Showing titles in Authors

Although it is said that he owed his poetic vision to his Sephardic Jewish roots, Siegfried Sassoon was, in many ways, a conventionally Edwardian squire. A gifted poet, who refused to become part of any literary movement, his poetry shattered the ideals of wartime heroism, and his friendships ranged from Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves to the Sitwells, Rupert Brooke and T.E. Lawrence. In this acclaimed biography, John Stuart Roberts skillfully chronicles Sassoon's life and work, including his homosexuality, his marriage and his quest for a personal religious faith.

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.

When Jan Morris joined the 1953 Everest expedition and was first to get news of the ascent back to London, she became the most famous journalist in the world. So began a glittering career covering the Eichmann trial, interviewing Che Guevara and scooping the story of Suez collusion. Morris transitioned in the early seventies and documented the experience in Conundrum. She was a pioneer and her books, including Venice and the Pax Britannica trilogy, have inspired readers across the globe.

'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and what it all means. Ranging from the personal to the sublime, each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this psychological and cultural portrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon.

Brought to you by Penguin. The greatest writer of our time tells her own story. Immerse yourself in the creative universe of Margaret Atwood for a riot of life, art and everything in between Raised by scientifically minded parents, Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern...

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

‘A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots’ Sunday Times A celebrated modern classic that has revolutionised our understanding of the Bloomsbury group and remains the definitive biography of the group’s gloriously eccentric patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Met with widespread acclaim and...

In this long-awaited and candid memoir, Hitchens re-traces the footsteps of his life to date, from his childhood in Portsmouth, with his adoring, tragic mother and reserved Naval officer father; to his life in Washington DC, the base from which from he would launch fierce attacks on tyranny of all kinds. Along the way, he recalls the girls, boys and booze; the friendships and the feuds; the grand struggles and lost causes; and the mistakes and misgivings that have characterised his life.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of The Pigeon Tunnel. Written and read by John le Carré. 'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to...

From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy, Hilary Mantel had a celebrated career as a novelist. Alongside this, she long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of Hilary's writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many people – and he had many sides. But no part of his identity was more important to him than that of a writer; it was one of the central ways he saw himself. Revealing Anthony Bourdain's observant, curious and hungry mind, The Anthony Bourdain Reader is a collection of Bourdain's best writing and touches on his many pursuits and passions, from restaurant life to family life to the 'low life', from TV to travel through places like Vietnam, Buenos Aires, Paris and Shanghai.

Living to Tell the Tale spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. A radiant, powerful, and beguiling memoir, Living to Tell the Tale gives us the formation of Gabriel García Márquez as a writer and as a man.

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. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.

A new investigation from Dr Mark Aldridge, exploring a lifetime of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple. Winner of the 2025 H.R.F Keating Award for the best 2024 biography or critical book related to crime fiction. In Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness,‘Agathologist’ Dr Mark...

A ‘Book of the Year’ for The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Daily Express, The Spectator, The Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and the I 'I must confess my devotion immediately: I read every word this man writes. I wait for every new novel and the wait has been worth it...

Whatever Jenn Ashworth turns her hand to, I'm there to read it' BENJAMIN MYERS, author of The Offing 'With honesty, humour and determination, Ashworth's journey takes the reader from coast to coast in search of freedom' JESSICA ANDREWS, author of Milk Teeth 'A miracle of a book . . . One of our...

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, Lincolnshire, a D-category prison. Under a less strict regime, the prisoners can enjoy a more relaxed set of rules, while slowly preparing to someday rejoin the world outside the walls. However, a minor breach of conditions gets him sent off to the notorious HMP Lincoln facility for twenty-two days, where more traumatic experiences await. "Heaven" is the third book in Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling series The Prison Diaries.

Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead. So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves. Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner, no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.