Biography

In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to try to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images from a wor…

The riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—a record-breaking, critically-acclaimed no.1 bestseller, now out in paperback. In the stirring first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the s…

Delving deep into Deakin’s library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters and recordings to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages

Joan Didion's savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution. We forget all too soon the things we …

After being expelled from school for playing football for his country, fifteen-year-old Liam Brady travelled to London to join Arsenal, and soon became an indispensable part of their glorious 1970s team. Rightly considered one of …

Musician and artist Cosey Fanni Tutti has continually challenged boundaries and conventions for four decades. As a founding member of the hugely influential avant-garde band Throbbing Gristle, as one half of electronic pioneers Ch…

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success a…

Discover the authoritative, illuminating biography of T. E. Lawrence – the man who inspired the iconic film Lawrence of Arabia – from The World's Greatest Living Explorer Ranulph Fiennes Thomas Edward Lawrence first set foot on th…

Colm Tóibín’s personal account of encountering James Baldwin’s work, published in Baldwin’s centenary year. Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year…

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love a…

The critically acclaimed definitive biography of Kate Bush, revised and updated for 2024, with a new foreword by Sinead Gleeson. Detailing everything from Bush's upbringing to her early exposition of talent, to her subsequent evol…

The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm KieferThe conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and origi…

As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working class parents and the…

Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimore, Billie Holiday had her first run-in with the law at aged 13. But Billie Holiday…

The first and only Estate-authorized biography of the legendary artist, Tupac Shakur, a moving exploration of his life and powerful legacy, fully illustrated with photos, mementos, handwritten poetry, musings, and more*AS SEEN IN …

Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to the stunning desert solitude of …

On 29 September 1934, at the German Embassy office in London, Christabel Bielenberg officially became a German citizen. Having met her German husband Peter two years prior, Christabel decided to renounce her British citizenship, p…

Lebowitz turns her trademark caustic wit to the vicissitudes of life - from children ('rarely in the position to lend one a truly interesting sum of money') to landlords ('it is the solemn duty of every landlord to maintain an ade…

'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own …

A searing insider’s account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament from Rory Stewart, former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcast. Over the course of a decade, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsid…

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming exploration…

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…

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…

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…

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…