School Memoirs

From iconic musicians Tegan and Sara comes a nostalgic memoir about high school, detailing their first loves and first songs in a compelling look back at their origin story. 'Honest and hilarious, dishy and sweet, smart and self-aware and utterly charming.' Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her...

Christina Asquith presents a moving firsthand account of her year teaching in one of Philadelphia’s worst schools. Told with striking humor and honesty, her story begins when the School District of Philadelphia, in desperate need of 1,500 new teachers, instituted a policy of hiring "emergency certified" instructors. Asquith, then a 25-year-old reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined their untrained ranks. More challenging than her classroom in the crime-infested neighborhood known as "the Badlands" are the trials she faced outside.

Corey White was a golden child. He knew this because his father would hit his mother and his sisters but not him. And his mother adored him so much she let him drop out of primary school. After losing his father to jail and his mother to heroin, though, he became a target for cruelty and...

One teacher. One school. One year. Brendan James Murray has been a high school teacher for more than ten years. In that time he has seen hundreds of kids move through the same hallways and classrooms - boisterous, angry, shy, big-hearted, awkward - all of them on the journey to adulthood. In The...

A sharp-witted and deeply insightful look into the storied world of elite prep schools from the first African-American legacy student to graduate from The Taft School. Early on in Kendra James’ professional life, she began to feel like she was selling a lie. As an admissions officer...

'My first stray thought: cancer is a gift. I'm lucky to have it. What priceless material for a doctor-writer.' What lessons might cancer teach him before it finishes him off? Peter Goldsworthy asks, obliquely. A GP of forty years' practice, as well as one of Australia's most awarded and...

In 2008, Annabelle Chauncy, a 21-year-old Australian university student, visited a school in Uganda, a country that had the highest school dropout rates in the world. Shocked by what she saw, she decided to act. Eighteen years later, her foundation, School for Life, oversees three schools with a...

Welcome to Noreen Olson's kitchen table, where everything happens. She loves birds, animals, family, children, friends, growing things and life on the farm, and writes about them and all the odd situations they manage to get into with engaging liveliness. Many of the pieces are humorous, but more than that, they are heartwarming and true. In them you will see reflections of your own loves, life, guilt, laughter, nostalgia, memories and beliefs. All of the animals, people, and incidents are real and names have been changed for "her own protection".

Brought to you by Penguin. The extraordinary early life in India and England of one of the world's leading public intellectuals Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh where he grew up, the village of Santiniketan where he was raised by his...

John's medical memoir was born from chaotic, disjointed, funny and frightening late-night letters to friends over email (any recipients of which all those years ago will likely walk away now). Those manic blogs from the hospital wards during under-slept call nights (which left a few friends wondering if he had invaded the hospital pharmacy) were the genesis for this book, Playing Doctor.

The powerful and uplifting story of one Ugandan woman who has given hope to hundreds of female victims of war and violence. Alice Achan was just 13 when the Lord's Resistance Army first terrorised her village in Northern Uganda in 1987. She spent five years on the run from the brutal LRA and then cared for her young nieces after their mother died of AIDS, losing them one by one to the disease.

A wild ride through a disaffected youth by a gifted writer. Dominic Gordon explores his memories in tight prose bursting with insight, audacious ideas and dark humour. What happens to the adolescent spirit when all vestiges of innocence about the world are foregone, replaced within the grinding...

It’s 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher – attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in...

In this New York Times bestselling memoir, Malala Yousafzai—the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—inspires young readers with her stunning story of resilience and power. I Am Malala. This is my story. Malala Yousafzai was only ten years old when the Taliban took control of her region...

In a medical model that was only ever designed to react to disease, this book dares to empower you, my fellow Nurse, to do the hard stuff better. This is my comeback story. I reveal the SH*T they don’t tell you in nursing school and share experiences from my 17 years in nursing that will tick you off, make you laugh, and bring you to tears.

Social media phenomenon and mental health advocate Chris Olsen invites readers into his therapist’s office—and into the story he’s spent years trying to understand—in this raw, fearless, and darkly funny memoir. For much of his childhood, Chris Olsen believed his family was ordinary...

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own.

Winner of the 2007 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir and Finalist for Narration by the Author From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-bestselling author who wore his celebrity with extraordinary grace comes a magnificently appealing book about teaching and about how one great storyteller found his...

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England. 'The war went. We sang in the playground, "Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb’s boom, and two big explosions." David’s father came back from Burma and didn’t eat rice...

Winner of the 2007 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir and Finalist for Narration by the Author From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-bestselling author who wore his celebrity with extraordinary grace comes a magnificently appealing book about teaching and about how one great storyteller found his...