Books like Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Istanbul: Memories and the City
Living to Tell the Tale
The first volume of García Márquez's memoirs, from his childhood in his grandparents' house in Aracataca to his years as a young journalist in Cartagena and Barranquilla, up to 1955.
A Strangeness in My Mind
Mevlut comes from an Anatolian village to Istanbul in 1969 to sell boza, a fermented drink, on the streets at night, and spends three years writing love letters to a girl he glimpsed once at a wedding.
The Dark Child
Camara Laye remembers growing up in Kouroussa in French Guinea, the son of a goldsmith with magical gifts, until he leaves for school in Conakry and then for Paris.
Aké: The Years of Childhood
Soyinka's memoir of growing up in a parsonage compound in Abeokuta in western Nigeria in the 1930s and 40s, up to the age of eleven.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz's memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, the only child of bookish European Jews, and of the loss of his mother when he was twelve.
Speak, Memory
Nabokov remembers his St. Petersburg childhood and émigré youth, from butterfly summers on the family estate to Cambridge and Berlin, in prose built like a chess problem.
Abandoning a Cat
A short memoir of Murakami's father, a teacher drafted into the war in China, that starts from a childhood afternoon when the two of them left a cat at the beach and found it waiting at home.
The Tongue Set Free
Canetti remembers his childhood from 1905 to 1921, in a Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna and Zurich, and the mother who taught him German.
Novelist as a Vocation
Essays on how Murakami became a novelist, from the baseball game where he decided to write his first book to the daily routine and stubbornness that have kept him writing since.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.
The World of Yesterday
Zweig's memoir of the lost cosmopolitan Europe of his youth, written in Brazilian exile and sent to his publisher on the day he and his wife took their lives.