Walk a mile in someone else's shoes. Immerse yourself in the lives of the famous and people whose stories you can relate to. Our biography titles come in book, eBook, eAudiobook or large print. This list updates when we add new titles to our collection.
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eAudiobook
A stunning investigation of the life and legend of Mexican kingpin Joaquín Archivaldo "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, building on Noah Hurowitz's revelatory coverage for Rolling Stone of El Chapo's federal drug-trafficking trial.This is the true story of how...
Book
"From reckless drug addict to one of Australia's top chefs and television stars: MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo's powerful life story will shock and inspire. Jock's life spiralled out of control when he tried heroin for the first time as a teenager ...
"Catherine Raven has lived alone since the age of 15. After finishing her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana, in a place as far away from other people as possible. She viewed the house as a way station,...
"Edith Widder grew up wanting to become a marine biologist. But after complications from surgery caused her to go temporarily blind while at university, she became fascinated by light, and her focus turned to bioluminescence. On her first visit to the...
"On screen, Danny Trejo is the most recognisable anti-hero in Hollywood - killed at least a hundred times, he steals every scene he's in. But off screen, he is so much more. The ultimate hard-knock-lifer, and a true man of the world, he has all the s...
"Written with a searing honesty and published for the tenth anniversary of Amy Winehouse's death, My Amy is an evocative portrait of unbreakable lifelong friendship - and a devastating study into fame, addiction and self-sabotage. Only one person knows...
"From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In...
"Kurt Schindler was an impossible man. His daughter Meriel spent her adult life trying to keep him at bay. Kurt had made extravagant claims about their family history. Were they really related to Franz Kafka and Oscar Schindler, of Schindler's List fame?...
"From Kindertransport survivor to pioneering Foreign Correspondent at the Guardian - the extraordinary life of Hella Pick. A trailblazer for women in journalism, Hella Pick arrived in Britain in 1939 as a child refugee from Austria. Over nearly four ...
"David Cossgrove was undoubtedly one of the key players in the social reforms of the 20th Century. Early in 1908, David was watching a self-formed patrol of Boy Scouts undertaking adventurous activities on a riverbank, near their homes in Kaiapoi, Ca...
eBook
Brendan James Murray has been a high school teacher for more than ten years. In that time he has seen hundreds of kids move through the same hallways and classrooms - boisterous, angry, shy, big-hearted, awkward - all of them on the journey to adulthood....
"Bob Dylan was the first figure in the history of popular music to challenge the domination of the three-minute pop song and to bring serious ideas and poetry into the song lyric. A true revolutionary, he was also the first pop performer to adopt the...
"All fans of Jane Austen everywhere believe themselves to be best friends with the beloved author and this book shines a light on what it meant to be exactly that. Jane Austen's Best Friend; The Life and Influence of Martha Lloyd offers a unique insight...
"Elizabeth von Armin may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian...
"Whether negotiating the mind-games of the Israeli intelligence services or performing ablutions in a London bathroom, Mohammad Chowdhury's life as a British Muslim travelling the world brings daily challenges. Border Crossings is the story of Chowdh...
"Trans woman Precious Brady-Davis recalls her childhood growing up in the Omaha foster care system and Pentecostal faith as a biracial, gender-nonconforming child"--Publisher's description.
"Rebel tells the story of Faith, a woman who grew up in the Children of God cult (known latterly as The Family). Now in her forties with two teenage children of her own, Faith's first-person narrative alternates between her childhood adventures and t...
"Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud is a no-holds-barred memoir and manifesto from outspoken senator, trouble-maker and multicultural icon Mehreen Faruqi. As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective...
"In 1976, Francis Beaumont spirited eleven-year-old Kim Chown and her brother away from their mother to Africa, where he had taken a job as a university lecturer. There, behind a veneer of respectability, he terrorised and brutalised his own child, K...
"The powerful account of how one man escaped the prison of Manus Island. A true story of bravery and resilience. The awe-inspiring story of the only person to successfully escape from Australia's notorious offshore detention centre on Manus Island. In...
"In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family's loss was one of the most complex and....
"Journalist Sarah Dingle was 27 when she learnt that her identity was a lie. Over dinner one night, her mother casually mentioned Sarah had been conceived using a sperm donor. The man who'd raised Sarah wasn't her father; in fact, she had no idea who...
"Mimi Kwa ignored the letter for days. When she finally opened it, the news was so shocking her hair turned grey. Why would a father sue his own daughter? The collision was over the estate of Mimi's beloved Aunt Theresa, but its seed had been sown long...
In Letters to My White Male Friends, Dax-Devlon Ross speaks directly to the millions of middle-aged white men who are suddenly awakening to race and racism. White men are finally realizing that simply not being racist isn't enough to end racism. These...
A riveting chronicle of trailblazing tennis champion and cultural icon Serena Williams's turbulent 2019 tour season and a revealing portrait of who she is, both on and off the court. Serena Williams is an undisputed global sports celebrity. Ranked #12...
An influential chef and food thinker combines personal stories with explorations into the cultural, historical and botanical backstories of the food we eat and the ingredients we use.
"In 1997, Dr Marie Cassidy arrived in Dublin from Glasgow. There to discuss a possible deputy state pathologist post with Professor John Harbison, instead she was whisked by police escort to a Grangegorman murder scene. There was no turning back. She...
"A fascinating collective biography of six female scientists in eighteenth-century France, whose stories were largely written out of history. This book presents the stories of six intrepid Frenchwomen of science in the Enlightenment whose...
"On December 10, 1936, King Edward VIII brought a great international drama to a close when he abdicated, renouncing the throne of the United Kingdom for himself and his heirs. The reason he gave when addressing his subjects was that he could not fulfill...
"When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he was asked to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer,...
"Born in rural Australia in the 1940s, baby Dianne is immediately taken from her parents and placed with a white family. Raised in an era of widespread racism, she grows up believing her Irish adoptive mother is her birth mother. When her adoptive mo...
"Brave, explosive, and thought-provoking, this is a powerful memoir. 'It's material, make a story out of it,' was the mantra Charlotte Grimshaw grew up with in her literary family. But when her life suddenly turned upside-down, she needed to re-examine...
"And you'd never guess that the baddest of the bad-me-would make it out of the prison system and instead of dying in the street as a stone-cold junkie and killer, I'd end up being shot, stabbed, decapitated, blown up, hanged, flattened by an elevator,...
After deciding not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, try to adopt a baby through foster care. Knowing that the system aims for reunification with the birth family, they open their home to a flurry of social workers wh...
The Tao of Bowie is partly a book about David Bowie. But it's mainly a book about you. Buddhism was central to David Bowie's life, but he was a wide-ranging thinker who also drew meaning from other sources including Jungian psychology, Nietzschean ph...
Imagine you are dying with a secret. Something you've never had the courage to tell your friends and family. Or a last wish - a task you need carried out before you can rest in peace. Now imagine there's a man who can take care of all that, who has no...
"Doug Heywood was a teenager when he discovered, in a shoebox hidden in a wardrobe, hundreds of letters, all written by his father, Scott Heywood. As a POW on the infamous Burma Railway, Scott wrote almost daily to his young wife, Margery, on scraps of...
"Serial homicide. Stalking. Arson. Gang crime. Who are the people behind these acts of terrible violence? What are their stories? And what is it like to sit opposite them? Dr Gwen Adshead is one of Britain's leading forensic psychiatrists, and she has...
"Whether it is pastoral care for the bereaved, discussions about the afterlife, or being called out to perform the last rites, death is part of the Reverend Richard Coles's life and work. But when his partner the Reverend David Coles died, shortly be...
"Those people who were betrayed were not innocent people. They were no better nor worse than I am. It's all part of the intelligence world. If the man who turned me in came to my house today, I'd invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. George Blake...
"Matthew Parris, presenter of Great Lives on BBC Radio 4, explores the surprising connection between trauma and greatness through vivid case histories. Ada Lovelace. Frederick Douglass. Vladimir Lenin. Marie Curie. Frieda Kahlo. Carl Jung. Tupac Shakur....
"This is the story of the Queen's and Princess Maragaret's childhoods and growing years as told by a woman very close to them for many years - "Crawfie." First published in 1950 it caused a huge fuss and the Queen Mother never spoke to her again. However,...
Mathilde Carre, codenamed 'La Chatte', the cat, then known as Agent Victoire, who was the exceptionally charismatic and daring founder of the 'Big Network'. This was the first Allied intelligence network in Occupied France, which soon grew central to...
Heavily in debt, and earning peanuts as a 'trolley dolly', Saskia Swann desperately needed to get her life back on track. After a chance meeting, she landed a job as cabin crew - but this time on a private jet. Suddenly, she found herself transported...
"This official book of photographs houses the 50-year collection of the most iconic and beloved photographs taken by prolific fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, the King of Street Style. The iconic Bill Cunningham was known for wearing a blue work...
"The first biography in over 15 years of Maria Callas, and the first to portray her as a feminist icon rather than a bitchy diva. Maria Callas (1923-1977) was the greatest opera diva of all time with a career that remains unmatched by any prima donna....
"The world-leading scientist of plant communication and intelligence reveals how she discovered the secrets of the forest. No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard. Now she shares the...
"W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of disheveled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of pe...
In this intimate portrait, Mann incisively illuminates Streisand's climb to fame before she became the icon.
"Ray 'Rabbits' Warren is the legendary voice of Australian sports commentary. People tell him he must have drunk a bottle of scotch and smoked a packet of cigarettes every day to have the voice that he has. That's not the case; at least, not any more...
"A respected boarding school teacher, described by his peers as 'one of the outstanding schoolmasters of his generation', Warr was arrested following an allegation of historical child abuse. The complainant was a former pupil at a school where Warr had...
A New York Times Bestseller "Funny, subversive, and able to excavate such brutally honest sentences that you find yourself nodding your head in wonder and recognition."--Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights and Hamilton: An Ame...
"Trapped, the first in a series of highly anticipated new titles from foster carer Rosie Lewis, plus The Boy No One Loved, the first title in the bestselling series from foster carer Casey Watson, now combined into a single eBook-only volume. Trapped...
"This is the first of several stories about 'difficult' children Casey helped during her time as a behaviour manager at her local comprehensive. Casey has been in the post for six months when thirteen-year-old Imogen joins her class. One of six children...
Large Print
"The human story has always been one of perseverance-often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Eu...
One-half of the celebrated Men in Blazers duo, longtime culture and soccer commentator Roger Bennett traces the origins of his love affair with America, and how he went from a depraved, pimply faced Jewish boy in 1980's Liverpool to become the quinte...
""I am a black woman who doesn't play golf, doesn't belong to or go to any club, doesn't like NASCAR, doesn't like country music, and has a Science degree in engineering. I speak differently, very fast, with an accent and a set of vernacular that is New...
"Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are....
"In this book, lifelong fan and Dylan expert Andy Gill examines the inspiration and significance of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter's output on official releases, from 1962 to 1969. It was a prolific era for Dylan, and saw the birth of many famous...
"Have you ever awakened from a sleepy delirium one morning and imagined that you lived in a different and glorious world where all the recognized masterpieces in the Western pantheon of art history were painted by women? If not, no problem: The renowned...
"Candice Brathwaite's much-anticipated second book about all the things she wishes she'd been told when she was young and needed guidance. I Am Not Your Baby Mother was a landmark publication in 2020. A thought-provoking, urgent and inspirational guide...
"Having to deal with the loss of loved ones is something that unites us all. Yet we rarely even talk about grief. Life After shares the raw, intimate and inspiring stories of how more than 60 ordinary and well-known Australians have recovered from...
""How did it come to this? I am tough, I am smart, I have lived alone. Now I am cracking, right down the middle..." Six months after the birth of her son, Emma Jane Unsworth finds herself in the eye of a storm. Nothing - from pregnancy to birth and beyond...
"Since she succeeded to the throne in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II has become respected, celebrated, and beloved around the world. This stunning collection of powerful images illustrates her storied reign in all its glory. More than 300 extraordinary pho...
"The major rediscovery of a forgotten masterpiece in the mould of Alone in Berlin and Stoner - the literary memoir of a youth in Nazi Germany. In 1965 the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp ...
"The vivid and powerful expressionist paintings of Irma Stern were a key factor in the modernization of early 20th-century South African art. Although she was widely recognized during her lifetime, Stern's posthumous fame has dwindled outside her home...
"Recounts Maxwell's rise and fall and rise and fall again. Preston weaves backwards and forwards in time to examine the forces that shaped Maxwell, including his childhood as a Jew in occupied Eastern Europe through his failed political ambitions in the...
Gripping, authentic and inspiring, Rebekah Campbell's quest to find love and happiness is packed with hilarious mistakes and insights that can help us all become better at relationships.
"Legendary musician Richard Marx offers an enlightening, entertaining look at his life and career"--
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins....
"This memoir is based on the diary I kept during 1990, the year that my first marriage came to an end.' After 22 years, spent across four continents, with two children - Louis and Marcel - in 1990 Anne and Paul Theroux decided to separate. For that year,...
"A tender and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing, and tenacious women in music, the two-time Grammy Award-winning "premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation" (New Yorker), Rickie Lee Jones. Have you met Ms. Jones?...
"Most people know Andrew McCarthy from his movie roles in Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Weekend at Bernie's, and Less than Zero, and as a charter member of Hollywood's Brat Pack. That iconic group of ingenues and heartthrobs included Rob Lowe, Mol...
"Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son...
"Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner's beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how...
"The members of Led Zeppelin are major deities in the pantheon of rock gods. The first and heaviest of the heavy metal monsters, they violently shook the foundations of rock music and took no prisoners on the road. Their tours were legendary, their lives...
"In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a dozen critic...
"When she refused to take a pay cut, Marie Cosgrove was cut loose. So she started her own business . . . and a few years later, she bought the company that had fired her. She didn't give up--she became greater. And you can, too. Whether it's everyday...
"Li Juan and her mother own a small convenience store in the Altai Mountains in Northwestern China, where she writes about her life among grasslands and snowy peaks. To her neighbors' surprise, Li decides to join a family of Kazakh herders as they take...
"A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design - Josef - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most i...
"Adam Andrusier spent his childhood in pursuit of autographs. After writing to every famous person he could think of, from Frank Sinatra to Colonel Gaddafi, he soon jostled with the paparazzi at stage doors and came face-to-face with the most famous people...
"In 2017, Rebecca Schiller turned fantasy to reality and moved her family to a countryside smallholding for a life of sowing and growing. But as the first few years go by, and the ever-expanding list of tasks builds to a cacophony, it becomes clear that...
"The Nuvolari Alfa P3; ex-Moss Maserati 250F; Paul Fahey's Lotus Cortina, Shelby Mustang and Escort FVA/FVC, Ray Stone's place in New Zealand motorsport history is unequalled. Working with national and international drivers he earned the respect of all...
"Featuring newly commissioned essays and photography of rarely exhibited works, this book highlights the radicalism of Jean Dubuffet, who was one of the most provocative voices of the postwar avant-garden. 1940s occupied Paris, Jean Dubuffet began to...
"At age 37, Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a massive left-hemisphere stroke that took away her ability to speak, walk, read, write, or remember any of her life-and gave her an unprecedented, profound experience of dwelling in the r...
"As a privileged young woman growing up with her extended family in Baghdad, Violette Shamash relives the excitement of a vibrant society coming to terms with daily life, first under Ottoman, then British, and finally pro-Nazi rule, which ended in disaster...
"By the time he was six, Stephen had been bombarded by the Luftwaffe and deported from occupied Guernsey, along with his family, to a prison camp in the heart of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. He had seen men die in front of him, walked with Jews straight...
"Lin-Manuel Miranda gives readers an extraordinary inside look at "In the Heights," his breakout Broadway debut, written with Quiara Alegría Hudes, soon to be a Hollywood blockbuster. Miranda offers untold stories, perceptive essays, and the lyrics to...
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