Top Ten Autobiographies

A Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Lee Dugard

When Jaycee Dugard was eleven years old, she was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was missing for more than eighteen years, held captive by Phillip Craig and Nancy Garrido, and gave birth to two daughters during her imprisonment. On August 26, 2009, Garrido showed up for a meeting with his parole officer; he brought Jaycee, her daughters, and his wife Nancy with him. Their unusual behavior raised suspicions and an investigation revealed the tent behind the Garridos’ home where Jaycee had been living for nearly two decades.

Operation Shylock – Philip Roth

Philip Roth's very literary novels, most famously Portnoy's Complaint, have always had the feel of confessional autobiography. Operation Shylock boasts not only a character named Philip Roth, a Jewish-American novelist, but an impostor who is claiming to be him. Roth's impostor causes a furor in Israel by advocating "Diasporism," the polar opposite of Zionism, encouraging Israelis to return home to eastern Europe.

Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy

This novel dissects the intricate difficulties of human relationships, from Margaret's passionate attachment to her father and her more problematic involvement with Colin, her lover, to the wider social relations between pupil and teacher, employer and employee, individual and State.

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

Readers who are entranced by the sweeping Anglo sagas of Masterpiece Theatre will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks's historical drama. A bestseller in England, there's even a little high-toned erotica thrown into the mix to convince the doubtful.

Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh's controversial first novel, set on the heroin-addicted fringe of working-class youth in Edinburgh, is yet another exploration of the dark side of Scottishness. The main character, Mark Renton, is at the center of a clique of nihilistic slacker junkies with no hopes and no possibilities, and only "mind-numbing and spirit-crushing" alternatives in the straight world they despise. This particular slice of humanity has nothing left but the blackest of humor and a sharpness of wit. American readers can use the glossary in the back to translate the slang and dialect - essential, since the dialogue makes the book. This is a bleak vision sung as musical comedy.

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

Proulx has followed Postcards , her story of a family and their farm, with an extraordinary second novel of another family and the sea. The fulcrum is Quoyle, a patient, self-deprecating, oversized hack writer who, following the deaths of nasty parents and a succubus of a wife, moves with his two daughters and straight-thinking aunt back to the ancestral manse in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town of no great distinction. There, Quoyle finds a job writing about car crashes and the shipping news for The Gammy Bird , a local paper kept afloat largely by reports of sexual abuse cases and comical typographical errors.

The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm

German novelist Timm (Headhunter), who inserts himself as narrator and witness into the plot of this ambitious but flawed work, tracks down Lena Brucker, a blind old woman, in 1989 to verify the rumor that she "invented" curried sausage, a popular German food sold by street vendors. Lena's story, which takes up much of the narrative, goes back to April 1945: as Hitler's dreams of conquest collapse, Lena, then a humble 43-year-old food-service worker in Hamburg, has an affair with Hermann Bremer, 24, a German naval officer and deserter. Both are married. Lena's husband, a smuggler and a naval skipper, has been gone six years, while Hermann conceals the existence of his wife and infant son from his new lover.