Biography

In an attempt to find out why we're not having the sex we want, Sofie asks the questions: can we blame a lacking sex education? Is it all just sexual trauma? Where's the radical sexual liberation we were promised? What are we goin…

Talented and ambitious, Monica Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both determined to make something of themselves. How did their lives turn out so different? Growing up gifted and working-class in the foothills of the Ozarks, …

‘This is a book about the comfort and sustenance that can be got from gardening and from the earth, about the wonderful pleasures and fulfilment that I get from my garden.’ - Alice Taylor. Alice’s garden is her refuge, her solace.…

A New York Times bestseller, the incredible true story of a couple that escaped slavery in the South and eventually made their way to the UK, Africa and beyond. The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped sl…

From the time, many years ago, when Michael Palin first heard that his grandfather had a brother, Harry, he was determined to find out more about him. The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective wor…

For nearly 60 years Mr George Lucas led a double life. A mild-mannered civil servant by day, by night he was a fixture of London's colourful underground gay scene - a twilight world of petty crime, louche pubs and public toilets. …

On 6 June, 1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Two days later they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen …

A Palestinian prisoner’s memoir of thirty years’ captivity, and a love letter to the wall that encircles and comforts him This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and didNasser Abu Srour gre…

In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it: she was brutally murdered, h…

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family.A timely and genre-bending memoir that offers fresh and fierce reflections on motherhood, desire, identity and feminism.At the centre …

A novelist's gripping investigation of the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New…

In the archives of the national library, a researcher named Linda sees a nine year-old girl's face in the pages of a yellowed newspaper, and the seed of an obsession is planted in her mind. Birgitta Sivander was brutally murdered …

Are we ever truly lost in the internet age? The Observable Universe is a moving, genre-defying memoir of a woman reckoning with the loss of her parents, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperc…

A deeply moving and brilliantly idiosyncratic visual book of days by the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train. More than 365 images chart Smith’s singular aesthetic - inspired by her wildly popular Instagram…

When football players leave Ireland behind in the hopes of carving out a future in the professional game, they often end up plying their trade in the UK -competing for a chance in the Premier League, the Scottish Premiership, or t…

Tom Kiely strode majestically through the Irish sporting scene, brushing aside all challengers, collecting championships by the score, smashing Irish, Scottish, British and European and world records on all sides. He created a bla…

A gripping account of survival and recovery from internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize-winner Salman Rushdie.On the morning of 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate…

On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux’s mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother’s condition, she had re…

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light.  In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Boo…

The astonishing new portrait of the master of spy fiction, by the woman he kept secret for almost half his life.  John le Carré led a life entirely constructed of secrets. First as a British ‘spook’ during the Cold War, then as a …

In 1981, Rebecca Solnit rented a studio apartment in San Francisco, her home for the next twenty-five years. There she began the process of forging a voice in a society that preferred women to be silent. Liberated by West Coast ac…

In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn't look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the …

John F. Kennedy’s life is promoted by sentimental and careless myth-makers as pure legend. But a sinister shadow lies across it.His death was such a shocking event that the vivid memory of his assassination still blinds us to much…

Sociopath: A Memoir is at once a mesmerizing tale of a life lived on the edge of the law, a redemptive love story and a moving account of one woman's battle to gain a deeper understanding of people who, like her, are sociopaths.Ev…

The definitive biography of Shane MacGowan, fully updated to include Shane's final months and the response to his passing. Punk protagonist, legendary drinker, Irish musical icon. The complete and extraordinary journey of the Pogu…

Pioneering human rights campaigner, patriot, romantic, traitor, LGBTQ+ martyr: this is the story of Roger Casement, one of the 20th century's most complex and compelling figures. In 1904, Casement became internationally celebrated…

Meet the Murdochs and the disastrously dysfunctional family of Fox News. Until recently, they formed the most powerful media and political force in America. Now their empire is cracking up and crashing down.In his irresistible tri…

In 1983 de Beauvoir published Sartre's letters, maintaining that her own to him had been lost. They were found by de Beauvoir's adopted daughter, and published to a storm of controversy in France. Tracing the emotional and triangu…

When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for h…

An extraordinary, uncompromising and consoling celebration of a life - through childhood, faith, family, love, friendship, pain and loss - written as its author was facing her own mortality. Gillian Rose was a star academic, accla…