Showing 157–168 of 414 resultsSorted by latest
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£20.00
This short volume has turned out to be merely a handful of recollections of well-remembered times and stories – some probably misremembered, too – and a few people who have played a crucial part in my life. And some confessions: I have never before tried to write about my doll phobia, for instance, or about the effect synaesthesia has had over the years. I can only hope that this collection of stories from times past might give some idea of a mostly happy life that has gone, and is going, much too fast.
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£9.99
A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls ‘the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected’ of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.
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£9.99
In early 2014, after many years living abroad, Sam Miller returned to his childhood home in London. His father was dying. When the editor, writer, critic and academic Karl Miller died later that year, the obituaries spoke of his brilliance and influence, of how he founded the London Review of Books, and how he had shaped the careers of some of the finest writers and poets of the second half of the 20th century. But they gave little sense of Karl Miller beyond the world of work: the warm, funny, football-loving family man so adored by his children and grandchildren. In the months after his death, Sam began to write about his father. He had been told, long ago, a family secret involving his parents and a close friend. Now, by reading his father’s papers and with the help of his mother, he was able to piece together a remarkable story.
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£14.99
Not all abuse leaves a mark – a powerful memoir of coercive control.
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£14.99
When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library or to spend her pocket money on amassing her own at home. In this book, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way. Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life – prompting endless re-readings, rediscoveries, and, inevitably, fierce debate – and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm.
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£8.99
Life changes in an instant. On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Nicholas and his brother Richard are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth and he drowns. Richard and his other brothers don’t attend the funeral, and incredibly the family return immediately to the same cottage – to complete the holiday, to carry on. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory. Nearly 40 years later, Richard Beard is haunted by the missing grief of his childhood but doesn’t know the date of the accident or the name of the beach. So he sets out on a pain-staking investigation to rebuild Nicky’s life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident. Who was Nicky? Why did the family react as they did?
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£9.99
Scouted in the street when she was 17, Victoire Dauxerre’s story started like a teenager’s fantasy: within months she was strutting down the catwalks of New York’s major fashion shows. But when fashion executives and photographers forced her to become ever thinner, Victoire’s dream became a nightmare.
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£9.99
Tracy Peacock Tynan, daughter of world-famous theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and author Elaine Dundy, grew up in London and New York during the 1950s and ’60s. Her parents threw lavish parties where style was essential and guests included the biggest Hollywood, theatre and literary legends – among them Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Orson Welles, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Maggie Smith. As Tynan describes it, her parents were ‘trying their best to be the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of the ’50s. Tynan reveals the glamour, secrets and dark side of her parents’ highly stylised world of endless jet-setting and savage fights, the struggles she faced as she tried to take charge of her life, and the happiness she eventually found as a costume designer, writer, wife and mother. She tells her astonishing story through the prism of the clothes which have come to symbolise her turbulent life.
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£14.99
With ‘Paper Cuts’, Stephen Bernard boldly tests the bounds of what a memoir can achieve. Living through the trauma of childhood abuse and mental illness, he writes to escape and confront, to accuse and explain. Each morning when he wakes, Stephen Bernard must literally reconstruct his self: every night he writes himself a letter to be read the next day. The fractured, intensely personal narrative of ‘Paper Cuts’ follows a single day in his life as he navigates a course through the effects of mania, medication and memories. The result is painful, unique and inspiring.
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£14.99
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. She spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating emergency supplies, hoping that when the World of Men failed, her family would continue on, unaffected. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals. According to the state and federal government, she didn’t exist. As she grew older, her father became more radical, and her brother, more violent. At sixteen Tara decided to educate herself. Her struggle for knowledge would take her far from her Idaho mountains, over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d travelled too far.
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£16.99
A moving, thought-provoking and surprisingly humorous book which is both a description of a journey to death and a celebration of the act of living. Based on Clare Wise’s blog, which she started when she was first diagnosed with cancer in 2013, ‘Not That Kind of Love’ charts the highs and lows of the last three years of Clare’s life. The end result is not a book that fills you with despair and anguish. Clare is an astonishingly dynamic, witty and fun personality and, as she becomes too weak to type, her brother – the actor Greg Wise – takes over, and the book morphs into a beautiful meditation on life, and the necessity of talking about death.
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£7.99
At the age of 15, Cat Marnell unknowingly set out to murder her life. After a privileged yet emotionally-starved childhood in Washington, she became hooked on ADHD medication provided by her psychiatrist father. This led to a dependence on Xanax and other prescription drugs at boarding school, and she experimented with cocaine, ecstasy. whatever came her way. By 26 she was a talented ‘doctor shopper’ who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists into giving her never-ending prescriptions; her life had become a twisted merry-go-round of parties and pills at night, and trying to hold down a high profile job at Condé Naste during the day. With a complete lack of self-pity and an honesty that is almost painful, Cat describes the crazed euphoria, terrifying comedowns and the horrendous guilt she feels lying to those who try to help her.
