Biography

The Irish Times bestseller 'A gripping tale of savagery and courage' Noam Chomsky 'Fascinating and captivating' Irish Times 'A beautiful book... Full of pain and longing but also joy, adventure, and excitement' Janine di Giovanni …

The road to Croke Park can be a long one, but for Leitrim hurler Zak Moradi it was longer than most. Born in a refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq, at the height of the Gulf War, Zak spent his formative years living under the oppressive …

In her new collection, with her trademark blend of wryness, intelligence and wisdom, Ann Patchett explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and how all these forces have shaped her as a writer. Ranging from the perso…

Bono - artist, activist and the lead singer of Irish rock band U2 - has written his autobiography: honest and irreverent, intimate and profound, Surrender is the story of the remarkable life he's lived, the challenges he's faced a…

The extraordinary story of how the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, was found in the most hostile sea on Earth in 2022On 21 November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, finally succumbed to the crushing ice. Its…

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undyin…

New York Times bestseller An unprecedented behind-the-scenes view into the life of Anthony Bourdain from the people who knew him best  When Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, fans around the globe came together to celebrate the l…

Originally from west Kerry, Thomas Ashe was a schoolteacher in north County Dublin and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. During the 1916 Rising he commanded the Fingal Battalion of the Volunteers, who were tasked with des…

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age…

No, they weren't 'just friends'!Queer women have been written out of history since, well, forever. 'But historians famously care about women!', said no one. From Anne Bonny and Mary Read who sailed the seas together disguised as p…

Debbie Harry is a musician, actor, activist and the iconic face of New York City cool. As the front-woman of Blondie, she and the band forged a new sound that brought together the worlds of rock, punk, disco, reggae and hip-hop to…

A cultural storm swept through the 1960s - Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies - and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (from the cultural commissioner of Ne…

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fas…

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of t…

We Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life c…

From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen. Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the …

Michael Viney and his wife Ethna lived in the city, had successful jobs in the media and had just turned forty when they made a life-changing decision: to give up everything for a self-reliant existence on a remote cottage farm in…

Part biography, part critical appreciation, part love letter, and all fun, this enormous full-color volume, packed with color film stills and behind-the-scenes photography, chronicles every Murray performance in loving detail, rec…

Irish rugby has produced many charismatic figures over its history. None more than Willie Anderson. Immortalised for his defiant stance in the face of the All Blacks' Haka, the Ulsterman is notorious also for his time spent locked…

'What started as a book on the frustration of funding led to the writing of an autobiography at forty... I had so little to do in the daylight hours, I stayed up late unbuttoning Levis in back rooms.' In 1984 at the age of 40, the…

A child who feels like an outsider in a world that's set against him. A boy who sings on the playground instead of playing soccer, who likes Barbies, and whose secretly favorite car is the one called Tutti Frutti. Gabriel Ebensper…

David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother's wedding. He mops his sister's floor. He gives directions to a lost traveller. He eats a …

A groundbreaking new biography of philosophy's greatest iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most enigmatic figures in philosophy, and his concepts--the Übermensch, the will to power, slave morality--have fundamentally res…

A deeply moving memoir of addiction, loss, and survival. This is Hunter Biden's story of tragedy and trauma, and his journey to overcome it all. 'In his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden tells it all with a …

Widely regarded as one of the greatest ever sportspeople, Roger Federer is a global phenomenon. From his humble beginnings as a temperamental teenager to becoming symbol of enduring greatness, The Master is the definitive biograph…

The 1,000-square-mile Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is, for many, a symbol of total disaster: a reminder of shattered ideals and lost lives, now a toxic, dangerous no-man's-land. For Markiyan Kamysh, it became a site of pilgrimage. He …

The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of hisor anyage To this day, mention the name Andy Warhol to almost anyone and youll hear about his famous images of soup cans a…

In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet, a transcendent star of almost unfathomable fame and fortune living what appeared to be the perfect life. But it turned out he had been living a double life for yearso…

Opening in July 1914, as Mohandas Gandhi leaves South Africa to return to India, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1918 traces the Mahatma’s life over the three decades preceding his assassination. Drawing on new arch…

Imagined by one of the world's foremost JFK scholars, this fictionalized conversation presents the essential biography of America's most glamorous and mythologized president. For many, the presidency of John F. Kennedy was a magic…