hays' transgender daughter – a love letter to a child who has always known herself. After a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child, the Hays family moved away from their Republican state. In A Girlhood, Hays tells of the brutal truths of being trans, of the sacrificial nature of motherhood and of the lengths a family will go to shield their youngest from the cruel realities of the world. Hays asks us all to love better, for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice.

by Prince Harry

The fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time and packed with revelations, Spare is Prince Harry's story. Twelve-year-old Harry was known as the carefree one; the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir until the loss of his mother changed everything. Then, at twenty-one, he joined the British Army, resulting in post-traumatic stress. Amidst this, the Prince also couldn't find love. Then he met Meghan. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. 

Is This Ok?

By harriet gibsone.

Harriet spent much of her young life feeding neuroses and insecurities with obsessive internet searching and indulging in whirlwind ‘parasocial relationships'. But after a diagnosis of early menopause in her late twenties, her relationship with the internet took a darker turn, as her online addictions were thrown into sharp relief by the corporeal realities of illness and motherhood. An outrageously funny, raw and painfully honest account of trying to find connection in the age of the internet,  Is This Ok? is the stunning literary debut from music journalist, Harriet Gibsone. 

Winner of Pulitzer Prize in Memoir, Stay True  is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. 

Life's Work

By david milch.

Best known for creating smash-hit shows including NYPD Blue and Deadwood, you’d be forgiven for thinking that David Milch had lived a charmed life of luxury and stardom. In this, his new memoir, Milch dispels that myth, shedding light on his extraordinary life in the spotlight. Born in Buffalo New York to a father gripped by drug-addiction, Milch enrolled at Yale Law befire being expelled and finding his true passion for writing. Written following his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s in 2015, in Life’s Work Milch records his joys, sadnesses and struggles with startling clarity and grace. 

Will You Care If I Die?

By nicolas lunabba.

In a world where children murder children, and where gun violence is the worst in Europe, Nicolas Lunabba's job as a social organizer with Malmö's underclass requires firm boundaries and emotional detachment. But all that changes when he meets Elijah – an unruly teenage boy of mixed heritage whose perilous future reminds Nicolas of his own troubled past amongst the marginalized people who live on the fringes of every society. Written as a letter to Elijah,  Will You Care If I Die?  is a disarmingly direct memoir about social class, race, friendship and unexpected love.

The best inspiring autobiographies and biographies

By yusra mardini.

After fleeing her native Syria to the Turkish coast in 2015, Yusra Mardini boarded a small dinghy full of refugees headed for Greece. On the journey, the boat's engine cut out and it started to sink. Yusra, her sister, and two others took to the water to push the overcrowded boat for three and a half hours in open water, saving the lives of those on board. Butterfly is Yusra Mardini's journey from war-torn Damascus to Berlin and from there to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Game. A UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and one of People magazine's 25 Women Changing the World, discover Yusra and her incredible story of resilience and unstoppable spirit.

Finding Hildasay

After hitting rock bottom having suffered with depression for years, Christian Lewis made an impulsive decision to walk the entire coastline of the UK. Just a few days later he set off with a tent, walking boots and a tenner in his pocket. Finding Hildasay tells us some of this incredible story, including the brutal three months Christian Lewis spent on the uninhabited island of Hildasay in Scotland with no fresh water or food. It was there, where his route was most barren, that he discovered pride and respect for himself. This is not just a story of a remarkable journey, but one of depression, survival and the meaning of home. 

The Happiest Man on Earth

By eddie jaku.

A lesson in how happiness can be found in the darkest of times, this is the story of Eddie Jaku, a German Jew who survived seven years at the hands of the Nazis. Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, and a Jew second. All of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp. But through his courage and tenacity he still came to live life as 'the happiest man on earth'. Published at the author turns one hundred, The Happiest Man on Earth is a heartbreaking but hopeful memoir full of inspiration. 

Don't Miss

3 lessons to learn from Eddie Jaku

I know why the caged bird sings, by maya angelou.

A favourite book of former president Obama and countless others, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , recounts Angelou’s childhood in the American south in the 1930s. A beautifully written classic, this is the first of Maya Angelou's seven bestselling autobiographies. 

I Am Malala

By malala yousafzai.

After speaking out about her right to education almost cost her her life, Malala Yousafzi refused to be silenced. Instead, her amazing story has taken her all over the world. This is the story of Malala and her inspirational family, and of how one person's voice can inspire change across the globe. 

In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin

By lindsey hilsum.

In her job as a foreign correspondent, Marie Colvin reported from some of the most dangerous places in the world. It was a job that would eventually cost her her life. In this posthumous biography of the award-winning news journalist, Lindsey Hilsum shares the story of one of the most daring and inspirational women of our times with warmth and wit, conveying Colvin's trademark glamour. 

The best memoirs

This is going to hurt, by adam kay.

Offering a unique insight into life as an NHS junior doctor through his diary entries, Adam Kay's bestselling autobiography is equal parts heartwarming and humorous, and oftentimes horrifying too. With 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions and a tsunami of bodily fluids, Kay provides a no-holds-barred account of working on the NHS frontline. Now a major BBC comedy-drama, don't miss this special edition of This Is Going To Hurt including a bonus diary entries and an afterword from the author. 

The Colour of Madness

By samara linton.

The Colour of Madness  brings together memoirs, essays, poetry, short fiction and artworks by people of colour who have experienced difficulties with mental health. From experiencing micro-aggressions to bias, and stigma to religious and cultural issues, people of colour have to fight harder than others to be heard and helped. Statistics show that people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds in the UK experience poor mental health treatment in comparison to their white counterparts, and are more likely to be held under the Mental Health Act. 

Nothing But The Truth

By the secret barrister.

How do you become a barrister? Why do only 1 per cent of those who study law succeed in joining this mysterious profession? And why might a practising barrister come to feel the need to reveal the lies, secrets, failures and crises at the heart of this world of wigs and gowns? Full of hilarious, shocking and surprising stories,  Nothing But The Truth  tracks the Secret Barrister’s transformation from hang ‘em and flog ‘em, austerity-supporting twenty-something to a campaigning, bestselling, reforming author whose writing in defence of the law is celebrated around the globe.

by Michelle Obama

This bestselling autobiography lifts the lid on the life of one of the most inspiring women of a generation, former first lady Michelle Obama. From her childhood as a gifted young woman in south Chicago to becoming the first black First Lady of the USA, Obama tells the story of her extraordinary life with humour, warmth and honesty. 

Kitchen Confidential

By anthony bourdain.

Regarded as one of the greatest books about food ever written, Kitchen Confidential lays bare the wild tales of the culinary industry. From his lowly position as a dishwasher in Provincetown to cooking at some of the finest restaurants across the world, the much-loved Bourdain translates his sultry, sarcastic and quick-witted personality to paper in this uncensored 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine' account of life as a professional chef. Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.

Everything I Know About Love

By dolly alderton.

Dolly Alderton, perhaps more than any other author, represents the rise of the messy millennial woman – in the very best way possible. Her internationally bestselling memoir gives an unflinching account of the bad dates and squalid flat-shares, the heartaches and humiliations, and most importantly, the unbreakable female friendships that defined her twenties. She weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age. This is a memoir that you'll discuss with loved ones long after the final page. 

The best sports autobiographies and biographies

By chris kamara.

Presenter, commentator, (sometimes masked) singer, footballer, manager and campaigner, Kammy's action-packed career has made him a bona fide British hero. Kammy had a tough upbringing, faced racism on the terraces during his playing career and has, in recent years, dealt with a rare brain condition – apraxia – that has affected his speech and seen him say goodbye to Sky Sports. With entertaining stories of his playing career from Pompey to Leeds and beyond; his management at Bradford City and Stoke; his crazy travels around the world; of  Soccer Saturday  banter; presenting  Ninja   Warrior ; and the incredible friendships he's made along the way,  Kammy  is an unforgettable ride from one of Britain's best-loved broadcasters.

Alone on the Wall

By alex honnold.

In the last forty years, only a handful of climbers have pushed themselves as far, ‘free soloing’ to the absolute limit of human capabilities. Half of them are dead. Although Alex Honnold’s exploits are probably a bit  too  extreme for most of us, the stories behind his incredible climbs are exciting, uplifting and truly awe-inspiring. Alone on the Wall  is a book about the essential truth of being free to pursue your passions and the ability to maintain a singular focus, even in the face of mortal danger. This updated edition contains the account of Alex's El Capitan climb, which is the subject of the Oscar and BAFTA winning documentary,  Free Solo .

On Days Like These

By martin o'neill.

Martin O’Neill has had one of the most incredible careers in football.   With a story spanning over fifty years, Martin tells of his exhilarating highs and painful lows; from the joys of winning trophies, promotion and fighting for World Cups to being harangued by fans, boardroom drama, relegation scraps and being fired. Written with his trademark honesty and humour,  On Days Like These  is one of the most insightful and captivating sports autobiographies and a must-read for any fans of the beautiful game.

Too Many Reasons to Live

By rob burrow.

As a child, Rob Burrow was told he was too small to be a rugby player. Some 500 games for Leeds later, Rob had proved his doubters wrong: he won eight Super League Grand Finals, two Challenge Cups, three World Club Challenges and played for his country in two World Cups. In 2019 though, Rob was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given just two years to live. He went public with the news, determined to fight it all the way. Full of love, bravery and kindness, this is the story of a man who has awed his fans with his positive attitude to life.

With You Every Step, a celebration of friendship by Rob Burrow and Kevin Sinfield

At home with muhammad ali, by hana yasmeen ali.

Written by his daughter Ali using material from her father's audio journals, love letters and her treasured family memories, this sports biography offers an intimate portrait of one of boxing's most legendary figures, and one of the most iconic sports personalities of all time. 

They Don't Teach This

By eniola aluko.

In her autobiography, footballer Eni Aluko addresses themes of dual nationality, race and institutional prejudice, success, gender and faith through her own experiences growing up in Britain. Part memoir, part manifesto for change, They Don't Teach This is a must-read book for 2020. 

Touching The Void

By joe simpson.

A million-copy bestseller, Touching The Void recounts Joe Simpson and Simon Yate's near fatal dscent after climbing Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. A few days after reaching the summit of the mountain, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frost-bitten, with news that that Joe was dead. What happened to Joe, and how the pair dealt with the psychological traumas that resulted when Simon was forced into the appalling decision to cut the rope, makes not only an epic of survival but a compelling testament of friendship. 

The best celebrity autobiographies and biographies

By adrian edmondson.

From brutal schooldays to 80s anarchy, through The Young Ones and beyond, Berserker! is the one-of-a-kind, fascinating memoir from an icon of British comedy, Adrian Edmondson. His star-studded anecdotes and outrageous stories are set to a soundtrack of pop hits, transporting the reader through time and cranking up the nostalgia. But, as one would expect, these stories are also a guaranteed laugh as Ade traces his journey through life and comedy. 

Being Henry

By henry winkler.

Brilliant, funny, and widely-regarded as the nicest man in Hollywood, Henry Winkler shares the disheartening truth of his childhood, the difficulties of a life with severe dyslexia and the pressures of a role that takes on a life of its own. Since the glorious era of  Happy Days  fame, Henry has endeared himself to a new generation with roles in such adored shows as  Arrested Development and  Barry , where he’s revealed himself as an actor with immense depth and pathos. But Being Henry  is about so much more than a life in Hollywood and the curse of stardom. It is a meaningful testament to the power of sharing truth and of finding fulfillment within yourself.

What Are You Doing Here?

By floella benjamin.

Actress, television presenter, member of the House of Lords – Baroness Floella Benjamin is an inspiration to many. But it hasn't always been easy: in What Are You Doing Here?   she describes her journey to London as part of the Windrush generation, and the daily racism that caused her so much pain as a child. She has gone on to remain true to her values, from breaking down barriers as a Play School presenter to calling for diversity at the BBC and BAFTA to resisting the pressures of typecasting. Sharing the lessons she has learned, imbued with her joy and positivity, this autobiography is the moving testimony of a remarkable woman.

Life Lessons

By jay blades.

‘Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.’ Let Jay’s words of wisdom – gleaned from his own triumphs over adversity – help you to find your best path through life. Filled with characteristic warmth and humour, Jay talks about the life lessons that have helped him to find positivity and growth, no matter what he’s found himself facing. Jay shares not only his adventures and escapades but also the way they have shaped his outlook and helped him to live life to the fullest. His insight and advice give you everything you need to be able to reframe your own circumstances and make the best of them.

A Funny Life

By michael mcintyre.

Comic Michael McIntyre specialises in pin-sharp observational routines that have made him the world's bestselling funny man. But when he turns his gaze to himself and his own family, things get even funnier. This bracingly honest memoir covers the highs, lows and pratfalls of a career in comedy, as Michael climbs the greasy pole of success and desperately attempts to stay up there.

by Elton John

Elton John is one of the most successful singer/songwriters of all time, but success didn't come easily to him. In his bestselling autobiography, he charts his extraordinary life, from the early rejection of his work to the heady heights of international stardom and the challenges that came along with it. With candour and humour, he tells the stories of celebrity friendships with John Lennon, George Michael and Freddie Mercury, and of how he turned his life around and found love with David Furnish. Me is the real story of the man behind the music. 

And Away...

By bob mortimer.

National treasure and beloved entertainer, Bob Mortimer, takes us from his childhood in Middlesborough to working as a solicitor in London in his highly acclaimed autobiography. Mortimer’s life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The book covers his numerous misadventures along his path to fame but also reflects on more serious themes, making this both one of the most humorous and poignant celebrity memoirs of recent years. 

by Walter Isaacson

Based on interviews conducted with Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is filled with lessons about innovation, leadership, and values and has inspired a movie starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Seth Rogen. Isaacson tells the story of the rollercoaster life and searingly intense personality of creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized the tech industry. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written and put nothing off limits, making this an unflinchingly candid account of one of the key figures of modern history.

Maybe I Don't Belong Here

By david harewood.

When David Harewood was twenty-three, his acting career began to take flight and he had what he now understands to be a psychotic breakdown. He was physically restrained by six police officers, sedated, then hospitalized and transferred to a locked ward. Only now, thirty years later, has he been able to process what he went through. In this powerful and provocative account of a life lived after psychosis, critically acclaimed actor, David Harewood, uncovers a devastating family history and investigates the very real impact of racism on Black mental health.

Scenes from My Life

By michael k. williams.

When Michael K. Williams died on 6 September 2021, he left behind a career as one of the most electrifying actors of his generation. At the time of his death, Williams had nearly finished his memoir, which traces his life in whole, from his childhood and his early years as a dancer to his battles with addiction. Alongside his achievements on screen he was a committed activist who dedicated his life to helping at-risk young people find their voice and carve out their future. Imbued with poignance and raw honesty,  Scenes from My Life  is the story of a performer who gave his all to everything he did – in his own voice, in his own words.

The best political and historical autobiographies

The fall of boris johnson, by sebastian payne.

Sebastian Payne, Whitehall Editor for the Financial Times, tells the behind-the-scenes story of the fall of former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. After being touted saviour of the Conservative Party, it took Johnson just three years to resign after a series of scandals. From the blocked suspension of Owen Patterson to Partygate and the Chris Pincher allegations, Payne gives us unparalleled access to those who were in the room when key decisions were made, ultimately culminating in Boris's downfall. This is a gripping and timely look at how power is gained, wielded and lost in Britain today.

by Sung-Yoon Lee

The Sister , written by Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar and specialist on North Korea, uncovers the truth about Kim Yo Jong and her close bond with Kim Jong Un. In 2022, Kim Yo Jong threatened to nuke South Korea, reminding the world of the dangers posed by her state. But how did the youngest daughter of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, his ‘sweet princess’, become the ruthless chief propagandist, internal administrator and foreign policymaker for her brother’s totalitarian regime? Readable and insightful, this book is an invaluable portrait of a woman who might yet hold the survival of her despotic dynasty in her hands.

Long Walk To Freedom

By nelson mandela.

Deemed 'essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history' by former US President, Barack Obama, this is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest moral and political leaders, Nelson Mandela. Imprisoned for more than 25 years, president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, the Nobel Peace Prize winner's life was nothing short of extraordinary. Long Walk to Freedom vividly tells this story; one of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph, written with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader. 

The Diary of a Young Girl

By anne frank.

No list of inspiring autobiographies would be complete without Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl . Charting the thirteen-year-old's time hiding in a 'Secret Annex' with her family to escape Gestapo detection, this book (which was discovered after Anne Frank's death), is a must-read, and a testament to the courage shown by the millions persecuted during the Second World War. 

The best literary autobiographies

The immortal life of henrietta lacks, by rebecca skloot.

Born to a poor black tobacco farmer in rural Virginia in 1920, Henrietta Lacks died of cancer when she was just 31. However, her story does not end there, as her cancer cells, taken without permission during her treatment continued to live on being used for research all over the world and becoming a multi-million dollar industry, with her family only learning of her impact more than two decades after her death. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot tells the story of a woman who never knew of her lifesaving impact and asks: do we ever really own our bodies? 

A Fortunate Woman

By polly morland.

Funny, emotional and imbued with great depth, A Fortunate Woman is an exploration of the life of a country doctor in a remote and wild wooded valley in the Forest of Dean. The story was sparked when writer and documentary maker Polly Morland found a photograph of the valley she lives in tucked inside a tattered copy of John Berger’s  A Fortunate Man . Itself an account of the life of a country doctor, the book inspired a woman doctor to follow her vocation in the same remote place. And it is the story of this woman that Polly Morland tells, in this compelling portrait of landscape and community.

Father and Son

By jonathan raban.

On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his own mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the extraordinary story of his parents’ marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.

Crying in H Mart

By michelle zauner.

This radiant read by singer, songwriter and guitarist Michelle Zauner delves into the experience of being the only Asian-American child at her school in Eugene, Oregon, combined with family struggles and blissful escapes to her grandmother's tiny Seoul apartment. The family bond is the shared love of Korean food, which helped Michelle reclaim her Asian identity in her twenties. A lively, honest, riveting read.

The Reluctant Carer

By the reluctant carer.

The phone rings. Your elderly father has been taken to hospital, and your even older mother is home with nobody to look after her. What do you do? Drop everything and go and help of course. But it's not that straightforward, and your own life starts to fall apart as quickly as their health. Irresistibly funny, unflinching and deeply moving, this is a love letter to family and friends, to carers and to anyone who has ever packed a small bag intent on staying for just a few days. This is a true story of what it really means to be a carer, and of the ties that bind even tighter when you least expect it. 

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Spare Kindle Edition

• Print length 409 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date January 10, 2023
• File size 4225 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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From the artist, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BCP3JP6F
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (January 10, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 10, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 4225 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 409 pages
• #2 in Historical British Biographies
• #2 in Biographies of Royalty (Kindle Store)
• #8 in Great Britain History (Books)

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