Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller is the award-winning author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. The book, a memoir of her childhood in Africa, is now a best-selling paperback.

To the Wedding by John Berger (Vintage, $12). I am often awestruck by the languid, easy way in which Berger tells a story, with such poetic force, such courage, such compassion. To the Wedding follows a great pilgrimage of late-20th-century characters who are tugging their histories behind them like millstones. Yet it is also a timeless story of unconditional love.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $12). I keep this short memoir by my bed because it is so emotionally honest, so horrifyingly funny, so incredibly rich. Among writers practicing the craft in our time, Ondaatje is second in greatness only to Berger. His every word feels deliberate, controlled, poetic.

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Echoing Silences by Alexander Kanengoni (Heinemann, $12). Kanengoni was a liberation fighter in Rhodesia, and this stark autobiographical novel about his war experiences punched me right in the stomach the first time I read it.

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, $13). Naipaul is a fearful snob, which is a pity, because he has an otherwise wonderful mind. The tenuousness of life in a post-colonial world is an issue of power, not race, and Naipaul dispels the race myth with such an accurate blow to the head that I think he kills it dead forever.

The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr (Penguin, $14). Until recently, memoirs were either too scandalous to stomach or they glossed over the knotty issues that make families interesting. In this 1996 account of her East Texas upbringing, Karr writes unflinchingly about the sort of lives usually sanitized as fiction, and she does so without making us feel as if we have accidentally walked into someone’s therapy session.

The Meadow