Spare by Prince Harry (January)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover the global phenomenon that tells an unforgettable story of love, loss, and healing.

“Compellingly artful . . . [a] blockbuster memoir.”—The New Yorker

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.

For Harry, this is that story at last.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight.

At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The discipline gave him structure, and two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he soon felt more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love.

Then he met Meghan. The world was swept away by the couple’s cinematic romance and rejoiced in their fairy-tale wedding. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. Watching his wife suffer, their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent the tragedy of history repeating itself but to flee his mother country. Over the centuries, leaving the Royal Family was an act few had dared. The last to try, in fact, had been his mother. . . .

For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

It's almost unheard of for a book to dominate public conversation well before even being published. Yet Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, has done just that after several explosive and intimate claims about his life within the royal family came to light. Of course, we haven't read it yet, but the talent of his ghost-writer, J.R. Moehringer, who also wrote the biographies of Nike's Phil Knight and Andre Agassi, has us excited. The Pulitzer Prize-winner has an astonishing ability to plumb the depths of his subjects—crafting a raw, nuanced portrait of a person in the process. “He’s half psychiatrist,” Knight said of Moehringer. “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.” — Elise Taylor.

In his book—which was published on Tuesday after a week of leaked excerpts—the 38-year-old royal revealed that, in 2005, he and Prince William pleaded with their father not to marry Camilla. Charles, who is now King, had been engaged in a long-standing affair with Camilla during his 15-year marriage to Princess Diana.“Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings,” Harry writes in Spare. “We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved.”

In passages that many stepchildren will relate to, Harry reflects on difficult moments adjusting to his father’s new marriage. In one story, likely from the late nineties, Harry remembers wondering if Camilla would be cruel to him “like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks,” noting that William “long harbored suspicions about the Other Woman.” Harry also claims that Camilla converted his bedroom into her own personal dressing room as soon as he moved out of their former residence, Clarence House, when he was 28.