Memoirs Audiobooks | Biography & Memoir

Frankly: The revelatory memoir from Scotland's first female and longest-serving First Minister

"Compellingly read by the author, Nicola Sturgeon. 'A triumph. Frankly is the most insightful and stylishly open memoir by a politician since Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father' Andrew O'Hagan 'Nicola Sturgeon tells her remarkable story with great skill and unflinching honesty' Alan Johnson The enduring popularity of Nicola Sturgeon, the first female and longest-serving First Minister of Scotland, was a rare constant in an era marked by Brexit, Covid and five different UK prime ministers. Previously, as 'Yes Minister' and Deputy Leader of the SNP, she helped to bring Scotland to the brink of independence, overseeing the Yes campaign in the independence referendum of 2014. In this deeply personal memoir, Sturgeon recounts her journey from working-class Ayrshire to the steps of Bute House. Revealing the person behind the politician, she explores the schism between her private and public personas: one painfully shy and self-critical, the other a consummate public performer. And yet, she pulls no punches, candidly recounting her interactions with figures including Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and Alex Salmond - her mentor and, ultimately, her staunch adversary. Full of the verve and wit that made Sturgeon one of the most high-profile politicians in the UK, this is a unique blend of personal insight and captivating vignettes. Infused throughout with a love of Scotland and its people, it discusses Sturgeon's mistakes, her battles, and her triumphs with candid honesty. Frankly is the compelling story of no ordinary politician."

Nicola Sturgeon (Author), Nicola Sturgeon (Narrator)

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Loveable: A Memoir: One Woman’s Path from Good to Free

"Good wives don’t fall in love with other men. That's what Amber Rae—who also narrates this program—told herself when, in the midst of building a home with her husband in Mexico, she met the man she knew she was meant to spend the rest of her life with. Maybe in another life, she thought. But the truth was, for years, she smiled and strived her way through a sexless and lonely marriage, never admitting her unhappiness to anyone—not even to herself. She thought that if she just tried harder, everything would fall into place. But as the voice inside her grew louder, she realized she had two choices: keep pretending everything’s fine and her needs don’t matter, or confront everything she thought she knew about love, loyalty, and her own limits. LOVEABLE is a raw and intimate journey of a woman breaking free from the roles that confined her. This memoir isn't about trading one life or one man for another—it’s about the painful, beautiful process of coming home to oneself. And this isn't just Amber’s story―it's a rallying cry to stop being good so you can start being free. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press Essentials"

Amber Rae (Author), Amber Rae (Narrator)

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Not That Wheel, Jesus!: Stories From a Faith That Went Off-Road in the Best (and Worst) Possible Way

"From the bestselling author of Holy Hot Mess, a laugh-out-loud look at what happens when life goes a direction we didn't expect and we are forced to reconsider the beliefs, assumptions, and stories that have always steered our course. Mary Katherine Backstrom grew up the most basic of all youth group kids-pH level 14-and her faith only grew as she led youth ministry, served as a missionary, and went on to become a bestselling Christian author. She knew all the practiced, perfect Sunday school answers and was driving happily down the straight and narrow, until one day her young son asked a simple question: will my Jewish best friend go to hell? In the months and years that followed, that single question continued to snowball. MK challenged and reconsidered every part of the faith she'd been raised to accept so completely. Not That Wheel, Jesus! is Mary Katherine's hilarious journey from certainty to doubt to going nuclear on the socials ("it was my heresy era"), and then of slowly and painfully finding her way back to a different, less defined faith. It's the heartfelt and achingly honest story of a spirituality that went off the road and crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, right before God and everybody. And then, slowly, through grace and plenty of therapy, grew richer and deeper than she ever could have imagined."

Mary Katherine Backstrom (Author), Mary Katherine Backstrom (Narrator)

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Bad to Blue: The True Story of a Chinatown Gangster Turned NYPD Detective

"In this intimate and harrowing memoir, a former Chinese gang member tells the story of how he went from “bad to blue” by leaving the gang behind and becoming a New York City police detective. Nestled in the warm embrace of his immigrant grandmother, Mike Moy was raised hearing bloodcurdling tales of the brutal life she escaped in China. But growing up on the mean streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, Mike has also faced shocking violence coupled with destructive racism. In a tight-knit community besieged with fear and alienation, teenage Mike takes refuge in one of Chinatown’s notorious gangs, tattooing his membership in Fuk Ching on his body. The gangs’ fearsome reputations are warranted. Frequenting gambling dens and pool halls, Mike and a boisterous band of gangmates run amok: selling and shooting guns, stealing, and running protection schemes. But the fast pace and constant danger take a terrible toll, with friends being killed or sent to prison—the inevitable end for most gang members. But vexing questions are raised for young Mike after he learns the extraordinary story of a cop who forgave the young shooter who made him a paraplegic. NYPD Officer Steven McDonald’s morality and compassion arouse a longing deep within Mike to be one of the “good guys.” In a world-changing turnaround expected by no one, Mike joins the NYPD. By donning that blue uniform, he gets the adrenaline-driven lifestyle he craves while staying on the right side of the law. But coming clean is not so easy. Patrolling the streets he once terrorized, he fears the exposure of his secret past. Anyone identifying him as a former gang member could lead to investigations, expulsion from the NYPD, media scandal, and legal charges for past crimes. And what would his former gangmates think if they found out he’d joined “the enemy”? Packed with violence, heartbreak, and love, Mike tells the triumphant story of one man’s transformation—even as bullets fly just above his head."

Mike Moy (Author), James Sie (Narrator)

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This Happened to Me: 'A brilliant and moving account of a journey of healing' Bessel van der Kolk

"'A brilliant and moving account of a journey of healing ... Thank you Kate, for sharing your courage and your hard-earned wisdom.' - Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score 'Price not only rises above the hurt and hate, she uses her hard-won insights to shine a light for others.' -Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle For readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name comes a powerful memoir that is a remarkable testament of survival and resilience. At once harrowing and inspiring, Kate Price's story is testament to the power to heal. Kate Price grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with her sister and parents. In leaving, she broke one of many, unwritten rules when it came to cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse. She started a new life in Boston where she began to experience a series of hazy, horrifying flashbacks. Through work with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, Price discovered that her father had abused and trafficked her as a child. So began a 10-year quest with a journalist from the Boston Globe. Revisiting the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two found the proof Price had been searching for. In her transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood, to create a life and family on her own terms. From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination."

Kate Price (Author), Kate Price (Narrator)

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Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life

"We've all got a choice. We can get better at fighting or worse at life. Every day, we absorb body blows: some glancing, others that knock us to the mat. It doesn't matter how well-prepared or tough you think you are. Everyone, at some point, is hit with a haymaker from life. It's the cost of living. And just like in the ring, opting out of pain is not an option. In Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business, former heavyweight boxer Ed Latimore takes readers on a journey from his hardscrabble childhood in Pittsburgh's public housing projects to his signing with Jay-Z's Roc Nation Sport. With honesty and humor, Ed shares how the discipline of boxing served as his rite of passage into manhood and gave him the tools he needed to overcome his childhood trauma and the demons of alcoholism. Ed's story is one of learning the hard lessons of maturity in perhaps the harshest way possible-from the hurt business. It's a story about finding self-mastery in the face of uncertainty, discovering the power of forgiveness, and embracing pain and adversity to design a life of purpose. Like Ed says, "How we absorb life's blows and rally through bruised and bloodied rounds shows who we are at our core. We sacrifice, weep, heal, and carry on. In hardship, we transcend.""

Ed Latimore (Author), Ed Latimore (Narrator)

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Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation

"Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, a thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses which reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture. Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life. In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place—from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of “equestrian chic” was born, to the reclamation—or, in Lil Nas X’s word, yeehawification—of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them? Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of “horse people”—the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness—to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image."

Bitter Kalli (Author), Tyla Collier (Narrator)

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Anonymous Male: A Life Among Spies

"A no-holds-barred memoir about identity, from a former Hostage Rescue Team sniper who left the FBI on 9/11 only to lose himself, moving deeper into a world of spies. "I can think of no recent book that so deeply penetrates the layers civilization has sifted atop the world, the one that's always seething away at the bottom of all things."-Jeffrey Lent, author of Before We Sleep "Mr. Whitcomb writes he had a 'backstage pass to the world.' He tells us about it here with candor and with the stunning courage to admit he admires Emily Dickinson."-David Mamet In September 2001, Christopher Whitcomb was the most visible FBI agent in the world. His bestselling memoir, Cold Zero, had led to novels, articles in GQ, and op-eds in The New York Times. He appeared on Imus in the Morning, Larry King, and Meet the Press; he was nominated for a Peabody reporting for CNBC. He played poker with Brad Pitt while contracting for the CIA. Then one day in 2006, without warning, Whitcomb packed a bag, flew into Somalia, and dropped off the face of the earth. For fifteen years, he waged a mercenary war on himself, traveling the world with aliases, cash, and guns. He built a private army in the jungles of Timor-Leste, working contracts for intelligence agencies, where he survived a coup d'état only to lose his friends, abandon his family, and give up on God. And though many stories might have ended there, Anonymous Male is a tale of redemption. While surfing the wilds of Indonesia, Whitcomb found himself trapped beneath a giant wave, where, at the edge of drowning, he came to terms with the chaos of his own clandestine life. He survived the wave to find his way home and rebuild the world that he had abandoned. Anonymous Male is a riveting memoir about loss and recovery, a deeply intimate story that spans continents, war, politics and the media. It is a confession, and a cautionary tale of what happens to people whom the government trains to lie, even to themselves."

Christopher Whitcomb (Author), Christopher Whitcomb (Narrator)

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Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty

"A "raw and lyrical" (New York Times) memoir-in-essays from former pinup model and lead singer of Nylon Pink Kaila Yu, reckoning with being an object of Asian fetish and how media, pop culture, and colonialism contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women. No one fetishized Kaila Yu more than she fetishized herself. As a young girl, she dreamt of beauty. But none of the beautiful women on television looked like her. In the late '90s and early 2000s Asian women were often reduced to overtly sexual and submissive caricatures-the geishas of the book-turned-film Memoirs of a Geisha; the lewd twins, Fook Mi and Fook Yu, in Austin Powers in Goldmember; Papillon Soo Soo's sex worker character in the cult Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket; and pin-up goddess Sung-Hi Lee. Meanwhile, the 'girls next door' were always white. Within that narrow framework, Kaila internalized a painful conclusion: The only way someone who looked like her could have value or be considered beautiful and desirable was to sexualize herself. Blending vulnerable stories from Yu's life with incisive cultural critique and history, Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays exploring feminism, beauty, yellow fever, and the roles pop culture and colonialism played in shaping pervasive and destructive stereotypes about Asian women and their bodies. Yu reflects on the women in media who influenced her, the legacy of U.S. occupation in shaping Western perceptions of Asian women, her own experiences in the pinup and import modeling industry, auditioning for TV and film roles that perpetuated dehumanizing stereotypes, and touring the world with her band in revealing outfits. She recounts altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards, allowing men to treat her like a sex object, and the emotional toll and trauma of losing her sense of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted. Candid and intimate, Fetishized is a personal journey of self-love and healing. It's both a searing indictment of the violence of objectification and a tender exploration of the broken relationship so many of us have with beauty, desire, and our own bodies. *Includes a downloadable PDF of Sources, Additional Reading, and the 'Not an Entirely Comprehensive List of Fetishized Portrayals of Asian Women in Mainstream Media' from the book."

Kaila Yu (Author), Kaila Yu (Narrator)

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Rock Star: My Life on and off the Ice

"No stone is left unturned in this no-holds-barred memoir by one of Canada’s greatest curlers From the first slides as a toddler at her hometown Winnipeg curling club to the top step of the Olympic podium, Jennifer Jones has risen to become one of curling’s greatest players. Along the way, she has altered how the game is played and has kicked open doors to allow women to have equality in what was, traditionally, a male-dominated field. Her record of achievement is unmatched, but it never came easily. In Rock Star, Jones opens up about the tensions between teammates and opponents, how she combined law school and a legal career with curling at the highest level, the inside story on what many consider the greatest shot in curling history, how her Olympic dream almost ended on a ski hill in Switzerland, and the challenges of balancing world-class curling with motherhood. Jones also reveals the personal battles she endured during her career. While she was front and centre in arenas and television coverage, she had to push herself past her severe introversion to find some level of comfort with being in the spotlight. There were also clashes with the media, which sometimes portrayed her so harshly that it left her in tears. From first slide to last rock, the journey she shares in this memoir is one that may surprise even her biggest fans. Jones helped to grow the sport, and in exchange, she grew as a curler, a wife, a mother, and a public figure. Equal parts inspiring and shocking, Rock Star will leave readers in awe of her accomplishments and the journey that led her to become the person she is today. "

Jennifer Jones (Author), Emma Love (Narrator)

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Destroy This House: A Memoir

"For fans of The Glass Castle and The Liars' Club, a tender, heartbreaking, and hilarious memoir chronicling the challenges of growing up with a desperately scheming father, a mother plagued by an acute hoarding disorder, and parenting parents while seeking independence. The Long family's love was fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Once her parents were gone, Amanda Uhle realized she was closer to them than anyone else, yet she found herself utterly confounded by the lives they had led. Amanda's striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mother's hoarding disorder flourished and her father's schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When financial ruin struck, they abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing, and Amanda's father became a preacher. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real. In Destroy This House, Amanda sets out to document her parents' unbelievable exploits and her own hard-won escape into independence. With humor and tenderness, Uhle has crafted a heartfelt and utterly unique memoir, capturing the raucousness, pain, joy, and ultimately, the boundless love that exists between all parents and children."

Amanda Uhle (Author), Rebekkah Ross (Narrator)

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I Swear: My Life with Tourette’s

"Brought to you by Penguin. From the remarkable man whose life inspired the heartstopping film, ‘I Swear’, a book that offers extraordinary insight into what it’s like to live with a severe form of Tourette’s Syndrome: a fascinating, complex condition that’s more common than most of us think ( 1 in 100 schoolchildren have the condition) , and yet is chronically misunderstood. Born in the 1970s on the Scottish Borders, John’s was twelve when his tics first arrived, as if from nowhere. Previously a happy, popular, football-mad boy he was labelled disruptive, rude, and even mad. As his condition progressed, from blinks and jerks to involuntary rude and obscene shouting, John was bullied, rejected - alienated from his family and a society that had no idea what to make of him. Hospitalized and drugged for months, it was only an extraordinary and transformative friendship, and John’s dogged optimism, that turned his life around, making I Swear an inspirational story of triumph over adversity. Through John’s eyes, we see Tourette’s not just as a medical condition, but as a lens through which we can all better understand the importance of human connection. And how essential, as well as ultimately rewarding, it can be to keep going and never give up. © John Davidson 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025"

John Davidson (Author), David Monteath (Narrator)

Audiobook

Memoirs Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir

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