Also of interest...in overcoming long odds

Gypsy Boy

by Mikey Walsh (Thomas Dunne, $25)

Born into a family of bare-knuckle Gypsy boxers, memoirist Mikey Walsh was “taking punches from his dad by the time most kids were in preschool,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. A true outcast, Walsh was not just a Gypsy but also came to discover that he was gay. Despite considerable struggles, Walsh eventually found acceptance. Memoirs written under a pseudonym often “reek of fraudulence,” but Gypsy Boy “feels, in all its cocky, awkward affection and anguish, like the real deal.”

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Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman (Simon & Schuster, $23)

Deborah Feldman’s memoir reads like “one of the darker Grimms’ fairy tales,” said Marion Winik in Newsday. Abandoned by her mother, Feldman grew up under a series of “twisted caregivers” as a free-spirited girl chafing under the rules and customs of a Hasidic Jewish sect in Brooklyn. After an arranged marriage that led to more misery, Feldman ultimately liberated herself, starting a new life and promising her son she’d never again stay silent. “Let’s hope she never does.”

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson (Grove, $25)

It’s unlikely that novelist Jeanette Winterson could imagine a villain as cruel as her adoptive mother, said Sarah Barmak in the Toronto Globe and Mail. When she wasn’t locking Winterson in a coal bin, this gun-toting terror was reminding the girl that “the devil led us to the wrong crib.” Though Winterson’s first memoir is sometimes self-pitying, it offers a touching story about how books saved her life, how literature can be a child’s lifeline.

At Last

by Edward St. Aubyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

With At Last, Edward St. Aubyn brings “a remarkable cycle of novels” to a close, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. In previous books, the aristocratic author’s stand-in, Patrick Melrose, overcame sexual abuse by his father and heroin addiction. Here, the character finds a measure of peace. For those new to the series: Imagine “one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”