Showing titles in Authors

Written with White’s signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of a legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.

‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the...

Meet Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist in human history. Her writing career spanned six decades, during which time she wrote 66 crime novels, 6 non-crime novels (including romances), and over 150 short stories. Not only was she a phenomenally successful novelist, but she is also the most successful female playwright of all time - her play “The Mousetrap” is the longest-running show in history. As you learn about Christie’s experiences and her storied career, you will better understand how the circumstances of her life shaped her work and vice versa.

Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination―the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne―a superfan and scholar―radically reimagines the last years of Plath’s life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy.

This is perhaps one of the best-loved of all journals. William Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, began it in May 1800 and resolved to keep it for a short time. She continued it for nearly three years. In it, she brought the Dove Cottage years to vivid and intimate life. She noted the walks and weather, the friends, country neighbours, and travellers on the roads. She set down accounts of the garden, of Wordsworth's marriage, their concern for Coleridge, and the composition of Wordsworth's poetry.

Part travelogue, part reportage, part autobiography, The Sign of the Cross is the story of Colm Tóibín's religious pilgrimage across Europe. Between 1990 and 1994, Colm Tóibín made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. His journey led him into close contact with people from all walks of...

The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is ‘puzzling’. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as ‘Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes’. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature, to observe and reflect – while surviving on eight dollars a year. From this experience emerged Walden, one of the great classics of American literature.

A delightful compendium of musings from the master of life writing, the much-loved Blake Morrison, for those who practise the art of memoir, and those who read it. 'Hallelujah! — now is the perfect time for Morrison’s book On Memoir' THE TIMES ON MEMOIR is a gloriously freewheeling...

Ant and Dec met on CBBC's Byker Grove and an instant friendship was formed, on and off screen. They moved from acting to music, releasing three albums as PJ & Duncan, including their still popular hit, 'Let's Get Ready to Rhumble'. From there, presenting children's TV with shows such as SMTV and Gimme 5 was the next step in their journey towards international renown. Next came primetime slots, with the duo presenting shows such as Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Britain's Got Talent and I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!

When Jeanette Winterson left home at 16 because she was in love with a woman, Mrs. Winterson asked her: "Why be happy when you could be normal?" This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is the story of how the painful past returned to haunt Jeanette's later life, and send her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft which supports us when we are sinking.

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature.

Brought to you by Penguin. George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. 'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached...

It was not long after Halloween when Stephen King received a telephone call from his editor. 'Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing.' The result is this unique combination of fantasy and autobiography, of classic...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Lowborn by Kerry Hudson. What does it really mean to be poor in Britain today? A prizewinning novelist revisits her childhood and some of the country's most deprived towns 'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to...

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to...

The long-awaited portrait of a literary master from one of our generation's greatest biographers. Anthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an undisputed classic of English literature. Spanning 12 spectacular volumes and written over 25 years, his comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing 20th-century Britain through war and peace. Drawing on Powell's letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew him, Hilary Spurling explores his life.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s inspiration and rival, who helped to bring England out of the...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Utterly fascinating’ NEW YORK TIMES ‘An act of intimate storytelling’ VOGUE ‘A profound, rich document’ NEW STATESMAN A deeply moving, newly discovered journal from one of America’s most iconic writers, Joan Didion, the author of The Year of...