Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER / OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD From Donald Trump's 2024 Vice-Presidential Candidate ‘Essential reading for this moment in history’ New York Times‘Brilliant … offers an acute insight into the reasons voters have put their trust in Trump’ ObserverJ. D. Vance grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks hillbillies or white trash.In this deeply moving memoir Vance tells the story of his family’s demons and of America’s problem with generational neglect. How his mother struggled against but never fully escaped the legacies of abuse alcoholism poverty and trauma. How his grandparents ‘dirt poor and in love’ gave everything for their children to chase the American dream. How Vance beat the odds to graduate from Yale Law School. And how America came to abandon and then condescend to its white working classes until they reached breaking point.‘A beautiful memoir but it is equally a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America … Vance offers a compelling explanation for why it’s so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it … a riveting book’ Wall Street Journal** Now a major-motion picture directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams Glenn Close and Gabriel Basso **In this Sunday Times bestselling autobiography Vance explores the economic and social disparity in regional America. It's a cultural and ethnic history of the hillbillies a group often dismissed and overlooked yet whose story is integral to understanding the 20th century United States.For fans of Megan Phelps-Roper (Unfollow) Tara Westover (Uwolniona) Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle) Ben Mezrich (Breaking Twitter) and Alex Preston (As Kingfishers Catch Fire).