Spare

Royal memoirs are usually exercises in saying nothing beautifully. Spare is the opposite: a prince saying everything, sometimes more than his advisers surely wanted, in prose polished by one of the best ghostwriters in the business. Whatever you think of Prince Harry, this book broke the sales records to prove that the world wanted to hear him out.

What it's about

Spare is Prince Harry's account of life as the "spare" to his brother's "heir," a framing he says was applied to him from birth. The spine of the book is grief: his mother Diana died when he was twelve, so a boy processed her loss inside an institution that treats emotion as a liability. From there the memoir moves through Eton, the infamous Nazi costume scandal, two tours in Afghanistan, years of tabloid harassment and the therapy that eventually helped him name what he was carrying.

The second half turns to Meghan Markle: how they met, how the press coverage curdled, why the couple stepped back from royal duties in 2020 and relocated to California. Harry describes a physical altercation with his brother William, strained conversations with his father and a family system he portrays as captive to its own press operation. The book was ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, the memoirist behind Andre Agassi's Open, which explains why it reads far better than most celebrity tell-alls.

Why everyone's talking about it

Spare became the fastest-selling nonfiction book on record when it launched in January 2023, moving over a million English-language copies on day one. A leaked early release of the Spanish edition meant its most explosive revelations, including Harry's claim of 25 Taliban kills in Afghanistan, were dissected worldwide before the book even hit shelves. It is rare for a senior royal to break ranks at all; breaking ranks at this level of detail made it a genuine historical document.

The verdict, for now

As a piece of storytelling, Spare is compulsively readable; Moehringer gives Harry's voice a wounded, novelistic quality that most memoirs in this genre never approach. The honest criticism: the book struggles with self-awareness. Harry demands privacy while volunteering intimate details no tabloid could have printed, settles scores at length yet frames every conflict with himself as the injured party. Military figures also questioned the wisdom of publishing his Afghanistan kill count. Read it as a gripping, one-sided testimony rather than a balanced history of the monarchy's troubles. On those terms, it delivers.