Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston
Huston had a fantastically complex and raggedy upbringing, on the fringes of both aristocratic bohemia and Hollywood. Her mother was killed in a car crash when she was only four, and she was then brought up by various nannies and housekeepers on a vast estate in Co Galway, before finishing up in Hollywood with Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson. Over it all towered the figure of her father, the director John Huston, "unfaithful, egocentric, judgmental", who turned out not to be her father anyway. That was John Julius Norwich. A true survivor's memoir (Bloomsbury £17.99 ).
My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans
Evans's career in journalism has covered a vast span, from working as a 16-year-old cub reporter in Ashton-under-Lyne and a genuinely noble Sunday Times campaign on behalf of Thalidomide victims, to the 1980s revolution in newspaper production methods. Overflowing with energy and enthusiasm, this is simultaneously a personal memoir, a portrait of an age (Evans met everybody) and an immensely powerful argument for why old-fashioned, slower-paced, quietly determined and authoritative print journalism still matters so much (Little, Brown £25).
My Father's Places: A Portrait of Childhood by Dylan Thomas's Daughter by Aeronwy Thomas
Aeronwy's childhood was passed largely at the ramshackle old boathouse in Laugharne, on the estuary of the river Taf, where her father wrote most of his poetry. It was an impoverished but blissfully happy time, spent mostly outdoors, and she has nothing but fond memories of her father, with his sweet smile and terrible teeth. But she also tells of the ferocious rows, and the violence both verbal and physical, that went on between Thomas and his wife Caitlin. Highly evocative, moving and melancholy (Constable £14.99).
My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle
Amid all the worthless and witless celebrity memoirs around this Christmas (of which Ant and Dec's is the worst), Boyle's is a peculiar exception - for sheer bad temper if nothing else. The Glaswegian stand-up has only one comic trick: to say the most unsayable thing about any given subject. The result is often appalling, though sometimes appallingly funny. Michael Jackson's music will last forever - "and so will his face". That sort of thing. If you are suffocating in cosy Christmas cheer, this abrasively cynical, relentlessly misanthropic book might feel like a welcome faceful of ice-cold water straight out of the Clyde (HarperCollins £18.99).
The Music Room by William Fiennes
A haunting and exceptionally well-written memoir about Fiennes's boyhood in a moated castle, Broughton, in Oxfordshire. It's filled with explorations, ghosts and "dark historical spaces", but also with a chattering family life. The most haunting presence, however, is his elder brother Richard, who develops epilepsy. His violent outbursts, described with an absolute clarity and tenderness, are all the more terrifying in so peaceful and reticent a world (Picador £14.99).
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Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story by Gabriel Weston
A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre. Weston manages to be cool-headed without being cold-hearted, writing in curt, precise prose about how heavy an amputated leg is, how lethally arrogant some doctors and surgeons can be and what a crude messy business abdominal surgery remains. The only thing she offers is the unvarnished truth about how human bodies function, or fail to function, yet the final effect is oddly consoling (Cape £16.99).
Closing Time by Joe Queenan
Queenan is well known for his hilariously biting journalism, especially on movies and Hollywood, and, as he confesses in this memoir, was only 13 when he first decided he wanted to make a living by "ridiculing people". The tough scepticism, or downright cynicism, is clearly rooted in a harsh upbringing in a poor Irish family in 1950s Philadelphia. All the usual clichés are here (drink, poverty, hopeless fantasies, a violently abusive father), yet the result is honest, fresh and original and as funny as ever (Picador £14.99)
The Letters of TS Eliot: Vol 2 1923-1925 ed Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton
With nearly 1,000 pages' worth of letters in just three years, this may seem a bit too monumental an addition to Eliot studies. Since Eliot lived another 40 years after this volume ends, one wonders what the final Letters will look like. Nevertheless, it offers a riveting poet's-eye portrait of these tormented years, with The Wasteland selling only by the hundred, on both sides of the Atlantic, Eliot increasingly distracted by lecturing and editing, and, through it all, the agony of his disintegrating marriage to Vivien (Faber £35).
Something Sensational to Read in the Train: The Diary of a Lifetime by Gyles Brandreth
Even Gyles Daubenay Brandreth's most ardent fan (who he?) would probably want no more than the occasional dip into this self-adoring doorstopper, perhaps while in retirement in the smallest room. Nevertheless, in small doses, Brandreth can be extremely funny and seems to have met everyone who was anyone. There can't be many people alive today who have shaken the hand of somebody who knew Oscar Wilde, vomited on Edward Heath and come close to giving Frankie Howerd, er, a trouser massage (John Murray £25).
MEMOIR OF THE YEAR The Running Year: A Birdwatching Life by Tim Dee
Dee's extraordinary, beautifully written account of a life spent watching birds is a fine addition to the flourishing genre of British nature writing. He conveys powerfully how birds are part of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, and offers a perfect balance of science, personal memoir and emotional response. A true birdwatcher, not a trainspotter-twitcher, Dee is particularly thrilled by the vast starling roost on the Somerset Levels - as awesome a natural spectacle as any in the world (Cape £16.99).