Biographies & Memoirs

In Bligh, the story of the most notorious of all Pacific explorers is told through a new lens as a significant episode in the history of the world, not simply of the West. Award-winning anthropologist Anne Salmond recounts the triumphs and disasters of William Bligh's life and career in a riveting narrative that for the first time portrays the Pacific islanders as key players.
From 1777, Salmond charts Bligh's three Pacific voyages - with Captain James Cook in the Resolution, on board the Bounty and as commander of the Provid... read more

In 1968, at the age of 22 Karl Marlantes abandoned his Oxford University scholarship to sign up for active service with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. Pitched into a war that had no defined military objective other than kill ratios and body counts, what he experienced over the next thirteen months in the jungles of South East Asia shook him to the core. But what happened when he came home covered with medals was almost worse. It took Karl four decades to come to terms with what had really happened, during the course of which he pa... read more

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using News Corp as his vehicle. David McKnight uncovers Murdoch's crusade for his unique brand of conservatism over three decades. Drawing on extensive original research, McKnight tracks NewsCorp's pursuit of conservative ideas, from Reagan and Thatcher to the Tea Party and its war on Barack Obama. He shows how Murdoch's political conn... read more

It's December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold.
As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren't random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again. As he re-creates t... read more

From the author of the bestselling and much-loved 'Seabiscuit', an extraordinary true story of courage and survival.

On a May afternoon in 1943, a bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, who struggled to a life raft and pulled himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamp... read more

The authorised biography of one of the greatest storytellers of all time, written with complete access to the archives stored in the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. Roald Dahl is one of the greatest storytellers of all time. He pushed children's literature into uncharted territory and almost twenty years after his death his popularity continues to grow -- worldwide sales of his books have now topped 100 million. The man behind the stories, however, remains an enigma. Dahl was a single-minded adventurer, an eternal child, and h... read more

The history of a family through 264 objects - set against a turbulent century - from an acclaimed writer and potter. 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: Potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined... The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Ch... read more

A thrilling and moving new novel from the acclaimed author of Touching the Void. As her hand slips from his grip, Patrick's life is shattered, forever changed. The Sound of Gravity is a harrowing, dramatic and powerful tale of love, loss and redemption as that haunting split-second memory changes the course of a lifetime. Trapped high on a stormbound mountain face in the icy depths of winter, the stricken young man is forced to fight for his life. Half a lifetime later, haunted by grief and guilt, Patrick is freed from his self-imp... read more

On an icy morning in Paris in January 1943, 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz — the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer’s wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers.
Caroline Moorehead’s remarkable new book is the story of these women... read more

From the moment Judi Dench appeared as a teenager in the York Mystery Plays it was clear that acting would be her career. Trained at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, it was her performance in her twenties as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's memorable Old Vic production that turned her into a star. In the theatre since, she has played every classic role from Titania to Cleopatra. She first became a household name via television, thanks initially to a sitcom, A Fine Romance, in which she played alongside the actor Mic... read more

Kamin Mohammadi was nine years old when her family fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution. Bewildered by the seismic changes in her homeland, she turned her back on the past and spent her teenage years trying to fit in with British attitudes to family, food and freedom. She was twenty-seven before she returned to Iran, drawn inexorably back by memories of her grandmother's house in Abadan, with its traditional inner courtyard, its noisy gatherings and its very walls steeped in history. The Cypress Tree is Kamin's account of... read more

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MOZAMBIQUE MYSTERIES is about turning fifty and finding a new direction. Lisa St Aubin de Tern travelled to Mozambique and, for the first time in her much-travelled life, felt at home - in a place 'so remote that few have visited it since the time of Vasco da Gama'. After three marriages and various affairs, she also fell in love. She set up a school and, together with her niece, the Tern Foundation. From the acclaimed author of THE HACIENDA, Mozambique Mysteries is a story of new beginnings in a country of contrasts and challenges... read more

Entertaining, instructive, thought-provoking and hilarious, the unmistakable voice of Deborah Devonshire rings out of this volume which combines her two collections of 'occasional' writings. The pieces are broad and eclectic in their subjects, ranging from treasures unearthed while the kitchen was being redecorated, musings about the reason for the reworded town sign, tourism at Chatsworth, a ringside view of both John F. Kennedy's inauguration and funeral, and the value of deportment. No matter what she's writing about she is alwa... read more

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union', offers his first major work of non-fiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels. A shy manifesto; an impractical handbook; the true story of a fabulist; an entire life in parts and pieces: 'Manhood for Amateurs' is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brillian... read more

From one of America's greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion's only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter's death. 'Blue Nights' is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion's life as a mother, a woman and a writer. Recently widowed, and becoming increasingly frail, 'Blue Nights' is Didion's attempt to understand our deepest fears, our inadequate adjustments to a... read more

'In 1894 a French Foreign Legion General said, Legionnaires, vous etes faits pour mourir, je vous envoie la ou on meurt. Legionnaires, you are made for dying, I will send you where you can die. When I was in my mid-teens and first read those words they were powerful and confronting. I read them as a challenge and an invitation. The words, and the feelings they evoked, remained with me until I was ready. On 20 May 1988, I enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. 'Searching for something he wasn't finding in his life in Australia, Davi... read more

May, 1992. Hana is twelve years old when she is put on one of the last UN evacuation buses fleeing the besieged city of Sarajevo. Her twenty-one-year-old sister, Atka, staying behind to look after their five younger siblings, is there to say goodbye. Thinking that they will be apart for only a few weeks, they make a promise to each other to be brave. But as the Bosnian war escalates and months go by without contact, their promise to each other becomes deeply significant. Hana is forced to cope as a refugee in Croatia, far away from... read more

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Martin Amis son of one of the popular novelists of the post-War era, has forged a groundbreaking manner of writing that owes nothing to the style of his father, nor indeed to anyone else. This title offers the real Martin Amis, a cabinet of contrasts: tortured, eloquently aloof, kind, obsessive, loved by women, and a dedicated family man.