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Biography
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Confessions of a Bookseller: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?' Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should by an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what the shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. 'The Diary of a Bookseller' (soon to be a major TV series) introduced us to the joys and frustrations of life lived in books. Sardonic and sympathetic in equal measures, 'Confessions of a Bookseller' will reunite readers with the characters they've come to know and love.
£10.99
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People Like Us: What it Takes to Make it in Modern Britain
Hashi Mohamed came to Britain aged nine, a refugee from the Somali civil war. He attended some of Britain's worst schools and was raised exclusively on state benefits. Yet today he is a successful barrister, with an Oxford degree and a CV that includes appearances on the BBC. Hashi explores what his own experience can tell us about social mobility in Britain today. Far from showing that anything is possible, he concludes his story is far from typical: our country is still riven with deep divisions that block children from deprived backgrounds from accessing the advantages that are handed to others from birth.
£9.99
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Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist
Stephen Morris has had a distinguished career, spanning nearly 40 years, as a pivotal member of Joy Division and New Order with his trademark machine-like drumming. After the death of Joy Division's singer, Ian Curtis, in 1980, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Morris and his wife Gillian formed New Order, one of the most critically acclaimed and influential bands of the late 20th century. New Order became the flagship band for Tony Wilson's Factory Records and, alongside him, opened the infamous Hacienda nightclub, the centre of the acid house movement. In 2015, after a ten-year hiatus, New Order released Music Complete ; which charted at `2 in its first week of release (the band's highest position in over twenty years). Part memoir, part visual scrapbook, part aural history, this is a hybrid memoir in Stephen's wry and witty voice.
£13.99
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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and A Reckoning
Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin - to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct.
£14.99
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A Month in Siena
When Hisham Matar was 19 years old he came across the Sienese School of painting for the first time. In the year in which Matar's life was shattered by the disappearance of his father the work of the great artists of Siena seemed to offer him a sense of hope. Over the years since then, Matar's feelings towards these paintings would deepen and, as he says, 'Siena began to occupy the sort of uneasy reverence the devout might feel towards Mecca or Rome or Jerusalem'. 'A Month in Siena' is the encounter, 25 years later, between the writer and the city he had worshipped from afar. It is a dazzling evocation of an extraordinary place and its effect on the writer's life. It is an immersion in painting, a consideration of grief and a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.
£11.99
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My Penguin Year: Living with the Emperors - A Journey of Discovery
Emperor penguins have the most extraordinary lifecycle. They march up to 100 miles over solid ice to reach their breeding grounds. They choose to breed in the depths of the worst winter on the planet; and in an unusual role reversal, the males incubate the eggs, fasting for over 100 days to ensure they introduce their chicks safely into their new frozen world. 'My Penguin Year' recounts author Lindsay McCrae's adventure to the end of the Earth, spending a year living alongside the most resilient creatures in nature. He experienced every aspect of a breeding emperor's life, facing the inevitable sacrifices that came with living his childhood dream, and facing down the personal obstacles that, being over 15,000km away from the comforts of home, almost proved too much.
£10.99
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Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain's Poorest Towns
Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. Twenty years later, Kerry's life is unrecognisable. She's a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books. But she often finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught somehow between two worlds. 'Lowborn' is Kerry's exploration of where she came from, revisiting the towns she grew up in to try to discover what being poor really means in Britain today and whether anything has changed.
£12.99
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Perfect Sound Whatever: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
January, 2017: James Acaster wakes hungover and alone in New York, his girlfriend having just left him. Thinking this is rock bottom, little does James know that by the end of the year he will have befouled himself in a Los Angeles steakhouse and disrespected a pensioner on television. Luckily, there is one thing he can rely on for comfort - music. In true Acaster fashion, this ends up with a completely unnecessary mission: to buy as much music as he can released in 2016, the year before everything went wrong (for James, at least).
£12.99
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A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation
Alison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. 20 years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic figure on the British Left, utterly driven by his work and by a commitment to collective politics. Within a year they were married. Within 10, Raphael would be dead. Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he from a Jewish Communist family with its roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, she from the English working class. In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. She tells of moving into Raphael's cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which transformed London's old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael's mother.
£15.99
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The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Doctor
When Dr Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In 'The Soul of Care', he delivers a deeply inspiring story about what it means to grapple with illness from both sides, as an experienced doctor and a loving husband.Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work - at moments joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonising, but always rich in meaning. Describing the practical, emotional and moral aspects of caring, Kleinman explores how we must ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves and of our doctors.
£10.99
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Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop
The story of retired superintendent Dr Leroy Logan, MBE, one of the black officers who helped change the Met
£17.99
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I Wanna Be Yours
The long-awaited autobiography of John Cooper Clarke, the Bard of Salford, punk poet, rock star, fashion icon, national treasure and acerbic wit.
£20.00
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Me: Elton John Official Autobiography
The first and only official autobiography by the much-loved global icon Elton John.
£12.99
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Can You Hear Me?: An NHS Paramedic's Encounters with Life and Death
A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won't let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an ambulance paramedic. Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for ten years: every day, he sees a dozen of the scenes we hope to see only once in a lifetime. This is a memoir of the chaos, intensity and occasional beauty of life on the front lines of medicine in the UK.
£12.99
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Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed
The story of a personal housing crisis that led to a discovery of the true value of home. Aged 31, Catrina Davies was renting a box-room in a house in Bristol, which she shared with four other adults and a child. Working several jobs and never knowing if she could make the rent, she felt like she was breaking apart. Homesick for the landscape of her childhood, in the far west of Cornwall, Catrina decides to give up the box-room and face her demons. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, she resolves to make a tiny, dilapidated shed a home of her own. With the freedom to write, surf and make music, Catrina rebuilds the shed and, piece by piece, her own sense of self. On the border of civilisation and wilderness, between the woods and the sea, she discovers the true value of home, while trying to find her place in a fragile natural world.
£12.99
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Tall Tales and Wee Stories: The Best of Billy Connolly
In December 2018, after 50-years of belly-laughs, energy, outrage and enjoyment, Billy Connolly announced his retirement from stand-up comedy. It had been an extraordinary career. When he first started out in the late Sixties, Billy played the banjo in the folk clubs of Glasgow. Between songs, he would improvise a bit, telling anecdotes from the Clyde shipyard where he worked. In the process, he made all kinds of discoveries about what audiences found funny, from his own exaggerated body movements to the power of speaking explicitly about sex. He began to understand the craft of great storytelling too. Soon the songs became shorter and the monologues longer, and Billy quickly became recognised as one of the most exciting comedians of his generation. This book brings together the very best of Billy's storytelling and includes his most famous routines.
£12.99
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More Than Likely: A Memoir
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are the creators of some of British television's most beloved comedies. Essex-born Clement teamed up with Geordie insurance salesman La Frenais in the early 1960s and scripted a series about two young pals from Newcastle, 'The Likely Lads', which became one of BBC Two's first hits. The duo went on to create the classic sitcoms 'Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?', 'Porridge' starring Ronnie Barker, and 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet'. Together and separately they have worked as writers and script editors for some of the most famous TV programmes ever made, and with stellar performers that include Billy Connolly and Tracey Ullman. This is their story.
£12.99
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Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years
In this follow-up to her critically acclaimed memoir 'Home', the enchanting Julie Andrews picks up her story with her arrival in Hollywood, sharing the career highlights, personal experiences and reflections behind her astonishing career, including such classics as 'Mary Poppins', 'The Sound of Music', 'Victor/Victoria', and many others. In 'Home Work', Julie describes her years in Hollywood - from the incredible highs to the challenging lows. Not only does she detail her work in now-classic films and her collaborations with giants of cinema and television; she also unveils her personal story of adjusting to a new and often daunting world, dealing with the demands of unimaginable success, being a new mother, moving on from her first marriage, embracing two stepchildren, adopting two more children, and falling in love with the brilliant and mercurial Blake Edwards.
£12.99
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Along Came a Llama
This rediscovered gem tells the charming tale of how a baby llama transformed a Welsh farming family forever.
£10.00
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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Biography
At 3 a.m. on Monday, 18 August 1969, the final night of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, four men armed only with acoustic guitars faced the gaping darkness of a vast open-air audience. An hour later, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had confounded and convinced their peers, and cemented their place in rock history. They had also made themselves, for better or worse, synonymous with Woodstock, and with the nebulous Woodstock generation which it inspired. Between 1969 and 1974, CSNY were the most successful, influential, and politically potent rock band in America. Here, Peter Doggett illuminates the pivotal years of 1960s counterculture through the story of four of its key protagonists, whose music, beliefs and relationships with each other chronicle both its trajectory and its legacy.
£14.99
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Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime
Agatha Christie was not only the biggest selling writer of detective stories the world has ever known, she was also a mystery in herself, giving only the rarest interviews, declining absolutely to become any sort of public figure, and a mystery too in the manner in which she achieved her astonishing success. H.R.F. Keating, a crime novelist and respected reviewer of crime fiction, brought together a dozen distinguished writers from both sides of the Atlantic to throw light on this double mystery. Some analyse the art itself; some explain the reasons for her success, not just the books, but also in film and theatre. The approaches are penetrating, affectionate, enthusiastic, analytical, funny - even critical. Together, they give an insight into the life and work of the first lady of crime.
£10.99
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Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy
The success story of the British royal family can be laid at the door of Prince Albert, who, after his death in 1861, turned into a man who could do no wrong. His statues were to be seen all over the Empire. Albert Halls, Albert Squares, Albert Streets filled every English-speaking town, and many of the towns in India. In this exhaustively researched and definitive biography, A.N. Wilson reveals Prince Albert to be a man of prodigious gifts. Not only was he politically astute, he had administrative gifts which could have made him a great general. He was scientifically informed. He understood, and was enthused by, modern technology. He was a knowledgeable art collector. He was a musician and composer. He was the father of a family. Between them, Victoria and Albert rescued the British monarchy from grave crisis and established the kind of country Britain would become over the next century.
£10.99
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A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner
Where can a tin of tuna buy you clean clothes? Which British education system struggles with 50% illiteracy? Where do teetotal Muslims attend AA meetings? Where is it easier to get 'spice' than paracetamol? Where does self-harm barely raise an eyebrow? Welcome to Her Majesty's Prison Service, a creaking and surreal world that has been left to rot for decades in the shadows of polite society. Like most people, documentary-maker Chris Atkins didn't spend much time thinking about prisons. But after becoming embroiled in a dodgy scheme to fund his latest film, he was sent down for five years. His new home would be HMP Wandsworth, one of the oldest, largest and most dysfunctional prisons in Europe. Horrifying, moving and darkly funny, this is the unvarnished depiction of what he found.
£10.99
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Ghostland: In Search of A Haunted Country
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020'A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature' Philip Hoare'An exciting new voice' Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country
£12.99
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