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Biography
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All the Young Men
In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Corker Burks visits a friend in hospital when she notices that the door to one of the patient's rooms is painted red. The nurses are reluctant to enter, drawing straws to decide who will tend to the sick person inside. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. And in doing so, Ruth's own life changes forever. As word spreads in the community that she is the only person willing to help the young men afflicted by the growing AIDS crisis, Ruth goes from being an ordinary young mother to an accidental activist. Ruth kept her story a secret for years, fearful of repercussions within her deeply conservative community. But at a time when it's more important than ever to stand up for those who can't, Ruth has found the courage to have her voice heard.
£16.99
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Fast Forward
The long-awaited follow up to Stephen Morris' bestselling memoir, 'Fast Forward' takes the reader from New Order to present day.
£20.00
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The Yellow House
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighbourhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighbourhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the house would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.
£12.99
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Sing Backwards and Weep
When Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just 'an arrogant, self-loathing redneck waster seeking transformation through rock 'n' roll.' Little did he know that within less than a decade, he would rise to fame as the front man of the Screaming Trees, then fall from grace as a low-level crack dealer and a homeless heroin addict, all the while watching some of his closest friends rocket to the forefront of popular music. In 'Sing Backwards and Weep', Lanegan takes readers back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and dripping with drugs.
£12.99
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The Nine Hundred
Believing that they had been called up for three months of government service, 999 young, unmarried Jewish women were tricked into boarding a train in Poprad, Slovakia, on March 25th 1942. The train became the first official transport to Auschwitz and the women were then sold to the Nazis as slave labour by their own government. Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors, historians, witnesses and relatives of those first deportees, this book is an important addition to Holocaust literature and women's history.
£13.99
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Churchill & Son
Few fathers and sons can ever have been so close as Winston Churchill and his only son Randolph. Both showed flamboyant impatience, reckless bravery, and generosity of spirit. The glorious and handsome Randolph was a giver and devourer of pleasure, a man who exploded into rooms, trailing whisky tumblers and reciting verbatim whole passages of classic literature. But while Randolph inherited many of his fathers' talents, he also inherited all of his flaws. Randolph was his father only more so: fiercer, louder, more out of control. Hence father and son would be so very close, and so liable to explode at each other. A revealing new perspective on the Churchill myth, this intimate story reveals the lesser-seen Winston Churchill.
£20.00
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The Zookeeper of Belfast
1941. With the men away fighting, animal-lover Hettie Quin is made Belfast Zoo's first ever female zookeeper. She is put in charge of Violet, a three-year-old Indian elephant, and they soon form a special bond. With Violet at her side, Hettie can almost escape the grim reality of her life: the father who has abandoned her family; the sister who recently died; the war that's raging hundreds of miles away. But the devastation of war is closer than she thought. When the bombs begin to rain down on the city, Hettie must gather all her courage to protect those she loves the most. Can she save Violet - and get through unscathed herself?
£14.99
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Hollywood Park
Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country's most infamous cults, and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer. Jollett slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician, forming the band The Airborne Toxic Event.
£14.99
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Rust
This is a debut memoir of grit and tenacity, as one young woman returns to the conservative hometown she always longed to escape to earn a living in the steel mill that casts a shadow over Cleveland.
£9.99
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Love Letters of Kings and Queens
In turns tender, moving, heartfelt and warm, these are the private messages between people in love. Yet they are also correspondence between the rulers of nations, whose actions (and passions) changed the course of history, for good or bad.
£16.99
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The Prison Teacher
Step inside one of Britain's most notorious prisons. During her time as a prison teacher Mim Skinner met every type of criminal. But her job was not to judge them, it was to teach. In this compelling, inspirational memoir Mim takes you behind the bars. From drugs and violence to pregnancy and heartbreak, Mim's classroom saw it all. With high drama but also candid humour 'The Prison Teacher' is full of eye-opening stories of those without a voice, revealing the human side of our country's most controversial institution.
£18.99
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To the End of the World
They say that sometimes ghosts don't realise they're dead and wander around screaming because no one is paying them any attention. Well, in show business you may have been dead five years before you finally twig. You howl around the corridors of power while the elected march straight through. Then one day you catch yourself in a mirror and there is nothing looking back. In his highly anticipated third memoir, Rupert Everett tells the story of how he set out to make a film of Oscar Wilde's last days, and how that ten-year quest almost destroyed him.
£12.99
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The Splendid and the Vile
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'Every time Churchill took to the airwaves it was as if he were injecting adrenaline-soaked courage directly into the British people ? Larson tells the story of how that feat was accomplished ? Fresh, fast and deeply moving.' New York Times
£12.99
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The Man from the Future
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann, one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome. Here, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science.
£20.00
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A Sound Mind
Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous - and found it in classical music. A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, this book rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting and varied in music.
£12.99
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Sylvia Pankhurst
The definitive biography of Sylvia Pankhurst, a woman ahead of her times - political rebel, human rights champion and radical feminist. Born into one Britain's most famous activist families, Sylvia Pankhurst was a natural rebel; a talented artist, prolific writer and newspaper editor. A free spirit and radical visionary, history placed her in the shadow of her famous mother, Emmeline, and elder sister, Christabel. Yet Sylvia Pankhurst was the most revolutionary of them all. This new biography celebrates a life in resistance, painting a compelling portrait of one of the greatest unsung political figures of the twentieth century.
£16.99
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Tenement Kid
'Tenement Kid' is Bobby Gillespie's story up to the recording and release of the album that has been credited with 'starting the 90's', Screamadelica. Born into a working class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, Bobby's memoirs begin in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heath's brutal slum clearances. Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers' apprentice, Bobby's rock n roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynott's mirrored pickguard at his first gig at the Apollo in Glasgow. Filled with 'the holy spirit of rock n roll' his destiny is sealed with the arrival of the Sex Pistols and punk rock which to Bobby, represents an iconoclastic vision of class rebellion and would ultimately lead to him becoming an artist initially in the Jesus and Mary Chain then in Primal Scream.
£20.00
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Dutch Light
Hugh Aldersey-Williams transports us to the Dutch Golden Age - a time of immense scientific and artistic innovation - in this histo-biography of Christiaan Huygens, one of Europe's leading, yet unsung, thinkers.
£10.99
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Ernest Bevin
As a statesman, Ernest Bevin is second only to Churchill in impact and legacy. Born in abject poverty to a single mother, and with virtually no formal education, Bevin went on to become the founder of the largest trade union in British history and then made it to the top of politics and government. As Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1945, he was the nation's wartime mobiliser-in-chief. Clement Attlee, Churchill's Deputy Prime Minister, kept the wartime coalition in good administrative order, but it was the charismatic Bevin who really drove the domestic war effort. As post-war Foreign Secretary, Bevin was Britain's last world power envoy and did much to thwart Stalin's Soviet Union and to prevent Europe sinking back into conflict. In this biography, Andrew Adonis brings to life one of our greatest statesmen - a politician whose light is often hidden beneath that of his more celebrated contemporaries.
£9.99
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The Seven Ages of Death
What can death teach us about life? Conducting many thousands of post-mortems has given Dr Richard Shepherd the opportunity to examine death at every stage of life. Each autopsy is its own unique investigation, providing evidence of how, through life, the risks to us ebb and flow. From old to young, from murder to misadventure, and from illness to accidental death, each body has taught him something: about human development, about mortality, about its owner's life story, about justice and even about himself.
£22.99
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Journeys to Impossible Places
Simon Reeve reveals the inside story of his most astonishing adventures and experiences, around the planet and close to home. 'Journeys to Impossible Places' continues the story Simon started in 'Step by Step', which traced the first decades of his life from depressed and unemployed teenager through to his early TV programmes. Now Simon takes us on the epic and thrilling adventures that followed, in beautiful, tricky and downright dangerous corners of the world, as he travelled through the Tropics, to remote paradise islands, jungles dripping with heat and life, and on nerve-wracking secret missions. This book inspires and encourages all of us to battle fear and negativity, and embrace life, risk, opportunities and the glory of our world.
£20.00
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Private Faces
Siân Phillips covers her early life of growing up as an only child in the remote Welsh countryside, her determination to be an actress at an early age, her short lived marriage and falling in love with Peter O'Toole.
£13.99
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A Life Lost
Jackson is aggressive, confrontational and often volatile. His mother, Kayla, is crippled with grief after tragically losing her husband and eldest son. Struggling to cope, she puts Jackson into foster care.
£9.99
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Queen Elizabeth II
A full, detailed and global portrait of a life lived in service. Insightful accounts of events range from the early years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign to more recent years. Featuring interviews from diverse sources, 'Queen Elizabeth II' also includes memories from crucial international figures of the twentieth century, such as Nelson Mandela. Asking questions about conflict and change and the Monarchy's journey as colonial institution, this is an insight the ways in which the reign of the monarch has intersected and impacted on others around the world.
£25.00
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