20 summer book tips: Biographies, histories and other non-fiction titles
Some of our summer reading selections
Perhaps best enjoyed by listening to the audio book, Bono’s memoir brings you behind the curtain for a peek at his extraordinary life, which benefits from his introspection and unrivalled ability to name-drop.
Not an autobiography for everyone’s tastes, but the impressive book sales of the idle Prince Harry’s life so far suggest that its publication has been justified. A story about privilege, the embrace of Hollywood and falling out with “The Firm”.
On having a son, the first thought of Britain’s greatest socialist George Orwell was to have the boy’s name enrolled at Eton College. Do as I say, not as I do. DJ Taylor is a formidable biographer who revisits the complex life of Orwell 20 years after his Whitbread Prize-winning work.
Charlie Bird’s life story – which is written with his long-time friend and fellow journalist Ray Burke – includes stories about his career as Ireland’s most famous reporter; his endgame, bravely living with motor-neuron disease since his diagnosis in 2021; and life’s bigger philosophical questions.
Martin Luther King – who was known as Little Mike as a child – was a sensitive boy. He twice tried to commit suicide. The prize-winning biographer Jonathan Eig’s study of his life – the first comprehensive MLK biography in three decades – could be the definitive account.
Tim Marshall, who is a best-selling writer on geopolitics, looks at how the race into space between China, Russia and the USA will shape the face of politics – and our lives – back here on Earth over the next 50 years.
David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a modern nonfiction classic. In his latest book, The Wager, he tells a gripping yarn about a shipwreck off Cape Horn in the eighteenth century where all is not what it seems.
There is hardly a more GUBU (“grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre, unbelievable”) story, as it were, from twentieth-century Ireland than the saga of Malcolm Macarthur’s serial killings in 1982. And there are few better suited nonfiction writers than Mark O’Connell to unpick the gothic elements of its tale.
Rory Carroll is a talented Irish journalist working for the Guardian, and a former South American correspondent. His book about the attempt by the IRA to assassinate Margaret Thatcher in a hotel in Brighton in 1984 has been widely hailed.
Noelle McCarthy’s memoir about coming of age in Cork City in the 1990s and her helter-skelter adult life in Auckland could be the Irish publishing sensation of the year. Already acclaimed in New Zealand, it doesn’t hold back any punches in describing a difficult relationship with her alcoholic mother (and is insightful about the restraints imposed on an intelligent woman of her mother’s generation living in conservative, Catholic Ireland).
Truman Capote was some gadfly. The real-life stories behind the female friends he gossiped about in his final, unfinished novel – who include Jackie Kennedy’s sister – make for a wicked read in the hands of the gifted Laurence Leamer.
Intriguingly, the IRA duo sent out to assassinate the bogeyman Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson MP in 1922 included a one-legged man. Ronan McGreevy explains why – while unravelling other mysteries – In his thrilling account of the murder.
Followers of Richard E Grant’s short social media video posts will know the Withnail and I actor wears his heart on his sleeve and is, well, a bit needy. In his second memoir, he shares the turmoil and the beauty of his wife’s final year alive before dying from lung cancer in 2021, a couple of months short of their 35th wedding anniversary.
The feminist writer Victoria Smith draws on a huge arsenal of cultural stereotypes – real and literary, including witches, Snow White, “Karens” (i.e. entitled, middle-aged women; think Soccer Moms), feminist theorists and the Seventies activist goddess Gloria Steinem – to explore why it is that middle-aged women can often be so disparaged.
The school master Sir Anthony Seldon has written biographies of every modern-day British prime minister, from Theresa May back to Margaret Thatcher. He doesn’t spare the rod in his study of Boris Johnson, which is co-authored with the historian Raymond Newell.
- Next week: 20 of the year's best fiction books
Jeff Benedict is a brilliant American sportswriter. His biography of Tiger Woods is unputdownable. In LeBron, he turns his gaze on another giant of American sport, basketball’s LeBron James, a man who reached the top of his mountain by overcoming incredible odds. The detail about the loneliness of his childhood is eye-popping.
Possessing the deft touch of a novelist and having played inter-county camogie for Tipperary means Eimear Ryan has the ideal credentials to examine issues of gender and identity in sport in modern Ireland.
Richie Fitzgerald grew up in Bundoran, Co Donegal in the 1980s. As Ireland’s first pro surfer, he has lived a life less ordinary, riding big waves – with monk-like dedication and extraordinary bravery – all over the world.
You couldn’t find a better companion for your holidays than Roddy Collins’ hilarious memoir about his life in football. But it’s not just about the laughs. The book is full of insight, warmth and a life well lived, superbly ghosted by his friend Paul Howard.
Tadhg Coakley’s necklace of essays about sport’s magical pull on us is a masterpiece. The book has special resonance for Irish readers because of its local references and focus on sports like hurling, but its themes, ideas and charm are universal.
