Showing 61–72 of 116 resultsSorted by latest
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£18.99
In a memoir that is as wildly funny as it is emotionally shattering, Selma Blair tells the captivating story of growing up and finding her truth. The first story Selma Blair Beitner ever heard about herself is that she was a mean, mean baby. With her mouth pulled in a perpetual snarl and a head so furry it had to be rubbed to make way for her forehead, Selma spent years living up to her terrible reputation: biting her sisters, lying spontaneously, getting drunk from Passover wine at the age of seven, and behaving dramatically so that she would be the center of attention. Although Selma went on to become a celebrated Hollywood actress and model, she could never quite shake the periods of darkness that overtook her, the certainty that there was a great mystery at the heart of her life.
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£7.99
A new collection of holiday-themed stories by the author of ‘Ballet Shoes’. There are stories for every reader in this delightful collection – exciting crime-solving adventures; nervous young actors in the spotlight for the first time: unforgettable holidays and unlikely friendships.
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£8.99
Classic detective story featuring genius-revue artist-detective Miriam Birdseye.
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£8.99
After the sudden death of their parents, the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, inherit a ballet school and take over running it with Dara’s husband Charlie. The sisters’ connection is intense, forged by a glamorous but troubled family history. But after they hire Derek, a charismatic, possibly shady contractor to renovate the studio, Marie throws herself into an intense affair with him that threatens their tight bonds and brings forward family secrets until an act of violence overturns everything.
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£10.99
Judy Batalion, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, discovered an extraordinary story of women who fought the Nazis. The ‘ghetto girls’ paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey and home cooking, and shot and killed them. They helped the sick and taught the kids, they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna’s water supply. There has been no book in the English language that brings together the incredible and integral stories of Jewish female resistance fighters. A propulsive narrative history, this book will at last tell the true story of these incredible women. It follows a group of intimately bound resistance fighters in the harrowing year of 1943 as they prepare for insurgence and find themselves in ever graver danger.
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£10.99
Growing up with a volatile and obsessive mother, Justine Cowan couldn’t get far enough away. It was only after her mother died that she found herself pulling at the threads of a story half-told – her mother’s upbringing as a foundling in the famous British institution. Haunted by this secret history, Justine travelled across the sea and deep into the past to discover the girl her mother once was. Here, with the vividness of a true storyteller, she pieces together her mother’s childhood alongside the history of the Foundling Hospital: from its idealistic beginnings in the 18th century, famous patrons from Handel to Dickens, its approach to childcare and teaching, and how it survived the Blitz only to close after the Second World War.
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£8.99
Anna grew up in England with her white mother and knowing very little about her African father. In middle age, after separating from her husband and with her daughter all grown up, she finds herself alone and wondering who she really is. Her mother’s death leads her to find her father’s student diaries, chronicling his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. She discovers that he eventually became the president – some would say the dictator – of Bamana in West Africa. And he is still alive. She decides to track him down and so begins a funny, painful, fascinating journey, and an exploration of race, identity, and what we pass on to our children.
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£8.99
When Lucy discovers the body of her great aunt Kitty, with a puzzling note and empty pill bottles by her bed, she can’t believe that the formidable woman who held her family together is gone – or understand why she has taken her own life. Lucy is determined to decipher Kitty’s final message. What she finds will overturn everything she thought she knew about her family. ‘Lullaby Beach’ takes the reader on a journey through three generations of a complicated, close-knit clan whose joys and misfortunes track many of the most pressing conflicts and concerns of post-war Britain, from the promise and hypocrisies of 1950s London to the political divides and risky freedoms of the present day.
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£18.99
Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancé, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin’s parents get to know Joe’s firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals. As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she’s also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a ‘love marriage’ actually means.
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£14.99
On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond’s life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into ‘the Mids’ – that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of an unravelling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighbourhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life – and her family – as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother and a daughter.
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£6.99
‘When you come to the house, you will hear strange tales. They will tell you in the village that it is haunted, but you must not be afraid. When the time comes – you will know what to do.’ Mr Blunden’s words echoed through Lucy’s ears as she explored the house. It was such an old house that it seemed to Lucy as if all the past was gathered up inside it as if in a great box; as though it had a life of its own that continued to exist just beyond the reach of her eyes and ears. Did Mr Blunden, who went out of his way to offer their mother the job as caretaker, mean to help or hurt them? Could she and her brother Jamie really help those troubled ghosts from another age?
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£18.99
The story of a girl from a council estate in Tottenham, born in 1934 to an electric-meter reader and a seamstress, who was determined to be an actress. Candid and witty, this memoir takes her from her awkward performances in working-men’s clubs at six years of age as dancing ‘Baby Eileen’, through the war years in London, to her breakthrough at thirty-two on Broadway with The Killing of Sister George, for which she received the first of five Tony Award nominations. She co-created ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ and wrote the screenplay for ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (for which she won an Evening Standard Award). Characterised by an eye for the absurd, a terrific knack for storytelling and an insistence on honesty, ‘Will She Do?’ is a raconteur’s tale about family, about class, about youthful ambition and big dreams and what really goes on behind the scenes.
