Books like The road from Coorain by Jill K. Conway

Jeannette Walls' memoir chronicles her turbulent childhood in a dysfunctional, itinerant family, detailing poverty, alcoholism, and homelessness across the United States as she seeks stability and personal growth.

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

A memoir of a woman who overcomes a strict survivalist Mormon upbringing in rural Idaho to pursue higher education, ultimately earning a PhD in history at Cambridge.

This book was written just a few years before Eleanor's death. She was at the top of her form. Eleanor dives into the minds of her characters to give us a sharper focus on the forces driving them. Thus we learn that Burke Denby decides to set aside the bothersome detail that they won't be living in the mansion BECAUSE Helen will find out soon enough anyway. Meanwhile, Helen has been spinning marvelous fantasies of redecorating feats that her newly acquired father-in-law will appreciate. "I'll win him over easily." Almost at the same time John Denby is reflecting on how hard it will be on Burke to start out on the ground floor and work his way up to the partnership Burke expects to be waiting for him after the honeymoon. The stage is now set for watching two young lovers try to live on love and deal with their slaughtered dreams of peace and plenty. Our author goes into great detail in describing the steps leading to financial ruin. Burke is determined that Helen learn how to keep an account of her money, but admits to himself that he can't do that either. His money disappears so fast it seems like someone is stealing it. It must be those 25 cent lunches that he splurges on when a perfectly good lunch can be had for 15 cents. A decision must be made between love, or financial security. The table of contents below lets us see the direction this love affair is drifting. CONTENTS I. frosted cakes AND shotguns . . . . .1 II. An Only Son ......... 84 III. Honeymoon Days ........ 83 IV. Nest-Building ......... 43 V. The Wife .......... 81 VI. The Husband ......... 75 VII. Stumbling-Blocks ........ 82 VIII. Diverging Ways ........ 104 IX. A bottle of ink ........ 125 X. by advice of counsel ....... 155 XI. in quest OF THE stars ...... 173 XII. the trail OF THE ink ...... 182 Xin. A woman's won't . . . . . . . . 199 XIV. an understudy . . . . . . . . 210 XV. A woman's will . . . . ... .225 XVI. emergencies ......... 241 XVII. pink teas to flighty blondes .... 258 XVIII. A little bunch of diaries ..... 265 XIX. the stage is set . . . . . . . . 284 XX. the curtain RISES ........ 298 XXI. the play BEGINS ........ 802 XXII. actor AND audience . . . . . . . 314 XXIII. "the plot THICKENS" ....... 380 XXIV. COUNTER-PLOTS ......... 339 XXV. enigmas ........... 348 XXVI. the road to understanding ..... 357

Jimmy Carter re‑creates his Depression‑era childhood on a Georgia farm, exploring family, community, and the early social fabric that shaped his life and the nation.

In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years. She left a detailed record of her life in her letters, her published articles, her book The Passing of the Aborigines, and in notes scribbled on paper bags, old railway timetables, and even scraps of newspaper. But very little of what this strange woman tells about herself is true. For her there were no boundaries separating experience from imagination; she inhabited a world filled with events that could not have taken place, with people she had never met. In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Mrs. Bates says she was most happy. There are meetings with the aborigines and whites who knew her or about her, and slowly the facts of her life are allowed to emerge. But what makes this book so extraordinary is the way that, almost imperceptibly, the author fuses her own imagination and experience with that of Daisy Bates, until she seems to be recalling this other life as if it were her own, until she is able to bring us the feeling of sitting in a tent near a railway line, staring out across a red desert, where the boundary between experience and imagination disappears. This magical, absorbing new book by the acclaimed author of The Emperor's Last Island confirms Julia Blackburn as one of Britain's most original and talented writers. - Jacket flap.

An intimate biography of Nicola Fuller, tracing her life from hopeful childhood in East Africa to the hardships of farming in Rhodesia, the fallout of civil war, and her final years on a Zambezi Valley farm.

Thirteen‑year‑old Mem, after her mother’s death and her father’s abandonment, seeks a new home for herself, her brother Joshua and their younger sister amid the challenges of 1817 frontier life.