Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover grew up on a mountain in rural Idaho, the youngest child of survivalist parents who distrusted government, doctors, and schools. She was never registered at birth, received no formal education, and spent her childhood working in her father’s junkyard and witnessing violence she was not permitted to name. At seventeen, she taught herself enough to pass the ACT and enroll at Brigham Young University — a step that would begin a decade-long rupture with her family and a profound, sometimes agonising reconstruction of her own identity. From BYU she won a scholarship to Cambridge, then a Gates Cambridge grant, and eventually a PhD in history. Westover’s memoir is a riveting, beautifully written account of what education really means — not the accumulation of facts, but the hard, disorienting work of learning to trust your own perception of reality. It spent over 200 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the defining books of the decade.