Best memoirs and biographies to read in 2025

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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Letters by Oliver Sacks (edited by Kate Edgar)

The neurologist Oliver Sacks – who died, aged 82, in 2015 – "was a compulsive letter-writer", said Lynn Barber in The Daily Telegraph. From 1985, the year his international bestseller "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" appeared, "he received about 5,000 letters a year and tried to reply to all of them". Sacks made carbon copies of the letters he wrote – the files ran to 200,000 pages – and these have now been whittled down to 700 pages by his long-time editor Kate Edgar. While he is sometimes given to "extravagance and self-pity", the letters also show the "extraordinary breadth" of his scholarship and his "genius for describing people".

Sacks, who grew up in north London, the son of two doctors, had a "traumatic childhood", said Gavin Francis in The Observer. During the War, he was evacuated to a "sadistic residential school". His homosexuality caused further emotional pain: when he came out in his late teens, his mother described him as an "abomination". After qualifying in medicine in Britain, he moved permanently to America – spending four years in California before settling in New York. His first book, "Migraine" – based on his experiences working at a headache clinic – appeared in 1970; three years later, he published the "groundbreaking" "Awakenings", about his success treating patients with a rare disorder known as "sleeping sickness".

As a young man, Sacks was an avid weightlifter and motorcyclist, and imbibed huge quantities of drugs, said Ralf Webb in The Guardian. Later, "workaholism" displaced substance abuse. For much of his life, he was a lonely figure – he was celibate for "30-odd years" – but found love in his final decade, with the writer Bill Hayes. These letters – "inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse" – reveal a "brilliant and vivid mind".

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A Second Act by Dr Matt Morgan

Matt Morgan has more than 20 years' experience as an intensive care doctor, "labouring at the extreme margins of life", said Tim Adams in The Observer. As well as witnessing hundreds of deaths, he has treated many patients who, despite their "vital signs" flatlining, "have returned to tell the tale". In "A Second Act" – a sequel to his bestselling memoir "Critical", about his time in intensive care – he focuses on ten such "survivors". They include Ed, who was "fatally" struck by lightning; Luca, who medically died after contracting Covid, only to be "restored by the blood oxygenation technique ECMO"; and Roberto, whose heart stopped for eight hours after being "frozen solid on a mountain ledge in the Dolomites". Such people, Morgan reveals, experience a "kind of double gratitude": for their miraculous "deliverance", and for the "unique knowledge" it brings. Those who have nearly died, he writes, truly understand how precarious (and precious) life is, and are the ones we really should be listening to. His book is an "excellent guide" to what they can teach us.

Not all of their hard-won wisdom is exactly revelatory, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times. We should – apparently – regularly tell the people we care about that we love them. "Do it now," Morgan urges, "because you may not get a second chance." I was also unconvinced by his concept of "self-funeraling" – the idea that people should stage mock funerals, in an effort to glean the insights accessed by those who've nearly died. Still, Morgan has a "knack" for "writing simply and sincerely", in a tone that is pleasingly "chatty". It's no surprise that his previous books were bestsellers; and "A Second Act" is also a thought-provoking and "enjoyable" read.

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Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux

The biographer Sue Prideaux has a track record of rehabilitating "19th century enfants terribles", said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph. "I Am Dynamite!", her "highly entertaining" 2018 life of Nietzsche, took pains to prove that the philosopher was no antisemite. She has also penned sympathetic biographies of Strindberg and Munch. In her latest work, she offers an "equally stout defence" of the French painter Paul Gauguin – today widely regarded as an "adulterous imperialist" who "spread syphilis" to teenage girls on Tahiti. While admitting that Gauguin was not "exactly a saint", Prideaux stresses that he was no "ideologue" of empire: he consistently decried French policies in Tahiti, and defended the indigenous culture of Polynesia. Nor is there any evidence that he had syphilis. In challenging the stereotypes, Prideaux has performed a valuable service – even if not everyone will be convinced by her claims about "Gauguin's goodness".

His life was certainly "remarkable and varied", said Stephen Smith in Literary Review. Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin spent part of his childhood in Peru (his mother being descended from a wealthy family there) and would tell people: "I am a savage from Peru". Despite performing poorly at school, he became "filthy rich" in his 20s as a trader on the Paris Bourse. In 1873, he married Mette-Sophie Gad, from a "respectable" Danish family, and they had five children. At first, painting was a hobby; but it became his main means of supporting himself after he lost his job in the 1882 stock market crash.

Telling his wife he needed to give free rein to the "savage" side of his nature, Gauguin left his family and moved to Brittany in 1886, said Tim Adams in The Observer. The following year, he travelled to Panama and the Caribbean (briefly working as a labourer on the Panama Canal) and, in 1888, he stayed with Vincent van Gogh in Arles – an "insane and creative" nine-week period that culminated in van Gogh cutting off his ear.

In 1891, Gauguin departed for Tahiti, said Nadia Beard in the Financial Times. Most of the remaining 12 years of his life were spent either there or in the Marquesas Islands. Polynesia, while not the paradise he'd expected, enabled him to find a "new artistic language, one that would pave the way for Henri Matisse and others". The paintings he completed – often of semi-naked island girls – cemented his status as a great artist. Prideaux's impressively balanced book fleshes Gauguin out "with nuance and detail". It is a "scintillating" achievement.#

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Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King by Anupreeta Das

Entrepreneurial genius? Aggressive monopolist? Major philanthropist? As the title of this book suggests, people have a range of takes on Bill Gates, said Nicole Kobie in The Times. The Microsoft co-founder was the original nerd-turned-billionaire – the "classic model" who paved the way for the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Once famed for his ruthlessness, Gates reinvented himself as a global philanthropist after Microsoft's alleged monopolistic practices landed the company in legal difficulty, and for six straight years YouGov polls found him to be the world's "most admired" man.

More recently, however, revelations about his ties to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – as well as his extra-marital affairs – have tarnished his reputation. In her well-researched and entertaining book, the New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das charts these "ups and downs" while using her subject to reflect on the "hidden influence of billionaires". Full of "intriguing titbits" – from Gates's love of fast cars to his "cringeworthy" pursuit of female employees – it "makes for compelling reading".

As Das delves into different facets of Gates's life, "eye-opening" details emerge, said The Economist. Gates, we learn, is the biggest private owner of farmland in America. The charitable foundation he started with his ex-wife Melinda outspends many governments – and even the WHO; this enables it to shape health policy in many countries, yet it is "accountable to no one". But the book has a major flaw: Gates never really comes alive as a person (he declined to be interviewed for it). Das's narrative has a "Gates-shaped hole" at its centre.

It also struck me as overly critical, said Felix Salmon in The Washington Post. Whatever his personal failings, there is surely a "lot to commend about Gates". Yet you won't read much in this book about the way he translated his ambitious vision of "a computer on every desk" into reality, or the key role he has played in the "spectacularly successful fight" against diseases such as HIV/Aids and malaria. Instead, the book "often reads like an extended list of all the major and minor complaints Das could find"; and not just about Gates, but about billionaires, nerds and philanthropists more generally.

Still, it does raise important questions, said Richard Waters in the Financial Times – about the growing chasm between the richest and the rest, and the moral demands we can make of those who use their wealth to do good. Even if it is not the final word on Gates, this book adds to our "understanding of the man".

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The Diaries of Franz Kafka

When Franz Kafka's diaries were first published soon after his death, aged 40, in 1924, they were heavily polished by his friend Max Brod, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Brod – who'd ignored Kafka's instruction to burn all his manuscripts – set out to turn him into a saintly figure, untouched by "human impulses". He cut out anything remotely sexual (including his visits to prostitutes) and excised anything else he judged extraneous – including the letters, draft stories, dreams and aphorisms that Kafka had "stuffed" into his diaries. Now, more than 30 years after they appeared in Germany, the unexpurgated diaries have finally been published in English, sensitively translated by Ross Benjamin. And they're a "revelation".

Apart from anything else, this new edition is "a lot funnier than Brod's version", said Morten Høi Jensen in Literary Review. We see Kafka noticing that a fellow train passenger's "sizeable member makes a large bulge in his pants", and commenting on a friend's pornography collection. But more valuable still is the restoration of the "open-endedness" of the original text. Kafka's diaries were really closer to notebooks: they were, Benjamin notes, a "laboratory" for his fiction – and now we can peer into that laboratory, seeing how the themes of his writing (alienation and loss, futility and repetition) "grew out of his circumscribed life".

At times Kafka cuts a surprisingly ordinary figure, said Chris Power in The Guardian. We see him off to the theatre, or "watching a ski-jumping competition" – though at other times he expresses "profound loneliness and isolation". He emerges not just as the tortured genius he is known as now, but also as a "youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration" – and the contradiction between the two "brings him closer to us".

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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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Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes

Lou Reed, the lead vocalist of the Velvet Underground, who died in 2013, already has a longish shelf of biographies. This one is the first to make use of his personal archive, "and it shows", said David Keenan in Literary Review. "It feels more like a coolly researched biography than one written by a passionate fan." What's more, Will Hermes tries to repackage the "violently aggressive, drug-huffing", gender-bending, "sexually unhinged" rock star to make him acceptable to the modern world: Reed and his circle were "nonbinary", Hermes informs us; he suggests that Reed was a troubled person who tried to become "someone good" (as he wrote in one of his best-loved songs, Perfect Day), not the sociopath that his behaviour suggested. The result is an "awkward love letter to the 20th century", but "the perfect biography of Lou Reed for 2023": a defensive depiction of a man whose stock in trade was "all that was difficult and dark and destructive in what it is to be human".

It's "the only Lou Reed bio you need to read", said Stephen Metcalf in The Washington Post. It's really two biographies: one of Lewis Allan Reed, the sensitive, middle-class, midcentury music fan; and one of the louche, sardonic, drug-addled persona he invented and inhabited. From Reed's early days with Andy Warhol to his breakthrough as a solo star, with a little help from David Bowie, it's all there, written up with a judicious blend of "love and scepticism". Hermes doesn't conceal the evidence that Reed became a pampered celeb who could be as obnoxious to waiters as he was to journalists. But he's good on Reed's "musically confrontational" yet "unabashedly romantic" songwriting. The book gets the balance between the person and the poseur "exactly right".

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