Showing 37–48 of 130 resultsSorted by latest
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£16.99
For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lisa Taddeo and the essays of Zadie Smith, ‘Bear Woman’ is a beautifully wrought memoir from one of Sweden’s bestselling authors, in which she examines motherhood and the female experience. In 1541, a young woman named Marguerite de La Roque accompanied her guardian on one of the first French colonial expeditions to the new world. After a sexual scandal on board ship, she was punished with abandonment on a barren, uninhabited island in the North Atlantic. Centuries later, Swedish writer Karolina Ramqvist came across the legend of the Bear Woman and became obsessed with this woman’s story of survival against the odds.
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£25.00
Something extraordinary happened to the UK literary scene in the 1980s. A generation of young British writers took the literary novel into new realms of setting, subject matter and style, challenging the Establishment writers of the 1950s. It began with two names – Martin Amis and Ian McEwan – and became a flood: Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Barker among them. Suddenly, authors of serious fiction were like rock stars, fashionable, sexy creatures, shrewdly marketed and feted in public. The yearly bunfight of the Booker Prize became a matter of keen public interest. Tim Waterstone established the first of a chain of revolutionary bookshops. Through this exciting, hectic period, the journalist and author John Walsh played many parts: literary editor, reviewer, interviewer, prize judge and TV pundit. In this book, he reports on what he found.
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£18.99
In ‘Mother’s Boy,’ Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish.Jacobson was 40 when his first novel was published. In ‘Mother’s Boy’ he traces the life that brought him there. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician.Grappling always with his family’s history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus.
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£10.99
Critically acclaimed, this unique and compelling personal biography uncovers the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author’s grandparents.
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£8.99
Josie George lives in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands with her son. Since her early childhood, she has lived with the fluctuating and confusing challenge of disabling chronic illness. Her days are watchful and solitary, lived out in the same hundred or so metres around her home. But Josie’s world is surprising, intricate, dynamic. She has learned what to look for: the complex patterns of ice on a frozen puddle; the routines of her friends at the community centre; the neighbourhood birds in flight; the slow changes in the morning light, in her small garden, in her growing son, in herself. Josie sets out to tell the story of her still life, over the course of a year. As the seasons shift, and the tides of her body draw in and out, Josie begins to unfurl her history.
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£10.99
Frederick Douglass’s pioneering autobiography that played a key part in the abolition of slavery.
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£9.99
This book tells the story of what it means to be old: how the pleasure of sex ebbs, how the joy of gardening grows, how much there is to remember, to forget, to regret, to forgive – and how one faces the inevitable fact of death.
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£14.99
Soldier, journalist, historian, author of 40 books, Jan Morris led an extraordinary life, witnessing such seminal moments as the first ascent of Everest, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Eichmann Trial, The Cuban Revolution and so much more. Now, in ‘Allegorizings’, published posthumously as was her wish, Morris looks back over some of the key moments of her life, and sees a multitude of meanings. From her final travels to the USA and across Europe to late journeys on her beloved trains and ships, from the deaths of her old friends Hilary and Tenzig to the enduring relationships in her own life, from reflections on identity and nations to the importance of good marmalade, it bears testimony to her uniquely kind and inquisitive take on the world.
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£20.00
Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. Then, in December 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As her own family’s secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant.
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£9.99
The long-awaited autobiography of John Cooper Clarke, the Bard of Salford, punk poet, rock star, fashion icon, national treasure and acerbic wit.
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£9.99
A memoir of a life spent immersed in the comfort and joy of books, from Sunday Times bestselling author Cathy Rentzenbrink.
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£8.99
When Gavanndra Hodge was seven years old her world was a precarious place. Her father was a hairdresser and drug dealer to Chelsea’s most decadent inhabitants and her mother an alcoholic ex-model. It was up to Gavanndra to ensure that the cigarettes smouldering between the fingers of the aristocratic junkies passed out in her sitting room were extinguished so that she and her little sister Candy could sleep safely in their beds. But when Candy dies suddenly on holiday aged nine, Gavanndra’s family, already so fragile and damaged, implodes, and a teenage Gavanndra is left to rebuild her universe, piece by piece. And she does. The life she cultivates is a long way away from the chaos of her past. She becomes a mother, and works hard to give her own children the sort of secure and ordered childhood that she never had. But there is somebody missing in the happy ending she has created for herself.
