Biographies & Memoirs

Simon Gray is determined to give up smoking. Can he kick the habit of sixty years? Will he, sometime soon, be able to leave his house without nervously feeling for his two packets of twenty and his two lighters? This is the final volume of the trilogy that began with "The Smoking Diaries".

Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, two thirteen-year-old boys were enrolled at an elite, boys-only New England boarding school. One of them, descended from wealth and eminence, would go on to Yale, then to a career as a navy officer and Vietnam war hero, and finally to the U.S. Senate, from where ...

'An extraordinary, moving book ... like opening a jewellery box packed with beautiful, unusual gems' Marian Keyes

Presents a memorable portrait of the volcanic city from an American writer who has lost his heart to the place and to a mysterious Neapolitan woman. Naples is an amalgam of equivocal beauty, betrayals and secrets, a wounded city whose commonplace wonders are conjured by this lyrical book.

If somebody had said to me, "Your wife will go mad, she'll go missing, you'll end up bringing up your children alone, you're going to search for her for years and years," I would have thought they were the ones going insane.

In spare, rhythmic prose, this book describes the nightmarish sequence of events that surrounded the sudden illness and subsequent death of Laure Adler's nine-month old child. The child's resilience as the story is told feeds a desperate kind of hope in both Adler's family and the reader.

The faux memoir of George W. Bush, from the creators of WeeklyRadioAddress.com, featured on TheOnion.com one of the highest rated podcasts in America.

Twenty-three years old, forensic archaeologist Courtney Brkic joined a UN-contracted team excavating mass grave sites in eastern Bosnia, drawn there by her family history. This is a book belonging and nationality and sheds light on the roots of violence and genocide.

A biography of the great 18th-century novelist, Tobias Smollett, by the author of "Cyril Connolly: A Life". It is filled with curious details from the worlds of publishing, medicine, politics and literary life.

A wonderful illustrated biography of the creator of The Lord of the Rings.

Diana Athill met Hakim Jamal when she edited his book, From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me, published by Andre Deutsch. Against all odds, they became friends, sometimes lovers.

This is Blake Morrison's memoir of his father, Dr Arthur Morrison. It shows a son asking who his father really was. Was he the man seen through a seven-year-old's eyes, jumping queues, or the sexual charmer seen by a 17-year-old? Or was he the figure, so hard to recognize, on his death-bed?

Twenty-three years old, forensic archaeologist Courtney Brkic joined a UN-contracted team excavating mass grave sites in eastern Bosnia. She was drawn there by her family history-her father is Croatian - and she was fluent in the language.

When Laure Adler learned from a colleague that her nine-month-old son had been taken ill, she rushed to the hospital. So began months of battling - with uncommunicative doctors and nurses, and with her own feelings of guilt, terror and hopelessness. Here, she describes the nightmarish events.

Affecting memoir of a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, to rank alongside The Diary of Anne Frank