Authors

In this long-awaited and candid memoir, Hitchens re-traces the footsteps of his life to date....

From the award-winning author of My Name Is Leon, The Trick to Time and Supporting Cast comes a childhood memoir set to become a classic: stinging, warm-hearted and true....

David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all....

This brutal, beautiful memoir from award-winning novelist Louisa Young is a heartbreaking portrayal of love, grief and the merciless grip of addiction....

On Writing is part biography, part a collection of tips for the aspiring writer....

A new and fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from acclaimed historian Lucy Worsley....

No book ever written has more perfectly captured the spirit of the 1960s counterculture....

In 1982 Murakami began running to keep fit. Here he reflects on his running experiences....

On 14 February 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death"....

On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the world in which our best-loved novelist lived....

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Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning....

A. A. Gill's memoir begins in the dark of a dormitory with six strangers. He is an alcoholic, dying in the last-chance saloon - driven to dry out, not out of a desire to change....

Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin....

Mr. Rushdie reads from his newest novel, Shalimar the Clown....

Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted....

Prisoner FF8282 gazes out from confinement on what he deems must be a glorious summer’s day, rays of sunlight bursting through the barred...

Technology affects almost everything we do, and its possibilities can be both exhilarating and daunting. This collection features two radio documentaries exploring Douglas Adams’ vision of the digital future, plus Did Douglas Get It Right?, presented by Mitch Benn.... 

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War....

On 10th June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father....

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s....

Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions....

First published in 1986 and updated several times since, Don’t Panic is in an in-depth exploration of Douglas Adams’s cultural phenomenon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy....

His best stories are the stories of his life. His father grew up in a New York poorhouse called the 'Pogie'. He worked at a psychiatric hospital where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell....

Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages....

A flicker of light almost appears at the end of the tunnel for prisoner FF8282, as he is transferred to North Sea Camp near Boston...

Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn't have on cars, suits and shoes fit for a prince. Both of her parents were waiting for paradise. It never came.

Jonathan Rogers follows the roots of Flannery O’Connor’s fervent Catholicism and traces the outlines of a life marked by illness and suffering, but ultimately defined by an irrepressible joy. In her stories, and in her life story, Flannery O’Connor extends a hand in the dark, warning and reassuring us of the terrible speed of mercy. 

In five short essays, the award-winning writer dissects the nervous condition of being not only Black, and not only a woman, but also quote-unquote "postcolonial". Weaving together the experiences, events, intersections and negotiations of her multifaceted identity, Dangarembga offers a powerful vision of Black liberation.

In The World of J.R.R. Tolkien, you will join Dr. Dimitra Fimi to delve into Tolkien’s complex and multilayered mythology, examining all these ingredients and more. In these 10 lectures, you will explore and appreciate Middle-earth as medieval, mythological, and modern, a literary creation that was shaped by forces old and new. And you may be surprised to discover just how much of Tolkien’s legendarium was constructed posthumously, with his son Christopher compiling and publishing many of Tolkien’s later works after his death.

From the Corner of Bad and Ass is a collection of Carrie Schiffler’s memories about growing up in welfare housing to absentee and alcoholic parents. Throughout these heart-wrenching and often-hilarious stories, we cheer her on as she fights to survive domestic violence, sexual abuse, and cycles of poverty and addiction ... all before her 18th birthday. Prepare to laugh at her attempts to earn the attention she craves and prepare to cry over the inappropriate attention she receives.

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

Had Upton Sinclair not written a single book after The Jungle, he would still be famous. But Sinclair was a mere 25 years old when he wrote The Jungle, and over the next 65 years, he wrote nearly 80 more books and won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He was also a filmmaker, labor activist, women’s rights advocate, and health pioneer on a grand scale. This new biography of Sinclair underscores his place in the American story as a social, political, and cultural force, a man who more than any other disrupted and documented his era in the name of social justice.

Marta McDowell has revealed the way that plants have stirred some of our most cherished authors, including Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In her latest, Unearthing The Secret Garden, she delves into the professional and gardening life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. McDowell paints an unforgettable portrait of a great artist and reminds us why The Secret Garden continues to touch us after more than a century. This deeply moving book is a must-listen for fans of The Secret Garden and anyone who loves the story behind the story.

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a 19th-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

Philip K. Dick was a visionary writer. From post-apocalyptic San Francisco to Nazi-occupied America, his strange alternative futures have transfixed the world. But his life was every bit as unusual as his fiction. A Life of Philip K Dick opens a window into PKD's unique mind. Written with close cooperation with two of his ex-wives and a number of his friends, we are taken through his five marriages, his periods living in squalor, and his souring literary success. We are also given unparalleled insight into his transcendental experiences.

Surprisingly little has been written about second-generation Bloomsbury who tantalised the original 'Bloomsburies' at Gordon Square parties with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. Young Bloomsbury introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West, 'who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet', sculptor Stephen Tomlin and writer Julia Strachey.

Rumi is a renowned Sufi mystic who lived a life in devotion to the divine, through adhering to the ways of the appointed seal of the prophets, Muhammad (SAW), who can be more commonly referred to as the chosen one. Many fail to recognize and realize this. Many also fail to recognize who Shamsudeen Tabrizi (RA) was and how he had such a life-changing impact on the life of Rumi that would then make him world-famous and his works magnetic. This is a unique book written about Maulana Jalaludeen ar-Rumi (RA), who is famous for his poetry, writings, and his spirituality.

Despite living a short life, and having a relatively small output, John Keats (1795-1821) has become one of the most celebrated English poets. This brief biography covers the important events of his life and provides a charming portrait of one of the most appealing and tragic figures of English literature.

In 1895, a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine Hathaway, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her from becoming a “hunchback” like the “little locksmith” who does odd jobs at her family’s home. Forced to endure her confinement for ten years, Katharine remains immobile until age fifteen, only to find that none of it has prevented her from developing a deformity of her own. 

Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now.