Popular European Memoir Books
Find memoir books written by authors from Europe for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge. (135)
111.
The Nazis Knew My Name : A Remarkable Story of Survival and Courage in Auschwitz by Magda Hellinger, Maya Lee EN
SlovakiaDescription:
The extraordinarily moving memoir by Australian Slovakian Holocaust survivor Magda Hellinger, who saved an untold number of lives at Auschwitz through everyday acts of courage, kindness and ingenuity. In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young Slovakian women were deported to Poland on the second transportation of Jewish people sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The women were told they'd be working at a shoe factory. At Auschwitz the SS soon discovered that by putting Jewish prisoners in charge of the day-to-day running of... continue
112.
The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting : A Powerful Memoir of Overcoming an Eating Disorder by Evanna Lynch EN
IrelandDescription:
'Gradually, I began to feel this dawning awareness that womanhood was coming for me, that it was looming inevitably, and it didn't feel safe... While those around me tried to expedite it, simulate it, exacerbate it, I tried to strangle it.' A raw and compelling new memoir from actress and activist Evanna Lynch about the battle between perfection and creativity. Evanna Lynch has long been viewed as a role model for recovering anorexics and the story of her casting as Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films has reached almost mythic proportions. Yet even after recovery, there remains a conflict ... continue
113.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn EN
Country: Europe / 
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Description:
In one devastating week, Raynor and her husband Moth lost their home of 20 years, just as a terminal diagnosis took away their future together. With nowhere else to go, they decided to walk the South West Coast Path- a 630-mile sea-swept trail from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. This ancient, wind-battered landscape strips them of every comfort they had previously known. With very little money for food or shelter, Raynor and Moth carry everything on their backs and wild camp on beaches and clifftops. But slowly, with every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, the w... continue
114.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost EN
Country: Europe / 
Netherlands
Netherlands
Description:
At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost—who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs—decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati. He was restless and lacked direction, and the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better. The Sex Lives of Cannibals tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he... continue
115.
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria A. Trapp EN
AustriaDescription:
With nearly 1,500 Broadway performances, six Tony Awards, more than three million albums sold, and five Academy Awards, The Sound of Music, based on the lives of Maria, the baron, and their singing children, is as familiar to most of us as our own family history. But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold. Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with the baron, their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and their life in America. Now with photographs from the original edition.
116.
The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti, James Amery Underwood EN
BulgariaDescription:
Marrakesh through the eyes and ears of one of Europe's major writers.
117.
The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier EN
Country: Europe / 
Switzerland
Switzerland
Description:
Travel writing, reflects convincingly on the meaning of the experience.
118.
The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig EN
Description:
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole... continue
119.
Thin Places : A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri ní Dochartaigh EN
Country: Europe / United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Description:
An Indie Next Selection for April 2022 An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022 A Junior Library Guild Selection Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family’s experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of “two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose” (The Guardian). Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her ... continue
120.
Things I Didn't Throw Out by Marcin Wicca EN
PolandDescription:
A wry and unsentimental account of the attempt to understand a parent as an independent person with their own history.