Biography & autobiography

UNSTOPPABLE! Surviving Is Just the Beginning

by Gigi Stetler

The Story About A Girl Who Wouldn't Give Up: A true tale of lessons learned at knife point and other crises, peaks and plateaus. Unstoppable! is a searing memoir detailing a challenging life of upheavals and...

The Complete David Bowie

by Nicholas Pegg

The biggest edition yet – expanded and updated with 35,000 words of new material

Critically acclaimed in its previous editions, The Complete David Bowie is widely recognized as the foremost source of analysis...

Stories My Father Told Me: Notes from "The Lyons Den"

by Jeffrey Lyons & Charles Osgood

This amazing collection of choice anecdotes takes us right back to the Golden Age of New York City nightlife, when top restaurants like Toots Shor’s, “21,” and Sardi’s, as well as glittering nightclubs...

Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir

by John Stevens

When he resigned last June, Justice Stevens was the third longest serving Justice in American history (1975-2010)--only Justice William O. Douglas, whom Stevens succeeded, and Stephen Field have served on the...

Two Miles to Tynecastle

by Andrew-Henry Bowie

Andrew-Henry Bowie is a passionate Heart of Midlothian Football Club supporter. He doggedly survived a tough childhood and found solace - sort of - in his overwhelming love of football. The author engages the...

What a Life!: The Autobiography of Jim Whelan

by Jim Whelan

Many people may not have heard of actor Jim Whelan but he has appeared in some of the most iconic programmes on British television over the past four decades, from Crown Court and Last of the Summer Wine to...

Wrong Sex, Wrong Instrument

by Maggie Cotton

Now retired and no longer silenced by a contract, Maggie Cotton presents an honest and long-overdue player's perspective of life inside a professional symphony orchestra, describing how she became the first...

An Emergency in Slow Motion

by William Todd Schultz

Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after...

Sunk Without Trace: 30 dramatic accounts of yachts lost at sea

by Paul Gelder

By the same author as the bestselling Total Loss,this is a new collection of terrifying and compelling accounts ofyachts lost at sea. The seven deadly causes of loss continue to taketheir toll, and Paul Gelder...

Higgy: Matches, Microphones and MS

by Alastair Hignell

Alastair Hignell is renowned as a rugby international for England,a county cricketer and a much-loved broadcaster. Forced to retire from his playing careers at an early age due to injury, and then from his broadcasting...

Apostate

by Forrest Reid

‘I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit…’ Born in Belfast in 1875,...

Gazza Agonistes

by Ian Hamilton

‘This is a fan's eye-view of Paul Gascoigne – and fans, as we know, are expert at reassembling dashed hopes...' In 1987 Ian Hamilton – acclaimed poet, biographer and Tottenham fan – was smitten from...

Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

Mary Shelley's own life was as dramatic as her fiction. Even had she not (at the age of 19) authored Frankenstein, one of the greatest horror fables in literature, she would be crucial to the study of Romanticism,...

Sir Robert Peel

by Norman Gash

Norman Gash’s magnificent two-volume life of Sir Robert Peel – Mr Secretary Peel (1961) and Sir Robert Peel (1972) – is the standard work on the great statesman, and is widely considered one of the great...

Eminence

by Jean-Vincent Blanchard

Chief minister to King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was the architect of a new France in the seventeenth century, and the force behind the nation's rise as a European power. Among the first statesmen to clearly...

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake

by Samuel Bawlf

On September 26, 1580, Francis Drake sailed his ship, the Golden Hinde, into Plymouth Harbor on the southwest coast of England.

Samuel Bawlf masterfully recounts the drama of this extraordinary expedition within...

English Captain

by Tom Wintringham

‘Barcelona is colour, noise, heat, dust, violent traffic and quick-moving people. Many of the men carry rifles slung on their backs…’ Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a pioneer of the International Brigades...

Like Punk Never Happened

by Dave Rimmer

‘A controversial and honest account of My Life On The Road With Rock Group, a potted history of pop from '79–'85, and a serious analysis of the whole mess… Dave Rimmer has one great weapon at his disposal....

Now All Roads Lead to France

Costa Book Award for Biography 2011

by Matthew Hollis

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert...

William Hogarth

by Jenny Uglow

Hogarth's prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous',...