74 books like Without Warning and Only Sometimes

One thing about being adopted is you have an in-built radar to seek out others who are too. I read Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit when I was a teenager, and since then, I have been in awe of her as a writer and her ability to eloquently describe her personal experience as an adoptee. 

This book is her autobiography, and there were occasions while reading it that I had to stop and cry. Finally, someone else had written about what I had kept holed up inside me. Her final chapter, "The Wound," speaks so profoundly to me as an adopted adult. It is honest, sharp, and fierce.

The author’s account of grinding, unrelentless poverty and neglect, set against her eventual, miraculous escape to a different life made me cheer.

Bravely, Kerry Hudson returns to the scenes of many crimes committed against her to really understand why the past refuses to let her go and whether anything has changed for deprived families in those rundown British towns she grew up in.

In an early chapter the author recalls being pushed between two adults across a table. She thought it was a game, but her parents were in fact arguing over who should keep her. Neither was willing.

This is an important and shameful piece of British social history and an unflinching examination of a dysfunctional family with different recollections of the past. 

I love this book mainly because of her deeply flawed, hard-drinking dad, who still managed to impart wisdom and love. I couldn’t help wishing I’d had a dad like him.

When Karr grew up, she had her own substance abuse issues that she talked about in another memoir, but this book is my favorite because her family is so screwed up and yet so brave and so tough. To me, they epitomize all that is good and bad about the South.

Personally, I love lyrical, poetic language, and Karr’s writing is transcendent! This is a book that will be with me forever. (I almost got to go to a workshop with Mary Karr, but the pandemic got in the way.)

Mixing official documents with real, remembered events, Lemn Sissay’s memoir is a search for identity, for his true name. Left in a home in Liverpool for unmarried mothers, he is moved between a series of foster and care homes, until he is given access to all his records in 2015, after a thirty-year campaign to find them. He finds who he really is. It’s an honest, poignant, unsettling, and heartfelt journey, revealing how a small boy’s life is shaped by ‘the authority’ and the faceless state. Complimented with inspiring poems and useful resources, this is a hopeful and helpful book. 

Elizabeth Berg wanted to read a novel about George Sand but couldn’t find one…and so she wrote it herself. In The Dream Lover, Berg unfolds the story of Aurore Dupin, who boldly left a loveless aristocratic marriage to make her own way in 19th-century Paris. She adopts the pen name George Sand and becomes France’s bestselling female novelist, living a bohemian lifestyle and scandalizing society by having high-profile love affairs and, even more outrageously, by dressing in men’s clothing. I love stories about trailblazing women, and Berg compellingly conveys how risky and courageous Sand’s actions were at a time when women had few rights.

I've always heard there are two sides to every story. Generally, this means a good side and a bad, or at least one with some sort of a redeeming perspective. But what does a person do when both sides are equally hellish? For Maiya, it means she truly is Daydream's Daughter and Nightmare's Friend. It seems as though the insufferable miseries will never end. This book is deeply emotional and compelling. The author describes the events in vivid detail creating a sense for the reader of being there in the midst of it all. The book immediately captures your attention, and page after page keeps you wondering what will happen next. An excellent story by an excellent author.

I didn’t think I could appreciate this memoir of a son searching for his imprisoned father in Gaddafi’s Libya until, suddenly, I did. This book showed me that the bonds between all fathers and their sons transcend things like nationality and religion. It is part of the core of what it means to be human.

I knew from the very first pages that the author would never again see his father, even as he tirelessly spends most of his adult life trying to. By extension, I understood that as much as we want to, we can never really know our fathers.

I raced through the pages.

“Long ago Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer.” Vanessa and Her Sister is a portrait of two extraordinary and unconventional women, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. The story is told in the form of a diary kept by Vanessa, beginning at the turn of the 20th century with the formation of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Priya Parmar has created a sympathetic yet honest portrayal of Virginia Woolf, her genius and her often precarious mental state, and the impact it had on her family—in particular Vanessa, who was an important and steadying influence for her sister and a talented artist in her own right.

Capturing the spirit of Maya Angelou’s work, Renee Watson expertly chronicles Maya’s life with evocative poems. This book is a rhythmic tribute to the first Black person and the first woman to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration. Bryan Collier’s collage art perfectly complements each poem.

I especially love the poem called “Brother Jimmy, Brother Martin,” which highlights Maya’s deep love for James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.

My favorite lines: “Jimmy was light in the darkest of rooms. Martin was water in a parched desert.”   

This is an excellent series of essays on the small things in life which please the author. Some are more obvious than others, but all are described stylishly and with typical French humour and elegance. I confess that after reading it, I did my own—inevitably inferior—version. But it was an enjoyment just going through the process.