Biography

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…

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…

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…

Reuben, aged 38, was living in a home for adults with learning disabilities and struggling to accept that he had Down's syndrome. Depressed and in a fog of anti-depressants, he hadn't spoken for over a year. Increasingly isolated,…

The new memoir from prize-winning writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo - playful, provocative and original, it's her deeply personal take on striving for a life of her own. 'When it comes to spinning light and shadow on the complexitie…

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own .. . When she uncovers his forgotten wif…

The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author and feminist icon - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos. Nancy Spain was one of t…

In this gripping memoir, Eamonn Mallie takes us on an extraordinary journey through his life as a journalist in Northern Ireland. From the frontlines of the Troubles to the corridors of power, Mallie’s fearless reporting and unrel…

At the age of 12, Pat Sheedy placed his first 10p bet and concocted his first scam. This marked the beginning of his descent into a compulsive gambling addiction that would lead to close to one hundred criminal convictions, over a…

When Jade's partner leaves the barn that they moved into just weeks before, he leaves a dent in the wall and her life unravelled. Numbed from years in a destructive, abusive relationship, she faces an uncertain future and complete…

What we can learn from Ethiopian running culture – written by an anthropologist and 2:20 marathon runner who trained with the Ethiopians.'Ethiopia is a place where I have been told that energy is controlled by angels and demons an…

Between Meals is the gourmand and journalist A.J. Liebling's delectable account of his time spent eating and drinking in 1920s Paris, under the tutelage of his friend Yves Mirande, 'one of the last of the great around-the-clock ga…

The pop songs that have been the soundtrack to the worst moments of her life. And of course, the pivotal day when Orange Is the New Black hit the airwaves and broke down the door to Jill's own sexuality. In these honest examinatio…

From the acclaimed author of Japan Story, this is the history of Japan, distilled into the stories of twenty remarkable individuals. The vivid and entertaining portraits in Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book take the re…

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Toibin looks at the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s,…

'I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ce…

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attache to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, bu…

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities o…

On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored.Returnin…

For over 300 years, Japan closed itself to outsiders, developing a remarkable and unique culture. During its period of isolation, the inhabitants of the city of Edo, later known as Tokyo, relied on its public bells to tell the tim…

Meet the Flying Fortresses of the American Eighth Air Force, Britain’s Lancaster comrades, who helped to bring down the NazisHistorian and World War II expert Donald Miller brings us the story of the bomber boys who brought the wa…

From declaring my love to Vanessa Redgrave to being fed cockroaches by Steve Buscemi, from turnip-based comedy with Blackadder to being farted on by Arnold Schwarzenegger, from Graham Norton's sofa to Alan Cumming's camper van, my…

Thug, armed robber, activist, revolutionary, tyrant we know the headlines, we know about the atrocities, but what do we really know of the man at the heart of it all? Stalin looks behind the image of the dictator and explores Iose…