ONE DAY I SHALL ASTONISH THE WORLD, by Nina Stibbe (Viking, $37)
n 1982, aged 20, a sketchily educated Nina Stibbe left Leicester for London to nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, co-founder of the . Stibbe wrote regular letters to her sister Vic, with her comical, uncowed take on the literary milieu in which she found herself. These letters were published as in 2013. Nick Hornby turned the wildly successful book into a TV series (starring Helena Bonham Carter as Wilmers); it was eminently watchable but nowhere near as funny.
