Diaries, letters & journals

  • Making It Up As I Go Along

    £8.99

    A collection of hilarious, poignant, and moving essays from Marian Keyes. Her tales of her eye-lash extension horrors, domestic goddess attempts, and the time that she decided to become a yoga instructor will have you crying with laughter.

  • Dear Michael Love Dad

    £16.99

    In 2007 Michael Maitland left home for university and in the years that followed he developed depression, OCD and, almost fatally, anorexia. It was only when Michael was taken to hospital in 2012, his body shutting down and his organs failing, that the family realised exactly what was happening. Later, Iain was given a bundle of letters that had been carefully saved and tucked away in a drawer – the letters he had written to Michael regularly from the autumn of 2007 when he went to university.

  • Portland Place

    £16.99

    ‘Portland Place’ is the diary of Sarah Shaw for the year of 1971, which she recently uncovered whilst clearing out her loft. Working as a secretary for the BBC at the time, Sarah’s diary describes the life of a suburban girl who certainly wasn’t ‘swinging’ but who was, ironically, not only working on a cutting edge BBC survey on sex education but also in the throes of an unlikely affair with middle-aged, working-class, Irish lift attendant, Frank.

  • Love From Boy

    £20.00

    ‘Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs’ So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding-school headmaster. For most of his life, Roald Dahl would continue to write weekly letters to his mother, chronicling his adventures, frustrations and opinions, from the delights of childhood to the excitements of flying as a World War II fighter pilot and the thrill of meeting top politicians and movie stars during his time as a diplomat and spy in Washington. And, unbeknown to Roald, his mother lovingly kept every single one of them. Sofie was, in many ways, Roald’s first reader. It was she who encouraged him to tell stories and nourished his desire to fabricate, exaggerate and entertain.

  • Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge

    £5.99

    While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader’s card to distinguish him from the city’s untouchables. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which only he remains.

  • Dear World How Are You

    £12.99

    When Toby Little was five years old, he decided to write to someone in every country in the world. With the help of his mum, Toby started handwriting and posting letters to everyone from research scientists in Antarctica to game-keepers in Chad and even the Pope. Not only did Toby achieve his goal but the world wrote back. Dear World, How Are You? is a collection of the most fascinating and heart-warming letters he sent and received. It shows that the world is only as big as your imagination and is full of potential friends, waiting to be discovered, no matter where you live.

  • Untitled Essay Collection

    £14.99

    A collection of hilarious, poignant, and moving essays from Marian Keyes. Her tales of her eye-lash extension horrors, domestic goddess attempts, and the time that she decided to become a yoga instructor will have you crying with laughter.

  • Please Enjoy Your Happiness

    £16.99

    An unforgettable, ageless love story written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

  • Notable Woman Romantic Journals

    £20.00

    In April 1925, Jean Lucey Pratt began writing a journal. She continued to write until just a few days before her death in 1986, producing well over a million words in 45 exercise books over the course of her lifetime. For sixty years, no one had an inkling of her diaries’ existence, and they have remained unpublished until now. Jean wrote about anything that amused, inspired or troubled her, laying bare every aspect of her life with aching honesty, infectious humour, indelicate gossip and heartrending hopefulness. She documented the loss of a tennis match, her unpredictable driving, catty friends, devoted cats and difficult guests. As Jean’s words propel us back in time, ‘A Notable Woman’ becomes a unique slice of living, breathing British history and a revealing private chronicle of life in the 20th century.

  • Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

    £25.00

    A selection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and important letters has been collected together to give us a full, living portrait of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch struggling with difficult philosophical issues, often unsure of herself intellectually; we witness her anguish as a mature writer when a novel won’t come together; we see her reflecting on the intricacies of human relationships; we see her fulminating about world events and exploring spirituality. They also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity: her sharp sense of humour, her irreverence, her emotional hunger and her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable.

  • Man With The Golden Typewriter

    £25.00

    Correspondence to and from the writer of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming.

  • Not That Kind Of Girl

    £16.99

    Lena Dunham, acclaimed writer-director-star of HBO and Sky Atlantic’s ‘Girls’ and the award-winning movie ‘Tiny Furniture’, displays her unique powers of observation, wisdom and humour in this exceptional collection of essays.

Nomad Books