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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eBook
Françoise Hardy shares her iconic life and memories in this brutally honest memoir of love, loss, and wisdom.
Muhammad Ali was one of the greatest champions of all time. His boxing skills were unparalleled, and his words have never been forgotten. From his birth in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky to his first Golden Gloves win to the Rumble in the Jungle and the...
The brilliant manager of Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign shows how Bernie took on the entire establishment and changed modern American politics for good.When Jeff Weaver hopped in a car with Bernie Sanders in the summer of 1986, he had no...
For five years, no American runner could beat him at any distance over a mile. But at the age of 24, with his best years still ahead, long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine finally lost. Driving alone at night after a party, Prefontaine crashed his sports...
The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches,...
"With a dispassionate but tender eye, Thompson captures the ache, fizz, yearning and frustration of being the father of adolescent boys--and of adolescence itself, observed and remembered." --Michael Chabon. What makes a good father, and what makes one...
"A bracingly immediate memoir by a young man coming of age during the Syrian war, Brothers of the Gun is an intimate lens on the century's bloodiest conflict and a profound meditation on kinship, home, and freedom." -- Amazon.com.
Traces the remarkable life of the head of post-World War II Paris' most exclusive finishing school, tracing her origins as an impoverished Jewish girl from the city of Angers and discussing the controversies that made her one of the world's most wanted...
eAudiobook
I Am, I Am, I Am is a memoir with a difference - the unputdownable story of an extraordinary woman's life in near-death experiences. Insightful, inspirational, intelligent, it is a book to be read at a sitting, a story you finish newly conscious of l...
Steve Halliwell is best known as the loveable patriarch Zak Dingle in the hit TV show Emmerdale, a part he has played since 1994. He is now one of the UK's most recognisable and treasured soap stars. Yet before his success, Halliwell spent many years...
"David Livingstone has gone down in history as a fearless explorer and missionary, hacking his way through the forests of Africa to bring light to the people - and also to free them from slavery. But who was he, and what was he actually like? "He was...
Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India for sixteen years, was as charismatic as she was controversial-at once admired and criticized for her political judgements and actions. Yet beyond such debate, what has not been fully understood is her life-long...
British National Health Service employee Phyllis Dorothy James White (1920-2014) reinvented herself at age 38 as P.D. James, crime novelist. She then became long known as England's "Queen of Crime." Sixteen of her 20 novels feature one or both of her...
New York Times Bestseller: This groundbreaking tell-all by a mob hit man is "chilling and compelling-a must-read" (Former FBI agent Joe Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco). The Bronx-born son of a Jewish bootlegger, "Joey the Hit Man" was introduced to crime...
Siren's Call is a tale of Yvette Wroby's two families: the family she was born into and the family that is the St Kilda Football Club. It's a story about the bond between Yvette and her mother Elfie, and a wider tale of how her mother's and father's ...
As the author of four humorous memoirs, activist and comedian Fay Jacobs returns with her newest tall tales, Fried & Convicted, Rehoboth Beach Uncorked. And, as you'd expect, It's chock-full of Fay's signature witty, wise, and often laugh-out-loud co...
In desperation, I look up into mum's face. A small face - a loving face- And the lights go out. Her face is the last image I will ever see in my lifetime. Blind since the age of seven, Nick Gleeson has spent his life learning to 'see' without seeing....
A touching and very funny autobiography. William Sharner reveals the man behind the worldwide star and experienced actor.
Graphic and Violent content - The morning started out like a morning of any other day for Terry Chasteen and her 3 small children, but it would be their last. Their murderer was a young man who was considered a dangerous boy at age 10, and a criminal...
"Falling truly, madly, deeply in love with one animal after another was a recurrent theme of the author's childhood, actively encouraged by her beautiful, impetuous mother as she single-handedly held the family together during the war's darkest days....
"Signing up to the Fire Brigade in 1981, Josephine Reynolds was Britain's first ever female firefighter. Her life of service saw her fight the fiercest forest fires in a generation, explosions at a petro-chemical plant and a chauvinistic, macho culture...
Where do I truly belong? This is the question Anne Pia continually asked of herself growing up in the Italian-Scots community of post-World War Two Edinburgh. This candid, vibrant memoir shares her struggle to bridge the gap between a traditional immigrant...
Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth were born just four years apart, in the 1770s, in a world torn between heady revolutionary ideas and fierce conservatism. Jane and Dorothy compares their upbringing and education, home lives and loves and, above all,...
'Where I am going has little beauty. No landscape to take the breath away, no cultural highlights of note, just a street of Victorian shops and houses to which I now know I undoubtedly belong.' A compelling memoir of family secrets and personal disco...
Book
"In these pages, Le Ly Hayslip--just twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her tiny village of Ky La--shows us the Vietnam War as she lived it. Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government...
"The first ever memoir from the number one global bestselling adventure author. Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to c...
"The West Wing meets The Office in this fresh and funny exclusive look into President Barack Obama's years in the White House, directly from his Senior Writer and former Director of Messaging."--
"Dean Home's works are a sensual delight to behold. The artist is a master colourist who brings together an array of influences to create sumptuous still lifes. Entering in the worlds that Home creates feels like stumbling into Coleridge's Xanadu, hi...
"Traces the author's life-changing rescue of a boatload of fellow refugees and how it inspired her to compete on the 2016 Refugee Olympic Team in Rio de Janeiro, tracing her subsequent advocacy on behalf of people who have been forced from their homes...
" St. Thomas Aquinas is enriched by the author's unique ability to see the world through the saint's eyes, a fresh and animated view that shows us Aquinas as no other biography has. Acclaimed as the best book ever written on Aquinas by such outstandi...
"Few American superstar stories are richer, wilder, or more excessive than Rick James's. He played in a band with Neil Young, spent years in jail, produced his first album (which was then picked up by Motown) with money from shadowy sources, crossed rock...
The close-knit villages of the Dearne Valley were home to four generations of the Hollingworth family. Spanning Richard Benson's great-grandmother Winnie's ninety-two years in the valley, and drawing on years of historical research, interviews and an...
Dark, comic, raw, disturbing, and often redemptive, these fifteen tales will take you from the 1950s to the present, along with a repeating cast of heroes and lunatics. The characters span the breadth and the depths of human qualities and capacities....
"Scott Jurek is one of the greatest ultramarathon runners of all time and a living legend. North tells the story of his biggest challenge, undertaken at the end of a career full of glittering achievements: breaking the speed record for the Appalachian...
There is no world leader as beloved (or loooved) as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Dynamic, smart, charismatic, compassionate, and sometimes sassy, he has quickly emerged as not only a dominant politician, but as a model-like role model to m...
"Francoise Hardy is best known in Europe for originating the famed 'Ye-Ye' sound in pop music which began a cultural scene in the early 1960s. Her teenage success grew as she became a much-photographed fashion model and actress. Adored for her shy beauty...
"Born to a pioneering family in Upstate New York in the late 1800s, Allene Tew was beautiful, impetuous, and frustrated by the confines of her small hometown. At eighteen, she met Tod Hostetter at a local dance, having no idea that the mercurial charmer...
"A bravely honest and brilliantly comic account of how one mother gave up drinking and started living; this is Bridget Jones Dries Out. Clare Pooley is a Cambridge graduate and was a Managing Partner at one of the world's biggest advertising agencies,...
Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron and his highly educated wife, Anne Isabella, is sometimes called the world's first computer programmer and has become an icon for women in technology. But how did a young woman...
When Marilyn Monroe stepped over a subway grating as The Girl in The Seven Year Itch and let a gust of wind catch the skirt of her pleated white dress, an icon was born. Before that, the actress was mainly known for a nude calendar and one-dimensional,...
"As a young boy in 1960s Plymouth, Allan Jenkins and his brother, Christopher, were rescued from their care home and fostered by an elderly couple. There, the brothers started to grow flowers in their riverside cottage. They found a new life with their...
"From a liberal upbringing in post-war Britain, boarding school escapades and life at RADA, Ogilvy enjoyed an acting career spanning more than fifty years, including TV show Upstairs, Downstairs and films Witchfinder General, No Sex Please: We're British...
"Brigid Keenan was a glamorous, successful young London fashion journalist. But falling in love with a diplomat saw her leave behind the gift chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in the forests of Nepal. Thirty years later (at the farewell...
The Second World War is dominated by heroic tales of men defending their country against a formidable enemy, but what about the women who also played their part in fighting for freedom? Eileen Younghusband was just 18 when she joined the Women's Auxiliary...
In January 2014 I was informed that I had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death and destruction, but about what it means to be human. I have undertaken a journey from my childhood to the man I am today, writing about the key events in my...
When seventeen-year-old Josephine Reynolds signed up to the Norfolk Fire Service in 1982, there was no such thing as a firefighter - only fireMEN. Nevertheless, she was determined to stick it out. From the gruelling fifteen months of training - wrest...
No issue in America in the 1960s was more vital than civil rights, and no two public figures were more crucial in the drama of race relations in this era than Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Fifty years after they were both assassinated,...
"The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971-87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed "Chez Baldwin." In this volume, the author employs Baldwin's home space as a lens through which to expand his biography...
"A deeply reported biography of the controversial Israeli Prime Minister, showing that we cannot understand Israel today without first understanding the man who leads it. For many in Israel and elsewhere, Benjamin Netanyahu is anathema, an embarrassment,...
"In 2008, twenty year-old Jonny Benjamin stood on Waterloo Bridge, about to jump. A stranger saw his distress and stopped to talk with him - a decision that saved Jonny's life. Fast forward to 2014 and Jonny, together with Rethink Mental Illness launch...
"Black Pasta is a riveting story of a beautiful, feisty young aristocrat, Elena Curtopassi, growing up under Mussolini. She endures the German occupation of Rome, witnesses Adolf Hitler's triumphant parade from the Colosseum and then experiences the ...
Large Print
"In her fearless memoir, My Story, Elizabeth Smart related, for the first time, the horrific experiences she went through as a fourteen-year-old girl, when she was abducted from her home and held captive for nine months. Since then, she's travelled the...
Like many Americans, Doug Fine enjoys his creature comforts, but he also knows full well they keep him addicted to oil. So he wonders: Is it possible to keep his Netflix and his car, his Wi-Fi and his subwoofers, and still reduce his carbon footprint?...
In the summer of 1995 Monica Lewinsky, twenty-one years old and fresh from college, started work as an unpaid intern in the White House, a job that brought her into contact with the then President of the USA, Bill Clinton. What followed would come to...
#1 New York Times bestseller for 13 consecutive weeks! First published in 1952, Witness is the true story of Soviet spies in America and the trial that captivated a nation. Part literary effort, part philosophical treatise, this intriguing autobiogra...
When she was just seventeen, independent and ambitious Elizabeth Scarboro fell in love with irreverent and irresistible Stephen. She knew he had cystic fibrosis, that he was expected to live only until the age of thirty or so, and that soon she'd have...
"After waving goodbye to the rocks, cliffs and sands of the north Cornish coast, Emma Smith (born Elspeth Hallsmith) and her family are uprooted to the Devonshire village of Crapstone, on the outskirts of Dartmoor. Emma's father, a decorated hero of the...
An honest confession of a diagnosis of cancer and the joys and disappointments of motherhood and marriage, ripe with regret over what is and, yet, still hopeful for what could be. With enough humor to ease the rawness of the story, Cushatt takes the reader...
'The man behind the hugely popular Alex Cross series has interviewed those closest to Hernandez to get the full, winding story on the NFL star turned murderer.' Sun'Patterson unravels Hernandez's complicated and troubling story.' CBS News'This distur...
Despite her best efforts (and the fact that she was once voted 'TV's most spankable personality'), Sami Lukis has always been romantically challenged. Aside from a handful of serious long-term relationships, she's been a serial dater for the better part...
""Muhammad Ali was a champion, a poet, a prophet. Sports Illustrated called him "the greatest athlete of the twentieth century." And yet he was even more than all of that, "a whole greater than the sum of its parts . . . bigger, brighter, more original...
As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays....
Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball...
'Patrick White, the un-Australian writer who did more than any other writer in the twentieth century to create an imaginative language that we can call Australian, who unshackled us from the demand that we write as the English do, who recognised, through...
What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profi...
The definitive account of the love affair that has captured the nation - Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.After much speculation in the national media, Prince Harry finally confirmed the rumours about his relationship with American actress Meghan Markle....
A look back makes Michele long for a do-over, the chance to make fewer mistakes and leave less of a mess to clean up. A look forward makes Michele wonder if all her attempts to control life have robbed her of the vibrancy of it. And, in the middle of...
It's a good time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain... Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should we use Botox? Do men secretly hate us? And why...
A deeply moving memoir about a couple whose lives were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future. Five months pregnant, on a flight to their "babymoon," Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his...
Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With...
H. Jon Benjamin--the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers--helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure. Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show busi...
After more than four decades living with multiple sclerosis, New York Times bestselling author Richard M. Cohen finds a flicker of hope in a groundbreaking medical procedure.Richard Cohen struggles with failing limbs and is legally blind. He has survived...
Since 1949, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable...
This is the untold story of the American federal agent who captured the world's most-wanted drug-lord. Every generation has its larger-than-life criminal legend living beyond the reach of the law: Billy the Kid, Al Capone, Ronnie Biggs, Pablo Escobar....
"Gimson's Prime Ministers provides the perfect follow-up to Andrew Gimson's best-selling Gimson's Kings and Queens, providing an acerbic and illuminating meditation on the fifty-two men (and one woman) who have led our government for the last three c...
"Leonard Bernstein reeked of cheap cologne and obviously hadn't showered, shaved, or slept in a while. Was he drunk to boot? He greeted his new assistant with, "What are you drinking?" Yes, he was drunk. Charlie Harmon was hired to manage the day-to-day...
"Over the last 8 years Anthony Joshua has pounded his way to the top of the boxing world. In April 2017 he faces the notorious Ukrainian, Wladimir Klitschko, in the fight that commentators are labelling the fight of the century. The famous Wembley Stadium...
"By the author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls and a heroine of the body positivity movement, an intimate, gutsy memoir about being a fat woman, Jes Baker burst onto the body positivity scene when she created her own ads mocking Abercrombie & Fitch...
"Harvey Milk-charismatic, eloquent, and a smart-aleck-was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 but had served for less than one year when he was shot by a homophobic fellow Supervisor. Milk's assassination made him the most famous...
"Charlotte Lennox (c. 1729-1804) was an eighteenth-century English novelist whose most celebrated work, The Female Quixote (1752), is just one of eighteen works spanning a forty-three year career. Susan Carlile's critical biography of Lennox focuses on...
"Physicians used to make house calls. Today, a few veterinarians still do. Duncan MacVean, DVM, is one such vet. His patients range from cats and dogs to pigs and lizards--each of them a unique personality. Every animal and every home is different, but...
Fifty years ago, a single bullet robbed us of one of the world's most eloquent voices for human rights and justice. To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King Jr. as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound co...
"Albert Facey's story is the story of Australia. Born in 1894, and first sent to work at the age of nine, Facey lived the rough frontier life of a labourer and farmer and jackaroo, becoming lost and then rescued by Indigenous trackers, then gaining a...
The spectacular, true story of a scrappy teenager from New York's Lower East Side who stowed away on the Roaring Twenties' most remarkable feat of science and daring: an expedition to Antarctica. It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe...
"Lady in Red is the long-awaited collection of behind-the-scenes stories and iconic images of one of the most influential First Lady in modern history -- Nancy Reagan. Lovingly compiled by long-time close confidante and aide, Sheila Tate, the book provides...
ConBody is a former Lower East Side drug dealer. Coss Marte's, bodyweight-only approach to fitness created in prison with only the space of his own cell and no equipment to work with. It's perfect for busy lifestyles on the go and can be done in hotel...
[This] is the story of the century-old blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. The two men's mutual hatred, while little remembered today, shaped...
"In 2017, in rsponse to a campaign seeking an apology for the Balfour Declarion, the British Government responde. "The Balfoutr Declaration is an historic statement for which HMG does not intend to apologise. We are proud of our role in creating the State...
Hillary Clinton dominated Amy Chozick’s life for more than a decade. Here, she tells the inside story of Clinton’s pursuit of the US presidency in a campaign book like no other. Amy Chozick’s assignments, covering Clinton’s imploding 2008 campaign and...
"Let Me Be Frank is the new book from one of the world's sporting greats. A deeply personal story, Bruno talks about his battle with mental illness, his time inside a mental facility, the impact his illness has had on his family and his career - and his...
Growing up as the daughter of a dedicated surgeon, Elizabeth L. Silver felt an unquestioned faith in medicine. When her six-week-old daughter, Abby, was rushed to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit with sudden seizures, and scans revealed a serious brain...
"Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma. Who was he really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who made him; those who broke him; and those who loved him? Almost ten years on from Jackson's untimely death,...
"Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment,....
"Sometimes I think of how I will describe New York to my children. I will tell them that the city was in so many ways, and for such a long time, the best and worst thing about my life. That it was a sort of perpetual question in pursuit of an answer....
"From the day she was born until she escaped aged 30, Katy Morgan-Davies knew nothing but a life in captivity. Her father was the deluded and cruel leader of a cult based in South London who convinced himself that he was a god, and the immortal leader...
Contains 37 biographical sketches of women who have changed the world.
"In her new memoir, All in the Downs, Collins tells the story of that lifelong relationship with English folksong—a dedication to artistic integrity that has guided her through the triumphs and tragedies of her life. All in the Downs combines elements...
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