Popular European Memoir Books
Find memoir books written by authors from Europe for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge. (85)
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Daughter of the Enemy by Marie Pal-Brown EN
GermanyDescription:
The memoir of a child growing up in wartime and postwar Germany. Her father is killed in battle on the Eastern Front. At age 16, she first learns about the Holocaust. Then begins a reckoning with Germany's horrific past that, eventually, leads her to the Baltic country of Latvia, in search of the father she lost.
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Dependency : The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 3 by Tove Ditlevsen EN
DenmarkDescription:
The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" —The Guardian). Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth century writers Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet, and the wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead—love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure, and destructive addi... continue
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Dicționar de lagăr by Oliver Lustig RO
RomaniaDescription:
A personal testimony of life and death in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps (Birkenau, Kaufering, Landsberg, etc.) in the form of a dictionary of terms specific to the camps and the mass murder of the Jews. also recalls Jewish attempts to resist, such as the Sonderkommando revolt in Birkenau in 1944.
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LatviaDescription:
Doom 94 is Jonevs' debut novel, published first as Jelgava 94 in Latvia in 2013 and was quickly proved to be a big hit and bestseller. Translated into 11 languages already, it is here for the first time in English. The story is set in the 1990s in the Latvian city of Jelgava and looks at the burgeoning craze during this decade for the alternative culture of heavy metal music. Jonevs takes the reader deep inside the world of music, combining the intimate diary of a youngster trying to find himself by joining a subculture, as well as a skilful, detailed, and almost documentary-like depiction of ... continue
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Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry EN
FranceDescription:
The World War II aviator and author of The Little Prince tells his true story of flying a reconnaissance plane during the Battle of France in 1940. When the Germans first invaded France in May of 1940, the French Air Force had a mere fifty reconnaissance crews, twenty-three of which served in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Group II/33. After only a few days, seventeen of the crews in Saint-Exupéry’s unit had already perished. Flight to Arras is the harrowing story of a single mission over the French town of Arras, an endeavor Saint-Exupéry realized the futility of even as he witnessed it unfolding... continue
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Free : A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi EN
AlbaniaDescription:
For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And wh... continue