Secondhand Biography & Memoir Bargain Book Box SP4016

Secondhand Biography & Memoir Bargain Book Box SP4016

Eighteen hardback memoirs, nearly all with dust jackets: Obama’s A Promised Land, Spare, Britney, Billy Connolly, Dawn French, Parky, Turia Pitt, Johnny Ruffo and Sir Peter Cosgrove. The sort of books people buy for Father’s Day and never get round to. Some covers may carry price stickers or sticker residue.

1. Will — Will Smith — The Fresh Prince’s memoir, written with Mark Manson, about a kid who built a persona to survive his father and spent fifty years inside it. Published before the slap, which makes it stranger.
2. General Peter Cosgrove: My Story — Peter Cosgrove — From Vietnam to commanding INTERFET in East Timor to Governor-General. One of the few Australian military memoirs that reads like a novel.
3. Bradman’s Best — Roland Perry — Bradman picks his all-time World XI and explains each choice. For cricket tragics, the arguments are the book.
4. Dear Fatty — Dawn French — French’s memoir as letters to the people in her life, Jennifer Saunders included. Funnier and sadder than you’d expect.
5. Unmasked — Turia Pitt & Bryce Corbett — The ultramarathon, the bushfire, 65 per cent burns, and what came after. Pitt’s own account, no self-pity in it.
6. No Finish Line — Johnny Ruffo — The X Factor singer and Home and Away actor on his brain cancer diagnosis, written while he was still fighting it. Ruffo died in 2023.
7. East and West — Chris Patten — The last Governor of Hong Kong on the handover and what he thought China would do next. He was mostly right.
8. The Woman in Me — Britney Spears — The conservatorship from the inside, the Timberlake chapter, the shaved head explained. The most-read celebrity memoir of its year for a reason.
9. Hands Across the Water — Peter Baines — A forensic policeman at the Boxing Day tsunami who stayed to build an orphanage. Australian charity story that earns the tears.
10. Windswept & Interesting — Billy Connolly — The full autobiography: the shipyards, the banjo, the welding, the drink, Parkinson’s. Reads like him talking.
11. Spare — Prince Harry — The one everyone argued about. The frostbitten bit, the fight with William, Diana’s death from his side.
12. A Promised Land — Barack Obama — Volume one of the presidential memoir, through the Bin Laden raid. Long, careful, and better written than most presidents manage.
13. An Outrageous Affair — Penny Vincenzi — The one novel in the box: a Hollywood actress, a scandal buried in the 1950s, and the daughters who dig it up. Big, glossy Vincenzi.
14. Unbearable Lightness — Portia de Rossi — Ally McBeal, anorexia, 37 kilos and the day she collapsed on set. Frank in a way celebrity memoirs rarely are.
15. Parky: My Autobiography — Michael Parkinson — Fifty years of interviewing everyone from Ali to Emu. The Yorkshire childhood chapters are the best thing in it.
16. Murderers and Other Friends — John Mortimer — The Rumpole creator on his years as a barrister and the people he defended. Dry, wicked, and short on sentiment.
17. The Life of Thomas Hardy — Florence Hardy — The biography Hardy secretly wrote himself and published under his wife’s name. Essential for Hardy readers and a curiosity for everyone else.
18. Hard Choices — Hillary Rodham Clinton — Her four years as Secretary of State, from Benghazi to the pivot to Asia. The diplomatic record, in her own version.