The Outrun is another stunning memoir, against a background of beautiful nature writing. Amy Liptrot grew up on Orkney, a carefree childhood on a sheep farm, but clouded by her father's mental illness. She then left for a hedonistic life in London, where her drinking gradually took over her life. Realising that her life had to change, she returned to the island to recover.

Zero K is a very Don DeLillo Don DeLillo novel, if you know what I mean. No one else could have written it. Superficially, it's about a billionaire and his secret compound in a very remote location in Central Asia, where he and his researchers are working on a project to preserve human bodies until a future time when advances in medical technologies can be applied so that they can become, perhaps, immortal. Jeffrey, the billionaires son, is invited to the compound to witness the project first hand.

I've been intending to read this ever since it came out, but never quite got to it until now. Having seen her at the Auckland Writers' Festival recently, it became essential post-Festival reading. In a way, it's a non-fiction version of her early novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a kind of silent twin to that book. Jeannette Winterson is able to move from extreme humour to extraordinary painful and sad events with equal ease. It's the story of her early life as an adopted child in the north of England; adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal mother.

The Fish Ladder is a blend of memoir, travelogue and nature writing, enhanced by fragments of poetry and Celtic mythology.
Following a miscarriage, Katharine and her 9 year old daughter decide to follow a river from the sea to its source. On the way she muses on motherhood, marriage, and family, while also searching for her birth-mother. Ultimately, this is a very powerful memoir about grief and self-discovery and acceptance, and poetically described landscapes. I enjoyed it more than H Is For Hawk.

Anna Pavord is perhaps best known for The Tulip, her monumental, bestselling history of that enigmatic flower. This is a celebration of the English landscape, and relates the history of how artists, travel writers, farmers and agricultural policy advisors have responded to the landscape, its beauty, and its management and use. She has read everything from artists biographies to dry land use reports commissioned by government departments. For those with an abiding interest in the English landscape and its meaning, this is essential reading.

Paul Kalanithi was a talented neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the age of 36, he dies around a year or so later. During that time he wrote, but didn't complete, this book. His wife wrote the Epilogue. The book relates his journey from medical student to patient, while confronting issues about what constitutes a meaningful life. While obviously very sad, it's ultimately a life-affirming and optimistic book, in the manner of Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks. Beautiful.