CIAO BELLA: In Search of My Italian Father
by Helena Frith Powell
Gibson Square £14.99
Frith Powell knew virtually nothing of her Italian father, the fruitily named Benedetto Benedetti, until he suddenly appeared in her life when she was 14. Speeding around Rimini in his vintage Mercedes, spouting Dante and urging her to eat bull’s testicles, he is very Italian: charming, irresponsible, a little superficial, and with a hopelessly antiquated view of the English as repressed. A delight.

ONE IN THREE: A Son’s Journey into the History and Science of Cancer by Adam Wishart
Profile £15
Although it enters a crowded field, Wishart’s account of his father’s death from cancer is moving, medically informed and exceptionally well written. Multiplying cancer cells are likened to “useless hotel bellhops passing on every bit of foyer gossip as a genuine message”. The aim, to dispel the “blind terror” that the c-word still evokes, is generously fulfilled, while he never shrinks from describing the irreparable loss of a parent’s death.

SEMINARY BOY
by John Cornwell
Fourth Estate £15.99
An unfashionable subject in these Laodicean times, that of a man’s struggle with his religious faith. But this is a superlative “journey of a soul”, one that finally, circuitously, brought Cornwell back to “the Faith of my fathers”. Beautifully written and remembered, from a Blitz boyhood in East Ham with its “hideous wailing across the rooftops”, to the seductively monastic atmosphere of seminary school with its murmurous Latin masses, the book is a self-portrait of a boyhood and youth of exceptional depth and complexity.

IT JUST OCCURRED TO ME . . .
by Humphrey Lyttelton
Robson £12.99
Lyttelton not only went to Eton, he was born there and fagged for Lord Carrington, a “benign fag-master”. Later, he was a grenadier guard, a Daily Mail cartoonist, a jazz trumpeter and chairman of a certain panel show. In this charming, meandering little book of memoirs, he flits from a story about a vicar being found in bed with a Wall’s ice-cream man, to “a small incident in a gents’ lavatory in Italy” during the second world war.

AN ORDINARY MAN: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda
by Paul Rusesabagina with Tom Zoellner
Bloomsbury £16.99
Here is a memoir that incontrovertibly matters. Rusesabagina was the hotel manager who successfully sheltered and saved 1,268 people in his hotel during “the fastest and most efficient” genocide in history. Himself a Hutu married to a Tutsi, he displays in this account a candour and clear-sightedness that are remarkable. Looking back into that heart of darkness, he admits that he saw only “vanity and insecurity” in the killers, rather than some unfathomable, age-old evil. And he concludes that “Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule.”

TITLE DEEDS: Growing up in Macbeth’s Castle
by Liza Campbell
Doubleday £14.99
Campbell calls her book “a work of friction” — a melancholy little pun, as this is not a happy tale. She was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle, “one of the few addresses featured in a Shakespeare play that can also be found on an AA road map”. After 600 years in the family, it was lost by her father along with 100,000 acres and two other stately homes, through drink, drugs and some truly terrible behaviour. Grim but gripping.

POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION
by Gore Vidal
Little, Brown, £17.99
Vidal has been, if not the most important, then surely the most self-important voice in American letters for half a century now. Yet his superior drawl, full of erudite wit and feline malice, is still irresistible. He’s met everybody who was anybody (though you sense he wouldn’t bother with anybody who was nobody), and his bitchy little feuds are hilarious, especially the one with Nabokov. Only “death ended these joyous exchanges”.

FALL OUT: A Memoir of Friends Made and Friends Unmade
by Janet Street-Porter
Headline Review £16.99
And finally, one to avoid at all costs. This is strictly for Janet devotees (are there any?), or someone who gave you that really rotten pair of socks last Christmas. Street-Porter’s humourless self-regard knows no bounds. “My hair changed colour about as often as I had sex,” she squawks at us. And, “I would be at the centre of the art and music scene in London night after night.” She even had lunch with Terence Stamp! Only one of Craig Brown’s parodies could really do this book justice in all its risible ghastliness.

Top five

SEMINARY BOY by John Cornwell
Fourth Estate £15.99
A beautifully written memoir of faith lost and found, recounted with exceptional depth

RUNNING FOR THE HILLS by Horatio Clare
J Murray £7.99
A real jewel, the evocative but achingly sad story of a dreamy 1960s rural idyll gone wrong

CIAO BELLA by Helena Frith Powell
Gibson Square £14.99
Delightful account of the author’s teenage introduction to her roué Italian papa

ONE IN THREE by Adam Wishart
Profile £15
Wishart’s examination of his father’s death from cancer is exceptionally well written

TITLE DEEDS by Liza Campbell
Doubleday £14.99
How drink, drugs and some truly bad behaviour led to the loss of the family castle: grim but gripping

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4 Ugly by Constance Briscoe (Hodder) 111,741

5 The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (Doubleday) 94,061

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