Biography

Tom Crean is one of the most iconic figures in Irish history. Born in 1877 in County Kerry, he enlisted in the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen, the start of a career that would bring him to the most extreme environments on Earth.…

Some people live to walk. Raynor and Moth walk to live . .. Raynor Winn knows that her husband Moth's health is declining, getting worse by the day. She knows of only one cure.It worked once before. But will he - can he? - set out…

A powerful and commanding account of the life of trailblazing political activist Angela DavisEdited by Toni Morrison and first published in 1974, An Autobiography is a classic of the Black Liberation era which resonates just as po…

A poignant and introspective memoir from Irish journalist and broadcaster Charlie Bird. In 2021, Charlie Bird was diagnosed with motor neurone disease - a man whose voice was so synonymous with his career faced losing it completel…

A fiercely honest and unvarnished autobiography from Ireland's most successful and controversial living artist.Making his name as a Pop artist in the late 1960s and 70s, Robert Ballagh quickly achieved an international reputation.…

*WITH A FOREWORD BY REESE WITHERSPOON*Actress Laura Dern and her mother - the legendary actress Diane Ladd - share their most intimate and important conversations.What happens when we are brave enough to speak our truths to the on…

In 2018 poet and author Michael Pedersen lost a cherished friend, Scott Hutchison, soon after their collective voyage into the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Just weeks later, Michael began to write to him.As he confronts th…

The story of the 2022 World Cup Champion and one of the greatest footballers of all time, Argentina's Lionel Messi. On 10 August 2021, Lionel Messi's beautiful Barcelona fairy tale came to an end as he completed a dramatic move t…

Kobe Bryant is a legend - The Rise is a fascinating look at his early life and how he became regarded as one of basketball's greatest-ever players. Kobe Bryant's death in January 2020 did more than rattle the worlds of sports and …

Memoirs can be boring, covering the same old ground, telling essentially the same old stories. Not this one. Herbie Brennan began a lifelong career as a writer at the age of 18. He worked as a journalist, a magazine editor, an adv…

From the award-winning author of My Name is Leon comes a childhood memoir set to become a classic: stinging, warm-hearted, and true. Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes.Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, …

Set around a small family farm on the edge of a bog, a few miles from the river Shannon, Minor Monuments is a collection of essays unfolding from the landscape of the Irish midlands. Taking in the physical and philo- sophical powe…

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the 'netsuke', they unlock…

Ah, Paris... gastronomie magnifique and... insane shit going on behind the scenes. A Waiter in Paris charts Edward Chisholm's jaw-dropping experiences while serving tables in the French capital, a demi-monde of sadistic managers,…

rowing up in conservative Saudi Arabia, Suad Aldarra felt stifled by the strictures placed on women. She yearned for the vibrant Syrian streets of her family's origin. When the opportunity arose to study at Damascus University, sh…

Richard Smyth had always been drawn to the natural world, but when he became a father he found a new joy and a new urgency in showing his kids the everyday wild things around them. As he and his children explore rockpools in Whitl…

John Donne lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, …

Claire Walsh spent her twenties living the life she thought she was supposed to live, all the while playing hide and seek with depression. As a result, the road to recovery was the only travelling she did. Aged 32, single and livi…

Multi-awardwinning Hannah Gadsby transformed comedy with her show Nanette, even as she declared that she was quitting stand-up. Now, she takes us through the defining moments in her life that led to the creation of Nanette and her…

Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty.All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning. Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she k…

Before he was president, he was senator. Written two years prior to the election that would change the face of the United States, The Audacity of Hope discusses the importance of empathy in politics, Obama's hopes for a different …

For more than twenty years Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, defied the authorities - be they communist or Taliban - to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the communists and watc…

'Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,' wrote George Seymour in 1944, when he was aged twenty-one. But the object of his affection was not a young woman, but a house -- ownership of which was then a distant dream. But he did eve…

"My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle - may they never give me peace" - Patricia Highsmi…

A poignant love letter to Bloom's husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships. In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was…

Born into music royalty, daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and sister to singer Rufus Wainwright, Martha grew up in a world filled with incomparable folk legends. With the same emotional honesty that has come t…

Death is a whisper in the Anglo-Saxon world. But on a remote island, off the coast of County Mayo, it has a louder voice. The local radio station runs a thrice-daily roll-call of the recently departed.The islanders keep vigil with…

From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, Mark Lanegan takes us back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously burst…

Seamas O'Reilly's mother died when he was five, leaving him, his ten brothers and sisters and their beloved father in their sprawling bungalow in rural Derry. It was the 1990s; the Troubles were a background rumble (most of the ti…

The late 1890s saw the start of a 'heroic age' in polar exploration. This book tells the story of three men who were to embody the spirit of the time - driven by courage, determination and ambition, to be the first to discover the…