Diana

Donald Spoto's Diana: The Last Year offers a full account of the Princess of Wales during her final year. Its central figure is a woman pulled between two aims: a sincere wish to ease suffering and improve the world, and a private need to reclaim the years she felt had been lost when she joined the Royal Family at nineteen. Spoto describes that institution as rigid and, in her eyes, cold.

The book follows how she reshaped her image in those last months, presenting a public self and a private self that gradually became less alike. Spoto, known for his biographies of film figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Marilyn Monroe, brings a biographer's attention to her inner conflicts.