Biographies & Memoirs

From one of the most ferociously brilliant and distinctive young voices in literary nonfiction: a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld, exposing a raw personal journey along the way.

A gripping and poignant literary memoir about grief, identity and family secrets

This hilarious coming-of-age story follows his journey from collecting Star Wars toys as a small boy to schmoozing Carrie Fisher in her Hollywood home, and becoming one of the most loved and instantly recognised faces on British TV.

Revealing the woman behind the warrior in the fight for freedom, justice and equality, the family of Rosa Parks presents a collection of personal remembrances, reflections and never-before-seen photos and letters that pay tribute to one of the most famous figures in American history.

The revealing and deeply moving autobiography of one of the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century

During the fifteen months which I spent as a political prisoner in Ghana, from January 1972 to March 1973, I had the enforced opportunity to reflect on the many problems appertaining to the welfare and future of Africa generally, especially her relationship with the rest of the world. The more I thought ...

Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British Prime Minister and leader of the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, is a towering figure. When he died, writes the author, "one might have thought it was not a man who was being borne to his grave, but British history itself".

The Churchills dominated world politics for generations - but, like every family, they too have their secrets. Winston's mother, Jennie, had an affair with the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and her spendthrift habits devastated the family's reputation. The younger brother, Jack, played a crucial ...

The author of the monumental La Comédie Humaine, Honoré de Balzac was an extraordinarily prolific writer and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of realism. This new biography looks at his remarkable body of work, setting it against his life in 19th-century France and making it an informative ...

Paperback edition of the award-winning and massively acclaimed true story Britain's first investigative journalist.

only after childhood ended was he aware of the price the adults had paid for life in this most romantic of settings.Navigating family tensions and the trials of growing up, Will describes the close-knit community of North Yorkshire and his family's place within it: the shepherd probing the head-high snowdrifts for his flock;

How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? This book offers an account of one man's struggle to recover from loss of his greatest passion - and go one further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music, by going back to the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe.

W. Sydney Robinson returns with this brilliant exploration of four Victorian eccentrics.

The definitive biography of an American music legend.

An extraordinary book based on a terrifying true story. Grey's Anatomy meets Goodfellas. Now a major Fox network series, The Mob Doctor, due for broadcast in the UK in spring 2013.

Follows the trail of the corpse of the author of "Common Sense," who was shunned as an infidel by the church, buried in an open field on a New York farm, and whose body was later dug up and moved to Britain years later by a well-meaning admirer who nevergot around to burying the remains.

This is the extraordinary life story of Robert Shirley, the thirteenth Earl Ferrers, tracing his aristocratic upbringing in the 1930s through his wartime childhood, national service in the jungle of Malaya, Cambridge in the 1950s and finally his life a government minister in every Conservative Government ...

In the Shadow of Sacrifice shows by example how to minimize the significance of life's challenges by presenting them as necessary ingredients in a strong and healthy development. The book reveals the impoverished youth of Howard Calhoun, the one quirky life-changing intervention that started his path ...