Among the wide variety of memoirs published this year, some of the most interesting are from small presses. Haus must be congratulated for Farewell to Salonica by Leon Sciaky (£16.99), which first appeared in America in 1946 but has never seen the light of day here. Born in 1893, Sciaky was a Sephardic Jew whose family were grain merchants in Salonica for 400 years. They emigrated to America just before the first world war. It is nostalgic, beautifully written and illuminating for its evocation of how an apparently stable, multicultural provincial Ottoman city collapsed into the tangle of Balkan rivalries that still beset the region.

Also with a Greek setting is John Lucas’s 92 Acharnon Street (Eland £12.99). Lucas spent 1984-85 as visiting professor in English at the University of Athens. This is a stirring account of his engagement with the people, poetry, politics and cafes that led to him making a second home there.

This year has been unusually rich in collections of letters. Disarmingly candid and dignified, The Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid (Faber £30) lets us see for the first time the man striving behind the poetry and the tragedies. The first quoted letter begins, “I have seen many strange things in my 17 years,” which sets the tone for the revelation of the interior existence of a man who sought to articulate through images in his work not just the strange events of his life but the deep, underlying strangeness that he perceived in the world. Not surprisingly, there is more discussion of poetry than of Sylvia Plath, but the eye is inevitably drawn to the references to her: to his sister, a stark “Sylvia gassed herself.” There are also some amazing letters to her mother. But perhaps the most moving follow the publication of his Birthday Letters, in particular those to Seamus Heaney, and to his son in 1998: “the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. . .I have a freedom of imagination I’ve not felt since 1962. Just to have got rid of all that”. It is an extraordinary volume, which anyone interested in the creation of literature must return to.

Less demanding is Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene (Little, Brown £20). When set alongside Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography, this slim volume is an object lesson in the importance of a writer’s voice to any understanding of him. Women, writers, spies and priests are all here and what he has to say about them is compulsively readable and fascinating. The Letters of Nöel Coward edited by Barry Day (Methuen £25) outdoes even The Mitford Letters (see below) for size. Printed on good paper and further adorned with photographs and reproductions of memorabilia, it looks hugely promising. If the editing is sometimes intrusive and muddling, this may reflect the complexity of Coward’s life but it also masks the inconsistency of his voice. Depending on whom he’s writing to, Coward can sound pompous, narrow, vain and conceited. Yet he is also as sharp, entertaining, sometimes nasty and as worldly as you would expect. His letters will delight those who enjoy the names and the campery: “No more news now, darlingest. I’ve got to take the Edens and the Gary Coopers out to dinner” (to his mother, 1938).

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One of the two biochemists responsible for driving the decoding of the human genome is J Craig Venter, who upset both the American and British governments by offering his skills to the private sector. Although he was a brilliant biochemist, his main achievement may be to have unseated the 500-year-old assumption that scientific research should be the exclusive prerogative of the public sector. In its way, his memoir, A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life (Allen Lane), may be as important a book as James D Watson’s Double Helix. However, in Watson’s own new memoir, Avoid Boring People (OUP £14.99) he seems to be breaking new ground of a different kind: it is amazing to see someone so distinguished reveal himself as such a vituperative, conceited old bore.

Among this year’s nonliterary memoirs is Clarissa Eden’s A Memoir: From Churchill to Eden edited by Cate Haste (Weidenfeld £20), although there is a literary angle even here: besides being the prime minister’s wife, she knew Isaiah Berlin, Evelyn Waugh, Maurice Bowra and a host of other luminaries.

Each year there are dozens of memoirs published by people who have led unusual lives, but we all know that an interesting life is not enough to make an interesting book. Gems occasionally emerge from these modest offerings by people who are primarily writing for children and friends. This year, in particular, we have For He Is an Englishman: Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman by Charles Arnold-Baker/Wolfgang von Blumenthal (Jeremy Mills £14.99). As a professor of law and architecture, not to mention traffic commissioner and many other things besides, his is not a household name, but he is notable above all as the author of the astounding Companion to British History. Direct, amusing, vigorously – often scathingly – intelligent, this brilliant and idiosyncratic poly-math charts his career and family history from medieval Prussia to the England of 2005.

And then there are the writers’ memoirs, including John Lanchester’s Family Romance (Faber £16.99), which subtly investigates his parents’ secrets; Miranda Seymour’s In My Father’s House (Simon & Schuster £14.99), her story of her gay father and his particular attachment to his house; and the indefatigable Al Alvarez’s Risky Business: People, Places, Poker and Books (Bloomsbury £12.99). But the best of this year’s is Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass (Harvill Secker £18.99). From The Tin Drum onwards, it has been apparent that his experience of the second world war shaped his imaginative landscape, but Grass shocked Europe with the admission in this book that he belonged to the Waffen SS. With startling candour he tries to remember and search for “the links in a process that no one stopped, an irreversible process whose traces no eraser can rub out”, which brought the unthinking adolescent to his few, inglorious weeks as a 17-year-old soldier on the Russian front and chaotic, terrified flight in the company of a battle-hardened lance-corporal. Eyeing “the runes on my collar”, his companion manages to produce a plain Wehrmacht jacket, then it is POW camp and, eventually, writing.

No round-up of this year’s memoirs would be complete without reference to Brian Thompson’s delightful Clever Girl: A Sentimental Education (Atlantic £14.99). It follows Keeping Mum, his award-winning account of his childhood as the bright boy in a clever, dysfunctional working-class family. His new book takes him from Hertford grammar school via national service in Kenya, skirmishing with the Mau Mau, to Cambridge and adult-hood. It is also the story of a sentimental education, from his first date on his 18th birthday at a Lyons tea shop in Tottenham Court Road, to marriage, after which “it never occurred to me that I could be anyone other than who I was”.

Yet the book is more artful than this. While Grass’s memoir addresses a substantial personal issue, Thompson’s is a careful, vivid portrait of a decade in which the speech, sights and sounds of the period are evoked with rare precision. It would take a defiantly sullen soul not to enjoy it, but it should not be underrated because of its charm. It captures a shift in cultural values with insight and love. Among many appealing moments is one when his father visits him at Trinity: “After chiding me for dressing like a poof...he insisted on a complete tour. . . I think he was looking for the factory hum of machinery or... men in white overalls with slide-rules in their hands. The noncommittal silence of the place annoyed him.”

BESTSELLERS

1Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright
(Hodder) 48,000

2Soldier: The Autobiography by General Sir Mike Jackson
(Bantam) 34,775

3Anyone Can Do It: My Story by Duncan Bannatyne
(Orion) 30,395

4Shameby Jasvdinger Sanghera
(Hodder) 27,710

5When Daddy Comes Home by Toni Maguire
(Harper Element) 22,372

All bestseller lists prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-17/11/07

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