A Song Flung Up to Heaven (Angelou Maya); Virago, 2008

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of Jimmy Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America's most impressive memoir writers.