Best new biographies and memoirs to read in 2025

From "meditations on grief" to "awkward coming-of-age" tales, the best memoirs and biographies "tell someone else's story but ring true to our own life experiences", said The Independent. Covering a vast range of material, these "intimate and compelling" books can shine a light on "anonymous but fascinating people" or reveal the innermost thoughts of the planet's biggest celebrities. Here are some of our top picks to add to your reading list.

The Colonialist

Today, Cecil Rhodes is best known for the "scholarship that bears his name" – and the campaign to have his statue removed from Oriel College, Oxford, said Hannah Rose Woods in The Observer. To his contemporaries, however, he was "a colossus". Born in 1853 in modest circumstances – his father was a Hertfordshire vicar – he rose to become a gold and diamond magnate, a "railway and telegraph entrepreneur", prime minister of the Cape Colony and a fervent supporter of imperial expansion. "Rudyard Kipling thought he was a king among men."

In this "deeply researched biography", William Kelleher Storey, an American historian, seeks less to understand Rhodes than to excavate "his material legacy". He focuses on the processes – financial, political, technological – that helped to make Rhodes "one of the richest and most famous men in the British empire" while causing "enduring damage" to southern Africa. This is all "very well done indeed", even if it means that Storey glosses over the more private aspects of Rhodes's life – including his "likely" homosexuality, which he "does not dwell on".

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"Rhodes's career was meteoric," said Piers Brendon in Literary Review. Sent to "grow cotton in Natal" aged 17, he was soon "harvesting a much richer crop from the newly discovered diamond fields of Kimberley". In 1880, aged only 34, he co-founded De Beers, and he went on to control "90% of the world's output" of diamonds, becoming hugely rich off the back of miners toiling in brutal conditions. Yet money didn't interest him much in itself; it was simply a means to help him realise his "dream" of an Africa "painted red". Storey's book is "scholarly", but the "nuts and bolts" of Rhodes's business dealings are the least interesting aspects of his life, and so it is unfortunately rather "dull".

On the contrary, we need to understand how Rhodes despoiled Africa, said A.N. Wilson in The Spectator, and in this "brave" book, Storey relates that history "punctiliously". There are those who still see him as a "bit of a hero" – who highlight his undeniable philanthropy, and who respond to the charge of racism against him by pointing to the provision he made in his will that his scholarships be denied to no student on grounds of "race or religion". Yet as Storey explains, when he used the word "race", Rhodes probably meant American, or German. He did not likely envisage Africans at Oxford. He was an unapologetic racist who helped turn the "morally nuanced British nation and empire ... into a brigand state" – and his defenders "are simply wrong".

How to Lose Your Mother

Molly Jong-Fast is the daughter of Erica Jong, best known for her groundbreaking and bestselling 1973 novel "Fear of Flying", about a liberated woman's quest for pleasure, said Alice O'Keeffe in The Times – and in which she coined the phrase "zipless f**k" to denote casual sex. As Jong-Fast relates in her "ruthlessly honest and often hilarious memoir", Erica's abilities as a writer weren't matched by her parenting skills. When her daughter was small, "she was never home, always travelling or out on the town". Erica's husband, Jonathan Fast, would try to get her to spend an hour a day with Jong-Fast, but she simply "couldn't do it": the most she'd manage would be half an hour. Eventually, Jong-Fast's parents divorced, and Erica slid into alcoholism ("always denied") and became increasingly obsessed with her waning fame. Jong-Fast developed problems of her own – including an eating disorder and drug and alcohol addiction – but she overcame these and is now a "devoted mother to three children", as well as a successful journalist and podcaster.

Her memoir is partly an account of her childhood, but also a description of her "annus horribilis" of two years ago, when Erica (by now in her early 80s) developed dementia, various friends and relatives died, and Jong-Fast's husband was diagnosed with cancer, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times. She spares few details as she documents her mother's decline: her increasingly stilted social interactions, her neglect of her personal hygiene. "Jong-Fast is aware that this memoir is a betrayal of a kind" (though her mother, she points out, often featured her in her writing). But if she is angry, she has reason to be: "put bluntly – bad mothers make bad daughters". Often rancorous, though never self-indulgent, this book is a moving portrait of a "painful and maddening" relationship.

The Spy in the Archive

In March 1992, an "elderly, ill-dressed and inarticulate" Russian walked into the newly opened British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, "carrying a duffel bag stuffed with papers", said Donald Rayfield in Literary Review. Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired KGB archivist, was nearly shown the door, but a young diplomat persuaded MI6 to "take a closer look". The bag proved to be a remarkable "counterintelligence bonanza": the papers revealed the identities of hundreds of Soviet spies, as well as numerous KGB plots, including a plan to break the legs of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who'd defected to the West in 1961. In this "enthralling" biography, Gordon Corera charts Mitrokhin's journey from loyal KGB officer to "disillusioned" spiller of secrets. He had become horrified by the KGB's repression of the Soviet people, and its deceit, said Alan Judd in The Spectator. But his defection was also fuelled by resentment. During overseas postings early in his career, he had committed various blunders. As a result, he was removed from operational work and consigned to a "dead-end job in the archives".

Mitrokhin extracted information by writing coded messages on scraps of paper, which he'd smuggle out of the KGB's headquarters in his socks, said James Owen in The Sunday Times. At his dacha, he would "reconstitute the documents with a typewriter" – before burying them underground in milk churns. All this took "remarkable courage": discovery would have led to certain execution. After he was exfiltrated to England in 1994, he "became disappointed with what he found in the West" – and angry that his revelations didn't lead to "Nuremberg- style justice for Russia's former leaders". This book is an "overdue and often striking memorial" to a man who remained, to the end, a "prickly oddball".

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, claims Ron Chernow, was the "most original character in American history". After reading his "deeply absorbing" biography, it's hard to disagree, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. With admirable "ease and clarity", Chernow tracks the "profoundly American life" of the man born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, who became "by turns a printer, steamboat pilot, journalist, stand-up storyteller, bestselling author, publisher, political pundit, champion of racial equality and all-round scourge of authoritarianism". Many aspects of the story are familiar: the boyhood spent next to the Mississippi River, which inspired his two best-loved works, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"; the gradual abandonment of the racist Southern outlook of his youth and transformation into a "Northerner"; the "gruelling" global speaking tours he undertook later in life. The figure who emerges is not particularly likeable – self-centred, often vindictive, "something of a money-hungry arriviste" – but he "was also a genius". And Chernow has done him justice in what will surely prove the "standard biography".

Despite his "ability to churn out 4,000 words of chiselled prose a day", Twain didn't see himself as primarily a "pen wielder", said Pratinav Anil in The Times. He "thought he was destined to be a tycoon". And yet virtually all his business ventures flopped. In the 1870s, he passed up an opportunity to invest in an "outlandish device called the telephone", and poured his life savings, along with his "coal-heiress wife's tidy inheritance" – $8m in today's money – into an ill-fated typesetting machine called the Paige Compositor. Thousands more went on a bogus cure for indigestion, and his move into publishing "turned sour with a string of pricey vanity projects". The resulting debts forced Twain into unhappy "European exile" for a decade; Chernow's account of all this is "charming, sympathetic yet judicious".

Late in life, after his wife's death, Twain developed a disturbing, though "apparently non-sexual", fixation on young girls, said Erica Wagner in The New Statesman. His "angelfish", as he called them, became his companions, though "once they turned 16, he lost interest and dropped them". Chernow deals with this issue sensitively; but elsewhere gets too bogged down in detail, while neglecting the "wider framework" of Twain's life. The results are often frustrating. "Strange to read a biography of Mark Twain – that most vibrantly entertaining of writers and personalities – and feel a little weary of him by page 900 or so."

The Memoir: Part One by Cher

"There was some sniggering" when the news broke that Cherilyn Sarkisian – aka Cher – was going to publish a two-part memoir, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. While a president can get away with such a "power move", it seems less justifiable for a pop star "who once sang 'The Shoop Shoop Song'". Yet it turns out that Cher has led such an eventful life that two volumes may not be enough. She was born in California in 1946, to a heroin-addicted Armenian father and a singer mother who married eight times, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. While much of her childhood was spent in chaotic poverty, there were periods of "wealth and plenty", depending on whom her mother was "married to at the time". Cher met her first husband, Sonny Bono, a songwriter 11 years her senior, in a coffee shop when she was 16. When he walked in, she recalls, "everyone else in the room faded". Having worked together as backing singers, they formed the singing duo Sonny & Cher, and in 1965 hit the big time with their "deathless global smash" "I Got You Babe", which knocked The Beatles' "Help!" off the top of the UK charts.

While Cher and Sonny had a "sizzling chemistry in performance", offstage he was an "old-fashioned, controlling" Svengali, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. A fan of Machiavelli, he worked Cher "like a pack mule" while saddling her with contracts that gave him ownership of 95% of her earnings (the remaining 5% went to lawyers). The pair reinvented themselves as TV stars in the early 1970s, making the hugely successful "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour", but divorced in 1975. Covering the period up to the dawn of Cher's "serious movie career in the early 1980s", "The Memoir: Part One" is a "detailed and characteristically profane" examination of a fascinating and remarkable life.

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Things in Nature Merely Grow

The Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li begins her "quietly devastating" memoir by "laying out the facts", said Suzanne Joinson in The Guardian. "And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering." Li and her husband had two sons, Vincent and James. Vincent died in 2017, aged 16; James died in 2024, aged 19. Both ended their lives by jumping in front of trains not far from the family home in New Jersey. Both were academically gifted, but had very different personalities. Vincent, who "loved baking and knitting", was the more flamboyant and emotional of the two – a boy, Li says, who lived "feelingly". James, by contrast, a "brilliant linguist", was "self-contained, somewhat unreachable", more at home with facts than feelings. If Vincent died because he couldn't cope with his emotions, James, Li suggests, "died from thinking". The story she tells in "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is so terrible that it "can only be conveyed through a restrained and astringent English". Yet the effect of this is not to distance the reader, but to create an "almost unbearable intimacy".

Li, who grew up in Beijing, and began her "prize-winning literary career" after moving to the US in 1996, is fiercely resistant to "platitudes about loss and grief", said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times. "Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process," she writes, "and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone." Instead of grief, she strives for "radical acceptance" – which seems to mean being aware that she is condemned to exist in the "abyss", while also carrying on in the normal world – getting out of bed at the regular time, playing the piano, studying Euclidean geometry. "Life is stubborn," she writes. "So am I."

Li offers some context to her son's deaths by exploring her own past, said Helen Brown in The Daily Telegraph. We learn that she was "relentlessly belittled and beaten by her mother as a child", and that she suffered bouts of severe depression, and twice attempted suicide when her sons were young. Did this, she asks bluntly, make "death feel like a viable solution to life's problems" for them? In the face of such unanswerable questions, Li "resists anger or regret", opting instead for a "cool-headed clarity". There's something remarkable about her "determination to live with dignity and defiance through this extremity", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. A work of "harsh beauty", her memoir is "unlike any other book I've read".

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The Heart-Shaped Tin

One August day in 2020, the food writer Bee Wilson was in her kitchen when a "vast heart-shaped tin" she had long owned "eerily and inexplicably" clattered to the ground in front of her, said Ceci Browning in The Times. Twenty-three years earlier, Wilson had used the tin to bake her wedding cake – a "dense yet cherry-less fruitcake". Her husband, however, had recently walked out on her, "nonchalantly" telling her he "didn't love her any more". The "rusting tin", which had once stood for "Disneyfied romance", was now a "symbol of the settled life she had lost". In her new book, Wilson draws on this episode to look more widely at kitchen objects and the meanings they acquire. She talks to friends about their cherished old pans, and examines objects from previous eras – such as the "small tin spoon" that Polish Holocaust survivor Jacob Chaim "secretly fashioned for himself while imprisoned in a forced labour camp". Striking a "perfect" balance between memoir and survey, "The Heart-Shaped Tin" is a "thoroughly enjoyable book".

Wilson is an "engaging and often erudite" guide to the "strange potency of everyday things", said Lucy Lethbridge in Literary Review. She considers "objects that were once stalwarts but now seem old-fashioned, such as toast racks and even teapots". She movingly recalls the blunt knife with which her mother – a "brilliant Shakespeare scholar who developed dementia" – would peel her "customary breakfast pear". Not being someone who spends much time in the kitchen, I was surprised by how much I loved this book, said Tanya Gold in The Daily Telegraph. Through a "close reading" of kitchen utensils, Wilson has produced something "wonderful and original": a story of love and loss that somehow feels "even more intimate than a tell-all memoir".

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

"Another Beatles book?" said Simon Schama in the Financial Times. "Honestly, do we need it? Yes we do, when it's as revelatory as Ian Leslie's 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'." Leslie, a journalist, is no "pop hagiographer"; instead, he sets out to "rescue" Lennon and McCartney from the "tone-deaf stereotype" perpetuated in countless biographies, which casts their relationship in terms of "gladiatorial opposition": Lennon as a "take-no-prisoners visionary", McCartney as a "crooning balladeer". Such a view, Leslie contends, was "largely the self-serving fiction" of Lennon during the band's break-up. The reality is more nuanced – Lennon wrote "soft ballads", McCartney could be "tonsil-shreddingly raw" – but in any case, Leslie writes, focusing on their differences means missing the "whole glory of Lennon-McCartney", which lay in their "interconnectedness". His book is an extended hymn to their creative partnership – a "romantic epic of the starlit, star-crossed, outrageously gifted pair, both inseparable and incompatible". At once "poetically exuberant and musically analytical", "John & Paul" is "brilliant".

Leslie opens his story in 1957, with a 15-year-old McCartney "making his way to a summer fête in Woolton to see a skiffle band called The Quarrymen, fronted by a charismatic teenager called John Lennon", said Deborah Levy in The New Statesman. The pair meet, and a friendship develops: soon they are bunking off school and writing songs together at Paul's house. Grief, as well as music, united them: both lost their mothers in their teens.

Much about the "journey from there – via Hamburg, the Cavern Club, London and America" – is familiar, said Alwyn Turner in The Times. Yet there's a "freshness" to Leslie's telling, a "wonder at the sheer implausibility and novelty of it all". Full of psychological insight and "lovely writing", his book is "tremendous" and "fascinating".

Above all, Leslie has a knack for describing Beatles songs in a way that reveals "new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later", said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. "She Loves You", while seeming to cleave to the conventions of a "boy-girl love song", is actually a song "about friendship between boys". In "Strawberry Fields", the "listener is oriented just enough to take pleasure in being lost". "Penny Lane" is McCartney's "toytown diorama". Up to now, I had considered Ian MacDonald's "Revolution in the Head" (1994) to be the "gold standard of Beatles books". With this "enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss", Leslie has, I think, surpassed it.

Source Code by Bill Gates

In the first installment of his planned trilogy of memoirs, Bill Gates remembers his early life growing up in Seattle and journey to co-founding Microsoft at the age of 20. The tech billionaire "offers insight into his family", sketching an "affectionate" portrait of his father and "virtuous, albeit peculiar" mother, said Martin Chilton in The Independent. Both parents were worried about their "extremely bright, reclusive" son; Gates recalls struggling with social interactions, preferring instead to read books alone.

The book is filled with "candid" moments from his reflections on being considered "somewhat unlikeable" to his "youthful experiments with LSD". For those interested in how Gates became such an "influential businessman", "Source Code" will make for enjoyable reading. "Fascinating tidbits" give us the "inside view from a hyper-focused young man with a brilliant mind", and I finished the book with a "respect for Gates' intellect" and an "appreciation of why he is such a unique achiever".

It's a "charmingly told" story, and one that completely "immerses" us in Gates' world, added Tom Knowles in The Telegraph. "But the interested reader may be more inclined to wait for the second and third books. That, we can hope, is where the real drama will begin."

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Me and Mr Jones by Suzi Ronson

In 1971, Suzi Ronson (then Suzanne Fussey) was a 21-year-old hairdresser at a salon in Beckenham, southeast London, when one of her customers – Mrs Jones – mentioned her "artistic" son David, said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. The next week, Mrs Jones brought in David's wife, Angie, who was so delighted with the "outrageous" haircut Suzi gave her that she took her to meet David himself – "a pale and epicene young man" who had just started calling himself David Bowie. With the help of a German anti-dandruff product, Suzi transformed David's "mousy" hair into a "spiky red feather cut". It was the birth of the "look of Ziggy Stardust".

Suzi, infatuated with the couple and their bohemian world, became Bowie's stylist, and soon after went on the road with him and the Spiders from Mars. Five decades on, she has written an "honest and troubled memoir" of her time as his "hair'n'make-up mascot". It belongs to a niche genre – call it "I-was-Sinatra's-valet" – but her book offers a compelling portrait of Bowie "on the verge of stardom".

Ronson skilfully charts her drab suburban upbringing, so different from Bowie's "countercultural" mileu, said Deborah Levy in Literary Review. With "perfect pitch and tension", she recounts key moments in his early career – from his legendary performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972 to the night a year later when he unexpectedly "retired" Ziggy Stardust.

Her book makes a refreshing change from the hagiographic tone of most Bowie biographies, said John Aizlewood on iNews. Here, "the star emerges as cold": he sacks his drummer on his wedding day, and expects Suzi to procure him an "endless supply of young girls and boys". Suzi herself is soon "cut adrift", at which point she marries the guitarist Mick Ronson, who had also been ditched by Bowie. After that, the book loses its dynamism.

Much Bowie literature consists of "pretentious evaluation" of his lyrics and influences, said Suzanne Moore in The New Statesman. Ronson, by contrast, barely mentions his music, and instead focuses on practical matters – such as sewing the jewels onto Bowie's jockstrap, or worrying "about all the sweat breaking the zips of his costumes". She tells us that she slept with him once, but is "discreet" about the details. It makes for an engaging, often endearing account of the "magical rising of Ziggy, by the woman who put the colour in his hair".

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