"For years I yearned for love and acceptance until I realised that the voice I was looking for was mine.' At 28, the admirable Talkhani tells her already epic personal story in this inspiring memoir. Raised amid the patriarchal strictures of Saudi Arabia, as a young woman she rejected the traditional path her culture had mapped out for her.

In the early 2000s, Parker and his partner moved to a remote village in West Wales and met Reg and George, a couple for over 60 years who settled there at a time when their relationship could have landed them in prison. The four men became firm friends, and when Reg and George died within a few weeks of one another, they willed their house, Rhiw Goch-the Red Hill-to Parker and his partner. This spellbinding, gorgeously written book is a portrait of two relationships through the ebb and flow of the seasons. It is also a valuable portrait of the queer rural experience.

"Each woman of the milking shed has been swept out by a riptide, pulled far from the current of normal motherhood." This riveting memoir—the first non-fiction book by an award-winning novelist—beautifully evokes the heart-in-mouth weeks that followed the premature births of Segal's identical twin girls as they fought to hold on to life.

As well as being Iris Murdoch's biographer, Conradi was her disciple and close friend, and towards the end of her life, her carer. In Murdoch's centenary year, this multi-stranded and deeply thoughtful memoir provides a more much personal account of their friendship than his official biography could. It takes in Conradi's upbringing in an upwardly mobile European Jewish family, his life in London as a gay man before homosexuality was decriminalised, his part in the early campaigns for gay rights, becoming a Buddhist, and finding peace in the Welsh Marches.

Winner of the Tony Lothian Prize for the best first uncommissioned biography, this tells of the four "emancipated, determined and wild" Olivier sisters whose dramatic interconnected lives span the 20th century. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought to be damaging to ovaries and formed a group called the Neo Pagans. Daphne later set up Britain's first Steiner school, while Noel was one of very few female doctors before the First World War. Sounds wonderful.

Written by the ninth Duke's grandson, this is the untold story of the husband of "dollar princess" Consuelo Vanderbilt. It aims to somewhat restore his reputation, especially in respect to Blenheim Palace, which he "left in a far better state than he found it".

"Long overdue" biography of a couple who were hugely influential across the spheres of art, gardening and cookery. Morris became a sought-after painter of flowers, birds and landscapes (David Bowie collected his art); Lett-Haines was hailed as "Britain's first Surrealist" and was a superb cook, who swapped recipes with Elizabeth David.

This double biography and autobiography charts both the author's struggles with mental health and his eventual recovery, and also his relationship with his father Lawrence, a leading Unionist politician in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. "A deeply absorbing and powerful piece of writing," says Birlinn.

"Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before." This dual biography, "brimming with poetry, art and nature writing", recounts the 16 months during which two young men of genius, living on the edge of the Quantocks, developed a new understanding of nature, the world and themselves, and discovered that "poetry was not an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it". Illustrated with woodcuts by Tom Hammick, it sounds marvellous. Next year is the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth.

Brings together everything we know about Charles, King of the Franks, and sifts through the evidence to come as close as we can to understanding the man and his motives, in this "sort of detective story" that makes use of everything from prayer books to skeletons, and from gossip to artwork.