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
Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to...
"A science writer explains the significance of Stephen Hawking's work--in terms all of us can understand"--
"The captivating story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their grandfather's humble Parisian jewelry store into a global luxury icon - as told by a great-granddaughter with exclusive access to long-lost family....
"With the imminent arrival of her third child, veterinary surgeon, Gillian Hick, decides to abandon the perils of mixed animal practice, in a favour of setting up a small animal practice from home. When neighbouring farmer, John Armstrong, drops in for...
Winston Churchill is an icon of modern history, but even though he was at the forefront of the political scene for almost sixty years, he might be remembered only as a minor player in the drama of British government had it not been for World War II. In...
Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, share the stories of the gutsy women who have inspired them?women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight...
Book
This is the first book about the major Australian sculptor Bronwyn Oliver, released to coincide with The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver at the TarraWarra Museum of Art. "I wanted to write an old fashioned art book, one that tells the story of the artist's...
Award-winning biographer Fitzsimons uncovers the little-known details of Nesbit's life, introducing readers to the Fabian Society cofounder and fabulous socialite who hosted legendary parties and had admirers by the dozen, including George Bernard Sh...
Many people believe we are a product of our environment. That the things we go through shape and mold who we become. Sarah Monares' compelling memoir shows us that while our past certainly impacts who we are, each of us have what it takes within ourselves...
Large Print
"Maxwell Taylor Kennedy takes readers on a wild ride as he relates the harrowing voyage to deliver his boat, Valkyrien, a 90-foot dilapidated wooden schooner, from San Francisco to Washington, DC. From day one, Kennedy and his skeleton crew face difficult...
"Marika Meeks fell in love with Stella the moment she saw her. The adorable pit bull puppy had been abandoned in a cold field in winter -- but her warm, friendly eyes and boundless affection could melt anyone's heart. Even so, Marika wasn't sure she was...
"What was it like being a Liverpool policeman in the sixties and early seventies armed only with a truncheon and a whistle? This anecdotal story folows the life and times of Edward KLsaika who struggles with his naiveté as a raw recruit. He quickly loses...
This book is a bright and vivacious look at the fashion, art and homes of one of the most celebrated fashion designers of the twentieth century. Adrian (1903-1959) designed costumes for over 150 Hollywood productions, including fabulous gowns worn by...
The youngest player to score in the World Cup final since Pele, for the tournament-winning team, in his brief career to date Kylian Mbappe is breaking records at a rate matched by only the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and is fast becoming...
Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches...
Pat Cavendish O'Neil was born into a world of enormous riches, eccentricity and intrigue. Her mother, Enid Lindeman of the Australian wine family, was a famous beauty who married four times. Two husbands were millionaires, two had titles and none lived...
Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world's leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards, both for his concerts and recordings. He is also a writer, composer and painter. As an international performer he spends much of his life a...
A legendary record producer and performer takes readers on an alphabetical journey of insights into the music of the Beatles and individual reminiscences of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Peter Asher met the Beatles in the spring of 1963, the start of...
Skeptical yet insightful, Fifield creates a captivating portrait of the oddest and most secretive political regime in the world--one that is isolated yet internationally relevant, bankrupt yet in possession of nuclear weapons--and its ruler, the...
Since her first appearance on screen in Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews has played a series of memorable roles that have endeared her to generations. But she has never told the story of her life before fame. Until now.
A ballet star traces his childhood in the impoverished suburbs of Havana, his adolescent participation in break-dancing and delinquency that prompted his enrollment in ballet school, and his performances throughout Cuba, the United States, and Europe...
As the acclaimed author of And the Band Played On, Randy Shil ts (1951-1994) became the country's most recognized voice on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. His success emerged from a relentless work ethic and strong belief in the power of journalism to help ma...
In 1953, after doctors prescribed fresh country air for his health, Scottish-born Robert Wales uprooted his young family from the city life of Sydney and set out to establish a sheep farm in the bush. What he lacked in experience and expertise, he made...
This is the story of how an awkward, ambitious suburban teen from humble beginnings transformed herself into a high school homecoming queen, and later, the most celebrated actress of our time. Meryl Streep came of age during the women's movement of t...
To see the world through Jenny Slate's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gases that ...
For a variety of reasons, Australian sport needed an uplifting, inspirational, feel-good story in 2019. The year was only little more than half over before one had well and truly arrived - one of the best ever, in fact. Tennis star Ashleigh Barty captured...
Innocent is the shocking true story of little Molly and Kit, siblings, aged 3 years and 18 months, who are brought into care as an emergency after suffering non-accidental injuries. Aneta and Filip, the children's parents, are distraught when their c...
A landmark biography of a singular and important Australian photographer, Olive Cotton, by an award-winning writer - beautifully written and deeply moving. Olive Cotton was one of Australia's pioneering modernist photographers, whose significant talent...
Haben grew up spending summers with her family in the enchanting Eritrean city of Asmara. There, she discovered courage as she faced off against a bull she couldn't see, and found in herself an abiding strength as she absorbed her parents' harrowing....
Gradually since 2003, Turkey's autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to make Turkey a great power -- in the tradition of past Turkish leaders from the late Ottoman sultans to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Here the leading authority...
The desire to be a parent can be a powerful emotion. It drove Anne and Alan to keep going after the death of their first child, and the miscarriages and unsuccessful IVF attempts that followed. Their dream was eventually realised through inter-countr...
What can we learn from the stunning rise and mysterious death of the ancient world's greatest conqueror? An acclaimed biographer reconstructs the life of Alexander the Great in this magisterial portrait. More than two millennia have passed, but Alexander...
She was the great love of President John F. Kennedy's life, but also Adolf Hitler's special guest at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was an actress, a journalist, an explorer, an MGM screenwriter, and also a suspected Nazi spy. Inga Arvad lived where g...
Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains. In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. People would...
A city, a movie star, and one magical year. In November of 1954 a young woman dressed plainly in a white oxford, dark sunglasses and a black pageboy wig boards a midnight flight from Los Angeles to New York. As the plane's engines rev she breathes a sigh...
As the author recalls the sexual and mental abuse he suffered at the hands of two teachers in his Christian Brothers primary school, and the desperate, dark days of depression and isolation which followed, he tells of how the angels helped him to claw...
"When I flew to Bali on 8 October 2004, I imagined my biggest problem was going to be deciding which sarong to wear with which bikini... " It was meant to be a holiday. A fun-filled break to a tropical paradise to celebrate a sister's birthday. But ...
Emma Forrest, an English journalist, was twenty-two and living in America when she realised that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. Lonely, in a dangerous cycle of self-harm and damaging relationships, she found herself in the chair of a slim, ...
Focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister...
Waiting for Daisy is the story of one couple's mission to have a baby. It is about doing all the things you swore you would never do to get something you hadn't even been sure you wanted. It's a real-life journey of loss, love, anger and redemption. Told...
'The Pacific' describes the extraordinary true stories of four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy carrier pilot fighting in the Pacific region during World War II.
Julie Flygare was on an ambitious path to success, entering law school at age 22, when narcolepsy destroyed the neurological boundaries between dreaming and reality in her brain. She faced terrifying hallucinations, paralysis and excruciating sleepin...
Paul McGowan tells all (and then some) in this riotous tale of misbegotten success that's 99% true in all the best ways. From his not-so-innocent youth growing up in the shadow of Disneyland and summer evenings in the innocent 1950s, to his dope-smok...
A generational work that, using television, reframes America's identity through the rattled mind of a septuagenarian, insomniac, cable-news-junkie president. In the tradition of great cultural figures like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, New York ...
As he entered his seventies, the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were past. Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger artists, this supreme painter and sc...
In this follow-up to her critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir Home, the enchanting Julie Andrews picks up her story with her arrival in Hollywood, sharing the career highlights, personal experiences and reflections behind her astonishing caree...
David Suchet has been a stalwart of British stage and screen for fifty years. From Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Freud to Poirot, Edward Teller to Doctor Who, Harold Pinter to Terence Rattigan, Questions of Faith to Decline and Fall, right up to 2019's...
"Growing up in 1970s Suffolk, in a crumbling giant of a house with wild, tangled gardens, Alex Monroe was left to wreak havoc by invention. Without visible parental influence, he made nature into his world. Creation became a compulsion, whether it was...
Edmund White was forty-three years old when he moved to Paris in 1983. He spoke no French and knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. White fell passionately in love with Paris,...
In 1992, Ben Watt, a member of the band Everything But The Girl, contracted a rare life-threatening illness that baffled doctors and required months of hospital treatment and operations. This is the story of his fight for survival and the effect it had...
Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood, Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen, pausing along the way for a series of confessions,...
An engrossing, unadulterated biography of "Bloody Mary"--Elder daughter of Henry VIII, Catholic zealot, and England's first reigning Queen Mary Tudor was the first woman to inherit the throne of England. Reigning through one of Britain's stormiest eras,...
A fascinating memoir of an extraordinary family told through the vast, four hundred year old house, Knole.
The first and highly anticipated biography of the author of such classics of suspense as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people...
eAudiobook
This is the story of the last acrimonious days of The Beatles, a final chapter reconstructing for the first time the seismic events of 1969, the year that saw the band reach new highs of musical creativity and new lows of internal strife. Two years a...
A candid, visceral, and incredibly entertaining account of what it's like to live in one of the most extreme man-made environments in the world. Imagine a world without natural light, where you can barely stand up straight for fear of knocking your head,...
July 15, 1942, Wednesday. Remember this day; remember it well. You will tell generations to come. Since 8 o'clock today we have been shut away in the ghetto. I live here now. The world is separated from me and I'm separated from the world. Renia is a...
The work of Mike Nichols pervades American cultural consciousness-from The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Angels in America, The Birdcage, Working Girl, and Primary Colors, not to mention the hit plays, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd...
Lisa Schwartz's stories and musings are all about watching her friends adult like pros, while she tries to understand why she doesn't want or can't seem to find all the things they have for herself. Like a big sister who's already seen it all, Lisa will...
Jimmy was a down-at-heel guitarist in New York, relying on his latest lovers to support him while he tried to emulate his hero Bob Dylan. A black guy playing white rock music, he wanted to be all things to all people. But when Jimmy arrived in England...
Donna Freitas has lived two lives. In one life, she is a well-published author and respected scholar who has traveled around the country speaking about Title IX, consent, religion, and sex on college campuses. In the other, she is a victim, a woman w...
As the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion long ago secured his reputation as a leading figure of the twentieth century. Determined from an early age to create a Jewish state, he took control of the Zionist movement, declared Israel's independence, a...
Jim Simons is the greatest moneymaker in modern financial history. His record bests those of legendary investors, including Warren Buffett, George Soros and Ray Dalio. Yet Simons and his strategies are shrouded in mystery. The financial industry has ...
The CEO of The Walt Disney Company shares the ideas and values he has used to reinvent one of the most beloved companies in the world, and inspire the people who bring the magic to life.
Kate Pickert worked as a health-care journalist and knew medical treatment well, but it all changed when she was diagnosed with an aggressive type of breast cancer at age 35. Pickert used her journalistic skills to identify the cultural, scientific, ...
After growing up in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, Rose achieved an improbable childhood dream: being selected first overall in the NBA draft by his hometown Chicago Bulls. In 2011, he became the youngest MVP in league history. Six years and four ...
"From birth to death, Phineas Taylor Barnum repeatedly reinvented himself. He learned as a young man how to wow crowds, and built a fortune that placed him among the first millionaires in the United States. He also suffered tragedy, bankruptcy, and fires...
"A chance encounter at a summer party on Martha's Vineyard blossomed into an improbable but enduring friendship. Carly Simon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis made an unlikely pair, Carly, a free and artistic spirit still reeling from her recent divorce...
"An inspiring memoir from the frontlines of history by the award-winning 60 Minutes correspondent. Don't ask the meaning of life. Life is asking, what's the meaning of you? With this provocative question, Truth Worth Telling introduces us to unforget...
"The incredible life story of Eugene Bullard, the first African American military pilot in WWI, who went on to become a self-taught jazz musician, a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer. Eugene...
"In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, which is also the subject of the smash-hit film Rocketman. The result is Me - the joyously funny, honest and moving story of the most...
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are the creators of some of British television's most beloved comedies. Essex-born Clement teamed up with Geordie insurance salesman La Frenais in the early 1960s and scripted a series about two young pals from Newcastle,...
Paris. The beauty. The grime. The colours and thoughts and songs and sounds and children and dogs. The taste of strawberries, the sky, first metro, last metro, the bells, the dreams... The city of light, it seems, has its own plans for Jayne. Drawn there...
Why do we make things by hand? And why do we make them beautiful? Led by the question of why working with our hands remains vital and valuable in the modern world, author and maker Melanie Falick went on a transformative, inspiring journey. Traveling...
Caroline Johnson was an unlikely aviation candidate. A tall blonde debutante from Colorado, she could have just as easily gone into fashion or filmmaking, and yet she went on to become an F/A-18 Super Hornet Weapons System Officer. She was one of the...
This is a remarkable and unique book, an informal portrait of Justice Ginsburg, drawing on a series of her conversations with Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president...
Bestselling author Cassandra King Conroy considers her life and the man she shared it with, paying tribute to her husband, Pat Conroy, the legendary figure of modern Southern literature. Cassandra King was leading a quiet life as a professor, divorced...
He's the worst Nazi war criminal you've never heard of. Sidekick to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and supervisor of Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, General Hans Kammler was responsible for the construction of Hitler's slave labor sites and conce...
John Mayall's story is like no other in the annals of rock and blues. Born in the UK in 1933, he laid the foundations of British blues, nurtured a generation of future superstars and then took the music back to the land of its birth. This extraordina...
At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in an adopted family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. And...
Mark Garrison recounts his experiences from being on the short list for the draft during the Vietnam War, to signing up to be a helicopter pilot, and his tour of duty with the Crocodiles and Alligators of the 119th Assault Helicopter Company.
At 14, Rocky Johnson left home to seek fortune and make professional wrestling his career. An incredibly agile and talented wrestler for a man his size, he soon became a featured main-eventer in every territory he worked -- from Los Angeles to New York,...
David Marr’s explosive bestseller, now expanded and fully updated. Cardinal George Pell is behind bars. In August 2019, his appeal failed. Australia’s most senior Catholic, the man once in charge of the Vatican’s finances, remains in prison for sexua...
From renowned diplomat and musician Andrās Simonyi -- whom Stephen Colbert calls "the only ambassador I know who can shred a mean guitar!" -- comes a timely and revealing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain and longing for freedom while chasing...
A high-profile CIA agent shares the story of her career in intelligence, describing her role on the frontlines of America's war on terror and the hunt to find and stop al-Qaida mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"Malala presents true stories of the refugee experience interwoven with her own story of her displacement in this incredibly moving follow up to her internationally bestselling memoir. Nobel Peace Prize winner and bestselling author Malala Yousafzai ...
In 1987 a massive snowstorm hits New York as Peter Kaldheim flees the city, owing drug debts to a dealer who is no stranger to casual violence. Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living hand-to-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling...
Although Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time, and remains an international name today, he is mostly remembered only for the gift of universal electric light. His invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago...
A fascinating, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting tale of self-discovery from the beloved actress who earned a permanent place in the hears of millions for her role in Little House on the Prarie when she was just a child. To fans of the hugely s...
The trajectory of Suede - hailed in infancy as both 'The Best New Band in Britain' and 'effete southern wankers' - is recalled with moving candour by its frontman Brett Anderson, whose vivid memoir swings seamlessly between the tender, witty, turbule...
When Liz Phair was just starting out in the Wicker Park, Chicago, music scene in the early 1990s, she encountered some people--mostly men, who didn't respect her and were determined not to see her fail, exactly, because they didn't care enough about her...
In September 2018, the F.B.I. was given only a week to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct against Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Many questions remained unanswered, leaving millions of Americans unsettled. Pogrebin...
"Like a hearing child born to deaf parents, I was shaped by my mother's handicap, discovering that food could be a way of making sense of the world". Ruth Reichl is the chief editor at Gourmet Magazine and recognised as one of the world's leading food...
David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway who barely finished high school, but he emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. He found his tribe in New York's East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and '80s for...
Can one of the richest men in the world be a good person? The biography of Carlos Slim, one of the richest people of all time, is not just the tale of the first man from a developing country to ever reach the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. It...
The country music superstar shares what the guitar has meant to him as a means of finding his own voice, who inspired his love of music, and memorable stories about the many great guitar players he has encountered over the years.
On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of Prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials ̀L...
The author's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but vol...
The definitive biography of a banker, essayist, and editor of the Economist, by an acclaimed financial historian. During the upheavals of 2007-9, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Ba...
To Liverpool fans he was 'God', but Robbie Fowler has never told his full story until now. In A Footballer's Life Robbie takes us on a journey through the twenty games that have shaped of his career and thinking about football from Hillsborough to Is...
Shaun Attwood arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, a penniless business graduate from a small industrial town in England. Within a decade, he became a stock-market millionaire. But he was leading a double life. After taking his first Ecstasy pill at a rave i...
Famed American actress Demi Moore at last tells her own story in a surprisingly intimate and emotionally charged memoir. For decades, Demi Moore has been synonymous with celebrity. From iconic film roles to high-profile relationships, Moore has never...
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