If you liked
Books like The Volunteer
Loved The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from biography & memoir, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
Know My Name
Emily Doe — the anonymous victim in the Brock Turner sexual assault case that became an international cause célèbre — reveals herself as Chanel Miller and recounts her experience of the assault, the trial, and the years of recovery. Miller's memoir redefines what victim impact statements can be and reclaims her story from the case that had reduced her to a role.
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2
Educated
A woman raised off-grid by survivalist parents finds her way to a PhD; an astonishing memoir of self-invention.
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3
Becoming
Michelle Obama's memoir traces her journey from the South Side of Chicago through Princeton, Harvard Law School, a career in public service and eight years in the White House. Intimate, politically engaged and carefully crafted, it is one of the bestselling memoirs ever published.
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4
Hunger
Gay writes about her body — its size, its history, the assault that changed her relationship to it and what her body has meant to her and to others across her life. Her memoir is one of the most formally and emotionally direct accounts of living in a body that culture treats as wrong, and of eating as a way of managing what cannot otherwise be managed.
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5
Born a Crime
Growing up mixed-race under and after apartheid; funny, sharp and genuinely moving.
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6
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
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7
Just Mercy
Bryan Stevenson, a young lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, recounts his early career defending death row prisoners in Alabama — including Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Stevenson's memoir is one of the most important accounts of the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor, the mentally ill and people of colour.
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8
The Year of Magical Thinking
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.
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9
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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10
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.