The story of a city, a time; the story of recovery, escape; the story of coming-of-age; the story of a career... This spring’s memoirs and bios cover all of these stories, which bring us back, make us ponder, and, hopefully, move us forward.

Going back in time and place is always at the heart of memoir, and this spring we have Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir, in which the critic and memoirist examines her life through the lens of her experiences in New York and asks how her engagement with the city has made her a fiercely independent woman. Children’s book author Arlene Alda waxes nostalgic about “da Bronx,” famous for nurturing some of our most famous citizens, including Carl Reiner and Colin Powell, in Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History. Sex and drugs fuel Brad Gooch’s Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s, a paean to New York City and to his great love, film director Howard Brookner.

In Screening Room: Family Pictures, Alan Lightman remembers Memphis from the 1930s through the 1960s, in a family saga set against the background of a segregated society. And The Rose Hotel: A Memoir of Secrets, Loss, and Love from Iran to America, by Rahimeh Andalibian, is the story of a family that survives the 1979 Iranian Revolution and escapes to California, where they face old crimes and new traditions.

With Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland, the title says it all, as Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus share the story of their abduction by Ariel Castro, their decade in captivity, and their daring escape. The resilience of the human spirit is highlighted in Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, by Sarah Hepola, who looks back at her drinking from the vantage point of sobriety.

In Jonathan Kozol’s memoir, The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time, the social critic describes watching his father devolve from a brilliant neurologist to an Alzheimer patient. Meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith contends with coming-of-age, the meaning of home, and the mother-daughter bond in Frontlist.

And journalist Judith Miller, “the longest-jailed correspondent for protecting her sources,” chronicles her long career in The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, which is being kept under wraps until its April 7 pub date. To quote Cees Nooteboom, the Dutch novelist and poet: “Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.”

PW’s Top 10: Memoir

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. Sarah Hepola. Grand Central, June 23

Frontlist. Tracy K. Smith. Knopf, Mar. 31

Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland. Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. Viking, Apr. 28

Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History. Arlene Alda. Holt, Mar. 3

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir. Vivian Gornick. FSG, May 19

The Rose Hotel: A Memoir of Secrets, Loss, and Love from Iran to America. Rahimeh Andalibian. National Geographic, May 12

Screening Room: Family Pictures. Alan Lightman. Pantheon, Feb. 10

Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s. Brad Gooch. Harper, Apr. 14

The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. Judith Miller. Simon & Schuster, Apr. 7

The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time. Jonathan Kozol. Crown, June 2

Memoirs & Biographies Listings

Algonquin

How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood by Jim Grimsley (Apr. 14, hardcover, $23.95, ISBN 978-1-61620-376-4). In August of 1966, playwright and novelist Jim Grimsley entered the sixth grade in his small eastern North Carolina hometown, the year federally mandated integration of the schools began. Here he looks back on his 1960s childhood and renders history on very personal terms.

Allen & Unwin

Making Soapies in Kabul: Hot Days, Crazy Nights and Dangerous Liaisons in a War Zone by Trudi-Ann Tierney (Apr. 1, paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-74331-427-2). The dramatic yet funny account of how a TV producer and former actress found herself working on Afghanistan’s most popular soap opera. Wacky ex-pats live wild lives, and locals try to survive as best they can against the backdrop of war.

Atria

Corruption Officer: From Jail Guard to Perpetrator Inside Rikers Island by Gary L. Heyward (Mar. 31, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-4767-9432-7). Former corrections officer Gary Heyward, a Harlem-born ex-Marine, shares an eye-opening, gritty, and devastating account of his descent into the criminal life, smuggling contraband inside the infamous Rikers Island jails.

Ballantine

Wide-Open World: How Volunteering Around the Globe Changed One Family’s Lives Forever by John Marshall (Feb. 10, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-345-54964-8). Marshall and his wife and teenage children embark on a life-changing adventure: six months of world travel, volunteering their way from Costa Rica to New Zealand and East Asia on a challenging, stimulating, often stressful, but rewarding trip.

Bloomsbury

Girl in Glass: How My “Distressed Baby” Defied the Odds, Shamed a CEO, and Taught Me the Essence of Love, Heartbreak, and Miracles by Deanna Fei (June 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-62040-991-6). An inspiring memoir of Fei’s daughter’s extremely premature birth and the controversy that erupted when AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong blamed her “distressed baby” for a cut in employee benefits.

Kaleidoscope City: A Year in Varanasi by Piers Moore Ede (Apr. 21, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-60819-868-9). Varanasi’s inhabitants relate their own tales in a revealing tour of India’s holiest city that offers new insight into the city and a vibrant portrait of modern, multicultural India.

Central Recovery

(dist. by HCI)

Many Faces, One Voice: Secrets from The Anonymous People by Bud Mikhitarian, foreword by Greg Williams (May 12, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-937612-93-1). In this companion book to the award-winning film The Anonymous People, the testimony of those who have come out of the shadows to fight the stigma associated with addiction take the reader on a journey of individual growth and, potentially, to world change.

Crown

The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China by Huan Hsu (Mar. 24, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-307-98630-6). Hsu, a first-generation Chinese-American, melds memoir, travelogue, ethnography, and social and political history in this story of his return to China to discover the fate of his great-great-grandfather’s long-buried porcelain collection.

The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time by Jonathan Kozol (June 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-8041-4097-3). National Book Award–winning author and education activist Kozol offers a deeply personal biography of his father, Harry L. Kozol, a renowned neurologist who suffered from Alzheimer’s, and a frank examination of how we come to terms with caregiving.

Da Capo/Lifelong

Dogfella: How an Abandoned Dog Named Bruno Turned This Mobster’s Life Around—A Memoir by James Guiliani, with Charlie Stella (May 26, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-0-7382-1807-6). An addicted ex-con recounts the story of his life, from his involvement in street gangs and the infamous Gotti crime family to his incarceration and eventual redemption through animal welfare, which began with his rescue of an abandoned, abused Shih Tzu that he named Bruno.

Deep Vellum

(dist. by Consortium)

The Journey by Sergio Pitol, trans. by George Henson (July 14, paper, $12.95, ISBN 978-1-941920-18-3). One of Mexico’s most culturally complex and composite writers recounts two weeks of travel around the Soviet Union in 1986, blurring the lines between fiction and fact, as he reflects on the impact of Russia’s sacred literary pantheon in his life and the power that literature holds over us all.

Doubleday

The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits (Apr. 7, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-385-53898-5). After discovering her old diaries chronicling anxieties about grades, looks, and boys, Julavits decides to write a journal as a 40-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The result is a two-year meditation on time and self, desire and death, and other pieces of life, including art and ambition.

Dutton

Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City by Mark Adams (Mar. 10, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-525-95370-8). Adams’s quest to solve one of history’s greatest mysteries takes readers to fascinating locations to meet irresistible characters in an often humorous look at the human longing to rediscover a lost world.

Ecco

Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution by Wendell Steavenson (July 21, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-237525-4). Through a series of character-driven vignettes, New Yorker writer Steavenson recounts the events of the Egyptian revolution—from Mubarak’s fall to Morsi’s—in a pointillist portrait of a people enacting and reacting to change and hope. 15,000-copy announced first printing.

ECW

(dist. by IPG)

Love in the Elephant Tent: How Running Away with the Circus Brought Me Home by Kathleen Cremonesi (May 12, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-77041-252-1). On a whim, Cremonesi’s wanderlust led her to take a job as a dancer in a circus and, working her way up, became an ostrich-riding, shark-taming showgirl, which brings her peace and the love of Stefano, the sexy elephant keeper.

What Was I Thinking?: The Autobiography of an Idea and Other Essays by Rick Salutin (May 12, paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-1-77041-260-6). Canadian journalism’s agent provocateur for more than three decades, Salutin has been one of the most outspoken commentators of his generation. This is classic Salutin and mostly unpublished works of thought and opinion, including a lengthy personal and historical essay on the world of therapy.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick (May 19, hardcover, $22, ISBN 978-0-374-29860-9) is an account of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, exploring the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life by a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts in New York City.

FSG/Sarah Crichton

The Wild Oats Project: One Woman’s Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost by Robin Rinaldi (Mar. 17, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-374-29021-4). What if for just one year you explored everything you’d wondered about sex but hadn’t tried? Journalist Rinaldi, 44, married for 18 years, decides to move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid, after her husband insists on a vasectomy when she is considering having a child.

Grand Central

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola (June 23, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4555-5459-1). A raw but uplifting memoir of addiction and recovery by a single woman with a rising career in media, who was also a serious blackout drinker. Hepola writes about women, alcohol, and giving up something you love. 200,000-copy announced first printing.

The Light of the World: A Memoir by Elizabeth Alexander (Apr. 21, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4555-9987-5). Alexander, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, reflects with gratitude on her life after the sudden death of her husband when he was 49. Alexander channels her poetic sensibilities into lucid prose that describes a very personal yet universal quest for meaning, understanding, and acceptance. 40,000-copy announced first printing.

Greystone Books

(dist. by PGW)

Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley (May 12, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-77164-102-9). In this recovery narrative and love story, interwoven with the latest research on the brain, Stanley tells the story of her husband’s brain and spinal cord injury and the role of music, science, and love in recovery.

Hachette/Twelve

Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents by Bob Morris (June 2, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-4555-5650-2). In an emotional journey filled with dark comedy, spiritual inquiry, and brutally honest self-examination, Morris recounts how he gave his parents the deaths they deserved—even if he didn’t always live his life as they wanted. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Harper

Happily Ali After: And More Fairly True Tales by Ali Wentworth (June 16, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-223849-8). The actress, comedian, and bestselling author picks up where she left off in Ali in Wonderland, dissecting modern life— this time on a mission of self-improvement— in a series of comic vignettes. 100,000-copy announced first printing.

Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s by Brad Gooch (Apr. 14, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-235495-2). The author of City Poet returns with a searing memoir of 1980s New York City in a colorful and atmospheric tale of wild bohemians, glamorous celebrites, and complicated passions, with appearances by Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Burroughs, and other legendary artists. 40,000-copy announced first printing.

HarperOne

Out of Orange: My Real Life by Cleary Wolters (May 5, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-237613-8). The real-life Alex Vause from the hit show Orange Is the New Black tells her own story for the first time—a powerful, surprising memoir about crime and punishment, friendship and marriage, and a life caught in the ruinous drug trade and beyond. 75,000-copy announced first printing.

HarperWave

In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi (May 26, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-235751-9). When scholar and writer Luzzi finds himself a widower and first-time father after a tragic car accident, he turns to Dante’s Divine Comedy to help rebuild his life. 100,000-copy announced first printing.

Holt

Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History by Arlene Alda (Mar. 3, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-62779-095-6). These oral histories reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in many fields of endeavor. Alda’s own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point for reminiscing with a nun, a police officer, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, and many others spanning six decades.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America by Joseph Kim, with contributions by Stephan Talty (June 2, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-544-37317-4) recounts survival in North Korea during the Great Famine that left five-year-old Kim on the streets, then a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries, and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Knopf

Ordinary Light: A Memoir by Tracy K. Smith (Mar. 31, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-307-96266-9) is a deeply moving memoir from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.

Little, Brown

Born with Teeth: A Memoir by Kate Mulgrew (Apr. 14, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-33431-0). At 22, Mulgrew gave a baby up for adoption and returned to work as the star of a popular soap opera. Twenty years later, she went in search of the daughter she had given away. The actress now appearing on Orange Is the New Black gives a moving account of the price and rewards of a passionate life. 60,000-copy announced first printing.

Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard (Apr. 7, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-316-24616-3). The author of Lunch in Paris takes a rendezvous with the unexpected when she gives up Paris and moves with her husband, and infant son, to a tiny village in Provence where they become culinary entrepreneurs. 65,000-copy announced first printing.

Morrow

American Wife: A Memoir of Love, Service, Faith, and Renewal by Taya Kyle and Jim DeFelice (May 5, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-239808-6). The widow of American Sniper Chris Kyle shares their private journey, a moving and universal chronicle of love, family, faith, grief, resilience, and purpose that is a model of heroism as she speaks out on the effects of fame and provides a road map for others faced with difficulties. 150,000-copy announced first printing.

Morrow/Dey Street

Love Is Love: A New Way of Talking About Family and Partnership by Maria Bello (May 12, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-235183-8). Actress and activist Bello came out in the New York Times “Modern Love” column, and here shares her journey to redefining sexuality, partnership, family, and spirituality as a woman. 125,000-copy announced first printing.

National Geographic

The Rose Hotel: A Memoir of Secrets, Loss, and Love from Iran to America by Rahimeh Andalibian (May 12, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4262-1479-0). Iran-born author Andalibian tells the story of her family: the struggle to survive the 1979 revolution, the move to California, and attempts to acculturate in the face of teenage rebellion, murder, addiction, and new traditions.

Norton

Bastards: A Memoir by Mary Anna King (June, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-393-08861-8). King watched her mother give away a newborn sister every year, five of them, from the commune of single mothers in southern New Jersey where she was raised in the 1980s. The siblings start to come together when King is a college student and she writes hauntingly and with humor about finding one’s family and oneself.

Other Press

A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz by Goran Rosenberg, trans. by Sara Death (Feb. 24, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-59051-607-2). A journalist tries to understand his father and his father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden, while observng the chasm between the child’s world in the collective oblivion of postwar Sweden and the father’s dark past. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Recapitulations by Vincent Crapanzano (Mar. 17, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-59051-593-8) is an autobiography and an ethnographic study by an anthropologist who grew up on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, including his father’s early death, his years at school, his love affairs, his own teaching, and his far-flung travels. 20,000-copy announced first printing.

Pantheon

Screening Room: Family Pictures by Alan Lightman (Feb. 10, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-307-37939-9). The author of the bestseller Einstein’s Dreams writes a lyrical memoir of Memphis from the 1930s through the 1960s: the music and the racism, the early days of the movies, and a powerful grandfather whose ghost continues to haunt the family.

Penguin Press

Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod (Feb. 10, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-1-59420-587-3). The great strategist who masterminded Obama’s historic election campaigns shares his life and work over the decades and opens up about his years as a young journalist, political consultant, and eventually senior adviser to the president.

It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario (Feb. 5, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-59420-537-8). After September 11, MacArthur ”genius” grant winner Addario, one of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, was tapped to return and cover the American invasion. This is the story of her singular calling as she captures virtually every major theater of war of the 21st century.

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (July 21, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-59420-347-3). New Yorker writer and lifelong surfer Finnegan chases waves all over the world, in this old-school adventure story, intellectual autobiography, social history, and exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art.

Plume

Cabin Fever: The Sizzling Secrets of a Virgin Airlines Flight Attendant by Mandy Smith, with contributions by Nicola Stow (June 30, paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-14-751598-8). In a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a flight attendant, Smith updates the genre and shares the good, the bad, and the naughty from her 12 years working for Virgin Airlines.

Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas by Matt Lewis (May 26, paper, $17, ISBN 978-0-14-751534-6). Marine biologist Lewis’s firsthand account of an ocean tragedy aboard the fishing boat Sudur Havid, on a journey from Cape Town to the Antarctic, is a story of disaster and heroism against a breathtaking backdrop of icebergs and killer whales.

Princeton Univ.

Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World by Carlos Fraenkel, foreword by Michael Walzer (May 25, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-691-15103-8). In an intellectual travelogue with a plea for integrating philosophy into our lives, Fraenkel invites readers on a tour around the world as he meets students at Palestinian and Indonesian universities, lapsed Hasidic Jews in New York, teenagers in Brazil, and the descendants of Iroquois warriors in Canada.

Putnam

The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World by Tracy Slater (June 30, hardcover, $26.95, 978-0-399-16620-4). A fiercely independent American woman leaves a life as a writer and academic in Boston and moves to Osaka to live with the most unlikely mate: a Japanese salaryman who barely speaks her language.

Random/Spiegel & Grau

My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine by Kate Betts (May 12, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-679-64442-2). A coming-of-age memoir by the former editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, set in the fashion world of Paris in the 1980s, brings to life the enchantment of France.

Rowman & Littlefield/Down East

The Python Trail: An Immigrant’s Path from Cameroon to America by Richard Afuma (Apr. 1, hardcover, $22.95, ISBN 978-1-60893-405-8). Growing up in a remote region of Cameroon, Afuma finds his way to a school run by Baptist missionaries and eventually attends college in the U.S. He describes an immigrant journey of surprise at povery existing in America and also tells his story of being unable to find meaningful employment, despite having a master’s degree.

Scribner

Criminal That I Am: A Memoir by Jennifer Ridha (May 12, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-4767-8572-1). A talented young lawyer becomes romantically involved with a convicted drug felon—Cameron Douglas, son of Hollywood star Michael Douglas—and makes a life-changing mistake when she illicitly smuggles antianxiety medication into prison.

Simon & Schuster

A Fine Romance by Candice Bergen (Apr. 7, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-684-80827-7). In the follow-up to Knock Wood, Bergen shares the big events: her marriage to French director Louis Malle; the birth of her daughter; playing the character of Murphy Brown; widowhood; falling in love again; and watching her daughter grow up and leave home.

Power Forward: My Presidential Education by Reggie Love (Feb. 3, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4767-6334-7). Mentored by both Coach Krzyzewski and President Obama, Love, who worked as a personal assistant to Senator Obama as a candidate for president and followed him to the White House, shares universal insights learned in unusual circumstances.

The Story: A Reporter’s Journey by Judith Miller (Apr. 7, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-4767-1601-5). Star reporter for the New York Times; foreign correspondent in some of the most dangerous fields; Pulitzer winner; longest jailed correspondent for protecting her sources: Judith Miller turns her reporting skills on herself with the intensity of her professional vocation.

S&S/Gallery

Amish Confidential by “Lebanon” Levi Stoltzfus and Ellis Henican (Apr. 7, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-5011-1030-6). The star of the Discovery Channel’s reality show Amish Mafia delivers a sizzling tell-all about Amish life today. From forbidden joyrides to the senseless shunnings to colorful family feuds, Lebanon shares his frank insider’s view of this fascinating and secretive society.

Soft Skull

Peaks on the Horizon: Two Journeys in Tibet by Charlie Carroll (Feb. 10, paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-1-61902-484-7). A high school English teacher sets out to visit the country that has obsessed him for 20 years while Tibetan-born Lobsang is crossing the Himalayas on foot, fleeing Tibet with his family. In a teahouse at the border between China and Tibet, the two men meet and Lobsang recounts his extraordinary life story.

Sourcebooks

Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir by Melissa Cistaro (May 5, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-4926-1538-5). A bookseller at San Francisco’s Book Passage explores the complex emotional landscape of being abandoned— her mother simply drove away one summer— and finds answers at her dying mother’s bedside and in a cache of letters.

Square One

After Woodstock: The True Story of a Belgian Movie, an Israeli Wedding, and a Manhattan Breakdown by Elliot Tiber, foreword by Ang Lee (Mar. 1, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7570-0392-9). Originally scheduled for last year, this new memoir from Taking Woodstock author Tiber chronicles a series of madcap and often heartbreaking adventures that take him around the world over three decades with his lover and friend, Belgian playwright/director Andre Ernotte. 35,000-copy announced first printing.

St. Martin’s

I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir by Kevin Sessums (Feb. 24, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-312-59838-9). Sessums chronicles his years working at Interview and Vanity Fair magazines, his HIV positive diagnosis, descent into addiction, and spiritual redemption climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostelo, and trudging across the cold, lonely winter beaches of Provincetown.

A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea by Eunsun Kim, with Sébastien Falletti, trans. by David Tian (July 21, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-250-06464-6) relates Kim’s story of growing up in North Korea, a country she loved despite her school field trips to public executions and the countrywide famine that killed her father, and the harrowing nine-year journey that finally led her to South Korea and freedom.

St. Martin’s/Dunne

The Art Hunter: My Journey into the World of Stolen Art by Chris Marinello and Kris Hollington (June 1, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-05056-4). Marinello, who has devoted his life to the recovery of stolen art, reveals the criminal intrigue, unimaginable wealth, and occasional danger that cloaks the international trade in stolen art.

Univ. of Texas

The Best I Recall: A Memoir by Gary Cartwright (June 1, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-292-74907-8). Legendary Texas journalist Cartwright looks back at a six-decade career that ranged from sports writing at the Dallas Morning News to a 25-year stint as senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine, where he covered everything from true crime to notable Texans.

Viking

Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland by Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus (Apr. 28, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-525-42765-0). Two victims of the infamous Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro share the story of their abductions, their decade in captivity, and their dramatic escape, drawing upon their recollections and the diary kept by Amanda Berry. Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporters Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan interweave the events within Castro’s house with original reporting on efforts to find the missing girls.