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Biography
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We Swim To the Shark
Georgie Codd is scared of fish. Really, really scared. Even on dry land there's no escape: Georgie sees sharks in the dining room, squid tentacles in the street, has nightmares of being stranded at sea. Granny Codd understands. She has spent her life beside the water, but won't so much as paddle in it. Georgie's boyfriend is supportive, too, even when she decides that the answer to overcoming this fear lies in travelling to Thailand, learning to dive, and swimming with the biggest fish in the world: the massive, mighty whale shark. Could this immersive therapy actually work? There's only one way to find out. An anxious Georgie quits her job, leaves her life behind, and plunges into a realm of strange creatures, hidden depths, and intrepid diving adventurers. But as her quest expands across the oceans, her shark remains elusive, and everything else starts to fall apart around her.
£12.99
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Losing the Battle, Winning the War
In September 2006, Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson was travelling through Helmand Province when his armoured Land Rover hit a mine. He suffered 37 injuries in all, including losing both legs, breaking his pelvis and spine, and suffering brain damage. For this he has become known as the most injured soldier to survive the Afghanistan/Iraq conflicts. After the explosion, doctors didn't think Ben would survive - then they didn't think he'd wake up, or talk again, or walk again. Ben confounded them all. More than that, the disabilities he survived with taught him how many other people are suffering too, many who didn't get the 22 years' quality of life that he had. This is the story of a young man in his prime who seemingly lost everything fighting for his country - only to prove that strength of spirit and mind can overcome even the greatest of hurdles.
£20.00
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Machiavelli
A comprehensive, authoritative and highly original portrait of one of history's most unjustly infamous characters.
£16.99
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Patch Work
Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and conserve clothes centuries old, the inscrutable remnants of lives long lost to history; the commonplace or remarkable things that survive the bodies they once encircled or adorned. In 'Patch Work', Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear.
£10.99
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Fake Law
The Secret Barrister returns to debunk the biggest legal lies of our time. Taking you from your own home to the halls of Westminster, this is the truth about justice in an age of fake law.
£12.99
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Making It
A moving, funny and inspirational memoir about finding success when the odds are stacked against you, from the beloved TV star of hit BBC One show The Repair Shop, which reaches 7 million viewers.
£16.99
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Inge's War
What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history? Svenja's beautiful, aloof grandmother Inge never spoke about the past. All her family knew was that she had grown up in a city that no longer exists on any map: Königsberg in East Prussia, a footnote in history, a place that almost no one has heard of today. But when Svenja impulsively visits this windswept Baltic city, something unlocks in Inge and, finally, she begins to tell her story. It begins in the secret jazz bars of Hitler's Berlin. It is a story of passionate first love, betrayal, terror, flight, starvation, and violence.
£15.99
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The Courage to Care
Nurses have never been more important. We benefit from their expertise in our hospitals and beyond: in our schools, on our streets, in prisons, hospices and care homes. When we feel most alone, nurses remind us that we are not alone at all. In 'The Courage to Care', Christie Watson reveals the remarkable extent of nurses' work. A community mental-health nurse choreographs support for a man suffering from severe depression. A teen with stab wounds is treated by the critical-care team; his school nurse visits and he drops the bravado. A pregnant woman loses frightening amounts of blood following a car accident; it is a military nurse who synchronises the emergency department into immaculate order and focus. Christie makes a further discovery: that, time and again, it is patients and their families - including her own - who show exceptional strength in the most challenging times.
£10.99
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A Dutiful Boy
Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of east London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different but in a home where being gay was inconceivable he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up life didn't seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor, brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim. However Mohsin had incredible drive and he used education as a way out of his home life and to throw himself into a new kind of life. He became the first person from his school to go to Oxford University and there he found the freedom to come out to his friends. But Oxford was a whole different world with its own huge challenges and Mohsin found himself increasingly conflicted.
£10.99
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The Man in the Red Coat
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist, and free-thinker, a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. 'The Man in the Red Coat' is at once a fresh and original portrait of the French Belle Epoque and a life of a man ahead of his time.
£10.99
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Broken Greek
An extraordinary, moving and funny coming-of-age memoir about identity, chip shops and pop songs.
£9.99
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The SS Officer's Armchair
It began with an armchair. It began with the surprise discovery of a stash of personal documents covered in swastikas sewn into its cushion. 'The SS Officer's Armchair' is the story of what happened next, as Daniel Lee follows the trail of cold calls, documents, coincidences and family secrets, to uncover the life of one Dr Robert Griesinger from Stuttgart. Who was he? What had his life been - and how had it ended? Lee reveals the strange life of a man whose ambition propelled him to become part of the Nazi machinery of terror. He discovers his unexpected ancestral roots, untold stories of SS life and family fragmentation.
£9.99
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Olive, Mabel & Me
When Andrew Cotter turned his brilliant sporting commentaries from the Masters, the Open, Wimbledon and the Six Nations to the lockdown contests between his two Labradors, Olive and Mabel, the result was an internet sensation. The first two videos - 'Dinner Contest' and the extraordinary follow-up, 'Game of Bones' - have been viewed nearly 30 million times on social media, and have resonated with dog owners and sports fans everywhere. The wait for Game 3, the ultimate decider, has been as tense as a putt for the title on the final green. Now, Andrew gives fans a commentary of a different kind as he tells the heart-warming story of his life with his two famous labradors, Olive and Mabel, of his bond with his dogs and of their adventures together. It's a story that will resonate with dog lovers everywhere, as he recounts how his connection with his dogs has grown through the years into an unbreakable bond.
£10.99
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The Boy With Two Hearts
One family's escape from the Taliban and their fight to save their son.
£9.99
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The Suitcase
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. 'If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again', warned her mother. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seemed to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she found herself with the dilemma of two competing urges: wanting to know what's in the suitcase, and wanting not to know. So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father's and his family's past.
£18.99
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Limitless
In fascinating and personal detail, and based on exclusive diaries and audio recordings from his mission, Tim Peake takes readers closer than ever before to experience what life in space is really like: the sacrifice that astronauts make in being apart from their families, the sights, the smells, the fear, the exhilaration and the deep and abiding wonder of the view from space. 'Limitless' is a book about the power of following our dreams - however unlikely they may seem - and of striving to reach our potential, even when we might not believe in it ourselves.
£10.99
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Clothes... and Other Things That Matter
In this volume, Alexandra Shulman delves into her own life to look at the emotions, ambitions, expectations, and meanings behind the way we dress. From the bra to the bikini, the trench coat to trainers, the slip dress to the suit, she explores their meaning in women's lives and how our wardrobes intersect with the larger world - the career ladder, motherhood, romance, sexual identity, ambition, failure, body image, and celebrity.
£9.99
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Both Sides
Known as 'Lord Bendtner' to his fans and haters alike, Nicklas Bendtner has been lauded for his football skills at superclubs Arsenal and Juventus. But his career has been haunted by his rocky behaviour and tendency to self-sabotage. 'Both Sides' is Bendtner's shockingly honest memoir of both the bright and dark sides of his personality and the football industry, and what really happens when you give a troubled, overconfident teen millions to spend.
£12.99
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The Secret Life of the Savoy
In 1889, Victorian impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte opened The Savoy, Britain's first luxury hotel. Allowing the rich to live like royalty, it attracted glamour, scandal and a cast of eccentric characters, with the D'Oyly Carte family elevated to a unique vantage point on high society. This book tells their story through three generations: Richard (a showman who made his fortune from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas), Rupert (who expanded the D'Oyly Carte empire through two world wars and the roaring twenties), and Bridget (the reluctant heiress and last of the family line).
£12.99
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Chemical Warrior
For thirty years, Hamish has served and volunteered in conflict zones around the world. As the army's foremost chemical weapons expert, he built a unique first-hand understanding of how to prevent attacks and train doctors on the frontline - saving countless lives in the process. After suffering near-death experiences time and again, Hamish discovered he had a ticking time bomb in his own chest: a heart condition called Sudden Death Syndrome that could kill him at any time. But with a new awareness for the fragility of life, he fought harder to make his count. Despite facing extraordinary personal danger, Hamish has unearthed evidence of multiple chemical attacks in Syria and continues to advise the government at the highest level, including after the 2018 Novichok poisoning in Salisbury.
£12.99
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Slowhand
Eric Clapton is acknowledged to be rock's greatest virtuoso, the unrivalled master of its most essential tool, the solid-body electric guitar. Clapton transfigured three of the 1960s' most iconic bands, the Yardbirds, Cream and Blind Faith, walking away from each when it failed to measure up to his exacting standards. No life has been more rock 'n' roll than Clapton's in his epic consumption of drugs and alcohol, his insatiable appetite for expensive cars, clothes, and women - most famously revealed when he fell in love with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his best friend, George Harrison, and the inspiration for 'Layla'. With the benefit of unrestricted access to family members, close friends, and fellow musicians, and his encyclopedic knowledge, Philip Norman has written the definitive portrait of the insecure, often pain-racked man.
£14.99
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Unspeakable
'Unspeakable' is John Bercow's characteristically forthright and incisive account of his unique vantage point into British politics. Containing verdicts on many of the leading figures of this era, from Tony Blair to David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson, Bercow explores and explains the ways in which he has sought to democratise the business of Parliament, using the Speakership to champion the rights of backbench MPs and hold the government to account. In his own words, 'I made friends and enemies alike, but from start to finish I sought to do the right, rather than the convenient, thing and to be a decent public servant'. From the start, Bercow tackles head-on his regretted fascination with definably right-wing attitudes and describes his inexorable march to more progressive thinking since his election as Member of Parliament for Buckingham in 1997.
£12.99
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Unwell Women
We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our body's mysteries. And as a science, we expect medicine to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality. We want our doctors to listen to us and care for us as people, but we also need their assessments of our pain and fevers, aches and exhaustion to be free of any prejudice about who we are, our gender, or the colour of our skin. But medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. In 'Unwell Women' Elinor Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification, and misdiagnosis of women's bodies, and traces the journey from the 'wandering womb' of ancient Greece, the rise of witch trials in Medieval Europe, through the dawn of Hysteria, to modern day understandings of autoimmune diseases, the menopause and conditions like endometriosis.
£16.99
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My Life in Red and White
Arsène Wenger charts his extraordinary career, including his rise in France and Japan where he managed Nancy, Monaco and Nagoya Grampus Eight (clubs that also play in red-and-white, like Arsenal!) to his 22 years at the helm of an internationally renowned club from 1996 onwards. He describes the unrest that led to his resignation in 2018, and his current role as Chief of Global Football Development for FIFA. He offers studious reflections on the game and his groundbreaking approach to motivation, mindset, fitness and football that was often beautiful to watch.
£12.99
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