Biographies & Memoirs

TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY **'Exhilarating.' Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year'Sharp-eyed and revealing.' The New Yorker'Brilliant .

James Baldwin was born into the squalor of a Harlem tenement and transcended an early life of setbacks and racism. A storefront preacher at the age of fourteen, he supported his entire family - mother and eight siblings - before he began writing for prestigious journals such as The Partisan Review. Troubled ...

A radical, literary and intimate insight into one of the twentieth century's most vital vocalists.

In 1937 aged just 19, Edmund Murray left his family and a comfortable job in London, caught the boat train to France and signed up for the minimum of five years' service with the French Foreign Legion. Armed with little more than school-boy French and a desire for a life of adventure, Murray travelled ...

The classic memoir of one of the century's most extraordinary familiesPerfect for fans of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE - A MAJOR NEW TV DRAMA

As a young woman growing up in a small, religious community, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty.

What Penaluna didn't ...

A 'humane and informative' (according to John Le Carre) biography of George Blake, the most notorious double agent in British history. The Happy Traitor is the work of many years' writing, research and unparalleled access, but was embargoed until Blake's death in Moscow in December 2020.

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights.

Kathy Reichs meets Fragile Lives in this fascinating and compelling memoir by one of the world's leading forensic scientists, Professor Angela Gallop

Over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems...Welcome to the incredible archive of Douglas Adams. After his death in 2001, Douglas Adams's papers were loaned to his old Cambridge college, St John's. Reproduced here, in facsimile ...

In her late twenties and already a partner in her headhunting firm, Lucy Leonelli was seemingly on top of the world, but despite her success she couldn’t shake the feeling she was missing out on life out there. So Lucy did the only reasonable thing she could do: she hung up her suit and set out on ...

A major new biography of one of Britain's best-loved artists.

The epic true story of an American hero who flew during the Second World War, soon to be featured in the upcoming Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks TV Series, Masters of the Air.

A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries."The author brings a fresh hopefulness to the enterprise of books and reading. Vintage Manguel-a pleasure for his many readers and admirers."-Kirkus Reviews In June ...

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending—a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, told through the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi. • “A pleasure to read in every way.” —The New York Times Book Review In the summer of 1885, ...

A unique coming-of-age story from the lost world of Arab-Jews

"Judiciously edited and engagingly annotated, this collection of Greene's personal letters - including many that were unavailable to his official biographer - gives new perspective to a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel, and romantic entanglement. Following ...

Originally written up in 1930 as a series of thrilling articles in the Daily Telegraph, Hector Bywater experiences were soon turned into a book, with the help of Daily Express journalist H. C. Ferraby.

The first full biography of one of the Second World War's most enigmatic secret agents