Educated

By Tara Westover. Random House; 385 pages; $28. Hutchinson; [pounds sterling]14.99
A riveting memoir of a brutal upbringing. The author grew up in a normally opaque environment: a Mormon survivalist household in Idaho, where she endured abuse and received no education. Despite not setting foot in a classroom until she was 17, she made it to university and wound up with a PhD from Cambridge.