Don’t miss our spotlight on narrative non-fiction, writing that seeks to share intimate personal experience with the wider world, to allow us to walk in another’s shoes. The great writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that “Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.”

Join these three hugely talented wordsmiths for insight into their truths. But keep in mind what Nietzsche once said: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

In Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun, novelist, sports shooter and former army reservist A.J. Somerset offers up one of the first looks at the gun as the pre-eminent cultural symbol of power in North America and asks how it got that way. Written from the unique perspective of a gun lover who’s disgusted with what gun culture has become, he presents an intellectual and cultural history that is certain to enrage, entertain and provoke debate.

In her moving memoir, This Is Happy, Camilla Gibb , the award-winning, bestselling author of Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, reveals the intensity of the grief that besieged her as the happiness of a longed-for family shattered—grief that lived in a potent mix with the solace that arose with the creation of another, most unexpected family, a family constituted by a small cast of resilient souls, adults broken in the way many of us are, united in love for a child. Reflecting on tangled moments of past sadness and joy, alienation and belonging, she revisits her stories now in relation to the happy daughter who will inherit them, and she finds there new meaning and beauty.