Browse our collection of the latest large print biographies. This list updates when we add new titles to our collection.
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"To maintain the pace at which he worked as a parliamentarian, cabinet minister, war leader, writer and painter, Churchill required a vast female staff of secretaries, typists and others. For these women Churchill was an intimidating boss; he was a man...
"In December 1854, Emmanuel Barthelemy visited 73 Warren Street in the heart of radical London for the very last time. Within half an hour, two men were dead ... This is the true story of one of nineteenth-century London's most notorious murderers an...
"An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff's years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how deafness taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life...
"The True Crime Biography of John Lawson, born in Scotland and raised in South Africa until the age of ten, where his policeman father locked him home alone and never returned. Rescued after four days without food, he was sent back to Scotland where rage...
"In Munjed Al Muderis's bestselling memoir Walking Free, he described his experience as a refugee fleeing Saddam Hussein's Iraq, his terrifying sea journey to Australia and the brutal mandatory detention he faced in the remote north of Western Australia....
As a child in wartime England, Janet White decided that she wanted to live somewhere wild and supremely beautiful, to inhabit and work the landscape. She imagined searching the whole world for a place, high and remote as a sheep stell, quiet as a monastery...
Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber 20,000 feet above Berlin, wireless operator John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his thoughts to his fiancee back home. In a miraculous turn of events, however, the twenty-one-year-old was thrown...
"A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius...
"In 2013, Ayaz Virji left a comfortable job at an East Coast hospital and moved to a town of 1,400 in Minnesota, feeling called to address the shortage of doctors in rural America. But in 2016, this decision was tested when the reliably blue, working...
"A unique burden was inherited by the children of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his celebrated siblings Senators Robert and Ted Kennedy. Raised in a world of enormous privilege against the backdrop of American history, this third generation of...
"In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To “set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was forced to do something unprecede...
"The 1954 motion picture Creature from the Black Lagoon featured a monster designed by a woman, Milicent Patrick. But Patrick's contribution was claimed by a jealous male colleague, her career was cut short, and she soon after disappeared from film h...
"Meredith May recalls the first time a honeybee crawled on her arm. She was five years old, her parents had recently split and suddenly she found herself in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric beekeeper who made honey in a rusty old military bus...
"G. Kelly's Pie and Mash has been run by the same family in the Roman Road in Bow for nearly a hundred years; an East End institution and the still point of a turning world. Outside its windows the Roman Road has seen an extraordinary revolution - from...
"The extraordinary follow-up to the international bestseller The King's Speech. The broadcast that George VI made to the nation on the outbreak of war in September 1939 - which formed the climax of the multi Oscar-winning film The King's Speech - was...
"Each June, Tory Bilski meets up with fellow women travelers in Reykjavik where they head to northern Iceland, near the Greenland Sea. They escape their ordinary lives to live an extraordinary one at a horse farm perched at the edge of the world -- if...
"To subdue the beast is the true story of Raoul John Palu the son of an English mother and Tongan father who was born in New Zealand. It follows his descent into madness and his harrowing journey and ascent into wellness. From the halls of academia to...
"Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy, and back-breaking. It was a time...
"Wallis Simpson is known as the woman at the center of the most scandalous love affair of the 20th century, but in this surprising new biography, bestselling author Anna Pasternak redeems a women wronged by history with new information revealed by those...
From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. A kind of memoir that is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire - for men and women - and the exhilaration of swimming, 'The ...
For centuries, the Tower of London has been home to a group of famous avian residents: the ravens. Legend has it that if they should ever leave, the Tower will crumble into dust, and great harm will befall the kingdom. One man is personally responsible...
A pioneer of performance poetry, Benjamin Zephaniah's talents as a lyricist and storyteller emerged at a young age, helping him to survive the racism he faced growing up in 1960s Birmingham. He now speaks candidly of his time living outside the law, and...
"Admiral William H. McRaven is a part of American military history, having been involved in some of the most famous missions in recent memory, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, and the raid to kill Osama...
"The year is 1942, and World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father's footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally...
"My mantra is simple - Don't stop believin'! For more than five decades Olivia Newton-John has been one of our most successful and adored entertainers. A four-time Grammy Award winner, she is one of the world's best-selling recording artists of all time,...
As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of...
Sally Urwin and her husband Steve own High House Farm in Northumberland, which they share with Mavis the sheepdog, one very fat pony, and many, many sheep. Set in a beautiful, wild landscape and in use for generations, it's the perfect setting for Sally's...
One of the most legendary television actors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, David Jason's career has ranged from theatre work in the West End to providing voices for Mr. Toad in The Wind In The Willows, Danger Mouse, and The BFG; and from...
The enchanting island of Corfu was home to Gerald Durrell and his family for five years before the Second World War. For the passionate young zoologist, Corfu was a natural paradise teeming with strange birds and beasts that he could collect, watch and...
In a frosty field on the longest night of the year, eight piglets snuffle their first breath, and jostle close to their mother to feed. Over the six months that follow, Helen Browning and her partner Tim Finney follow their adventures to show how pigs...
Marina Benjamin's Insomnia is part memoir and part philosophical inquiry into a condition that is on the rise and that can grant us insights into the workings of our unconscious minds. An intense and lyrical personal narrative, it treats insomnia as ...
"All roads lead back home. Billy Connolly may be a citizen of the world, but in his heart he's never been far from his homeland. Made in Scotland is Billy's unique and intimate portrait of his native Scotland, a love letter to the places and people that...
The story of three downed British airmen who mastermind an elaborate, rollicking escape from a WWI German POW camp.
The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington and Hanoi to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam. On 12 February, 1973, one hundred and sixteen men who, just six years earlier, had been high flying Navy and Air Force...
"As the Great Depression brought America to the brink of disaster, a devoted single mother in Cleveland, Ohio, wrestled triumph out of adversity by creating a community activity that would inspire the nation. Josephine Morhard's daughter-in-law recounts...
"A moving biography of Kenneth Grahame, author of the children's classic The Wind in the Willows, and of the vision of English pastoral life that inspired it"--
"Tina Turner is the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll, a musical icon celebrating her 60th year in the industry. In this dramatic autobiography, she tells the story of a truly remarkable life in the spotlight. From her early years picking cotton in Nutbush, Tennessee...
"Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, pulling long hours while struggling as a single mom to keep a roof over her daughter's head. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society. While she...
"A vivid biography of former First Lady Barbara Bush, one of the most influential and under-appreciated women in American political history. Barbara Pierce Bush was one of the country's most popular and powerful figures, yet her full story has never been...
"Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to have to flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie...
Adam Hills always wanted to be a comedian. He also wanted to wear thongs, but we'll get to that. Growing up in Sydney, Australia, laughter was what brought the Hills family together. But it wasn't until Adam's nineteenth birthday that he decided to pursue...
Growing up in post-war London, Rosie and her sister Jo spend their days longing for their grandparents' farm, buried deep in the Hampshire countryside - a green paradise of feasts and freedom where they can roam and dream. But when Rosie is ten years...
Kamal Ahmed's childhood was very "British" in every way - except for the fact that he was brown. Half English, half Sudanese, he was raised in 1970s London at a time when being mixed-race meant being told to go home, even when you were born just down...
"The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she recently made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden...
"Bestselling author and historian Lucy Worsley tracks a new course through Queen Victoria's life, examining how she transformed from dancing princess to the Widow of Windsor and became one of Britain's greatest monarchs along the way. Taking twenty-f...
"The incredible memoir of how Wilma Melville turned a band of shelter dogs into one of America's foremost disaster-response assets in catastrophes from 9/11 to Katrina. To most, these dogs were unadoptable. Unsalvageable. Irredeemable. To retired gym...
"The incredible true story of a boy living in war-torn Somalia who escapes to America--first by way of the movies; years later, through a miraculous green card."--
"How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds...
She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s--and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most...
"After dropping out of the 2016 presidential race, Chris Christie stunned the political world by becoming the first major official to endorse Donald Trump. A friend of Trump's for fifteen years, the two-term New Jersey governor understood the future ...
TV adventurer Simon Reeve has journeyed across epic landscapes, dodged bullets on frontlines, walked through minefields, and been detained for spying by the KGB. His travels have taken him across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of...
"Casey Gerald comes to our fractured times as a uniquely visionary witness whose life has spanned seemingly unbridgeable divides. His story begins at the end of the world: Dallas, New Year's Eve 1999, when he gathers with the congregation of his gran...
"IOn 17th July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets. On the 100-year-anniversary...
"Written through the eyes of a growing child, this is the story of a very particular family and their circle of brilliant, idealistic and intellectual friends in London in the 60s, 70s and 802. We follow William through the ups and downs of childhood,...
"With charged intellect and piercing candor, provocative essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon shares his experiences of growing up with racial prejudice and violence both within his own family and in the culture at large. Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer....
"James Butler Hickok was known across the frontier as a soldier, Union spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman, and actor. But in July 1865, "Wild Bill" Hickok shot and killed Davis Tutt in Springfield, Missouri - the first quick-draw duel on...
"Maud Berridge (1845-1907) was the wife of a Master Mariner, and she travelled with him on at least five occasions, sailing to Melbourne with emigrants and cargo. The first occasion was 1869 just after they were married, when Henry was Captain of the...
The Durrell family returns to the island of Corfu. Already an ardent naturalist at the age of ten, the young Gerald lives in an unconventional and disordered household with his mother, sister, and two brothers. Convivial and open, the family plays host...
Detective Inspector Richard Venables QPM (Rtd.) has helped identify thousands of bodies all over the world, piecing together fragments from tsunamis, transport and other disasters to return the victims to their loved ones. A world-renowned expert in ...
"Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life,...
"A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents--artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs--Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley....
"Hidden amongst the photographs, uniforms, revolvers, and war medals of the Civil War are the remarkable stories of some of the most unlikely heroes--women. North, South, black, white, Native American, immigrant--the women in these micro-drama biographies...
"During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh...
"On a summer day in New York Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, gasping for breath on their living room couch. After a frenzied 911 call, an ambulance race across Manhattan, and hours pacing in a hospital waiting room, a doctor finally delivers...
What do you lose when your memories begin to disappear? What do you value when this reframes how you've lived, and how you will live in the future? How do you conceive of love when you can no longer recognise those who are supposed to mean the most to...
Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successi...
1935: The Durrells pack their bags and flee the gloom of England like a flock of migrating swallows. Their destination is the Greek island of Corfu, where the eccentric family takes up residence in a series of villas. Budding naturalist Gerald, the youngest...
"A narrative by the Tower of London's official Ravenmaster about what it's like to live among the ravens at England's most famous national monument, woven together with insight from folklore, history, and contemporary behavioral science about this un...
"For half a century Eric Clapton has been acknowledged to be one of music's greatest virtuosos, the unrivalled master of an indispensable tool, the solid-body electric guitar. His career has spanned the history of rock, and often shaped it via the se...
"It was July 1944 when Madge stepped onto a troopship that was to carry her thousands of miles away from home. Only twenty years old and not long qualified as a nurse, she had signed up to serve in the Burma Campaign. She would be based on the Indian...
"'I have always felt,' William Shatner says early in his newest memoir, that 'like the great comedian George Burns, who lived to 100, I couldn't die as long as I was booked.' And Shatner is always booked. Still, a brief health scare in 2016 forced him...
Tim Bentinck has played the part of David Archer in BBC Radio 4's 'The Archers' since 1982. He is also the Earl of Portland - without an estate or riches - and the voice of 'Mind the Gap' on the Piccadilly Line. Timothy takes the reader behind the scenes...
"Britain has been defined by its conflicts, its conquests, its men and its monarchs. To say that it's high time that it was defined by its women falls some way short of an understatement. Jenni Murray, the long-time presenter of Woman's Hour on BBC Radio...
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. This is the...
Helen Walmsley-Johnson's first husband controlled her life, from the people she saw to what was in her bank account. He alienated her from friends and family and even their three daughters. Eventually he threw her out, and she painfully began to rebuild...
"What could be cooler, thinks teen Elizabeth Garber in 1965, than to live in a glass house designed by her architect dad? When Elizabeth Garber, her visionary architect father, and the rest of their family move into Woodie Garber's modern masterpiece,...
"With over 100 movies to his credit over 5 decades, Hollywood legend and British national treasure Michael Caine shares the wisdom, stories, insight and skills for success in life that acting has taught him in his remarkable career. One of our best-l...
"In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in ...
In 1939, Annie Jarman and her six young daughters were evacuated from their south London home and sent to the Sussex countryside to wait out the war. Refusing to be parted, they faced the unknown together, never imagining just how much their lives wo...
"Many years after the death of her grandmother Elisabeth, Lulah Ellender inherited a curious object - a book of handwritten lists. They seemed rather ordinary - shopping lists, items to be packed for a foreign trip, a tally of the eggs laid by Elisa...
"The Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up by Winston Churchill in 1941, saw its role in France as helping the Resistance by recruiting and training guerrilla fighters. 39 femaile agents were trained alongside the men, learning how to disappear into...
"In his new book, Andrew Morton reveals new information and sources that totally transform our perception of Wallis Simpson. It was described as the most poignant royal love story of the century, a man and a woman equally united by a love that divided...
"Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully...
"One of the most celebrated, beloved, and enduring actors of our time, Sally Field has an infectious charm that has captivated the nation for more than five decades, beginning with her first TV role at the age of seventeen. From Gidget's sweet-faced "girl...
"To begin with I was in love and I am in love so that's not hard." Ellie LeBlond Sosa had asked her grandmother how her lifelong love affair with President George H.W. Bush had withstood World War II, the West Texas oil fields, the painful loss of a child,...
"Kashner and Schoenberger draw on candid interviews with Jackie Kennedy Onassis' sister, Lee, to share insights into the close relationship the two shared. One became the most iconic woman of her time, while the other lived in her shadow. In discussing...
"The author shares his experiences of becoming a professional woodworker, from his early experiences with woodwork, to his leap of quitting his sales job to become a carpenter, and the chance encounter with Chip Gaines that changed his life."
"Tilar J. Mazzeo's comprehensive and riveting biography describes the extraordinary life and times of Eliza Hamilton, the wife of founding father Alexander Hamilton, and a powerful, unsung hero in America's early days. Eliza was a strong pioneer woman,...
"Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two success...
"Fred Rogers (1928-2003) was an enormously influential figure in the history of television and in the lives of tens of millions of children. As the creator and star of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood , he was a champion of compassion, equality, and kindn...
At the age of fifty, Eddie Brocklesby decided to run her first half-marathon. Until that point, her exercise regime had consisted of little more than chauffeuring her children to their own sports clubs. The race was the first of what was to become a ...
"For more than thirty years, mountain men explored the Great American West, opening the gates of the mountains for the wagon trains of pioneers that followed. Win Blevins' poetic tribute to their incredible adventures includes, among many, the stories...
"John Kerry tells the story of his remarkable American life -- from son of a diplomat to decorated Vietnam veteran, five-term United States senator, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and secretary of state. A Yale graduate, Kerry enlisted in the U.S....
"Seymour Hersh's fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every major newspaper in the free world, honors galore, and no small amount of controversy. Now he describes what drove him and how he worked as an independent o...
"When Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were set up by a mutual friend on a blind date in July 2016, little did they know that the resulting whirlwind romance would lead to their engagement in November 2017 and marriage in May 2018. Since then, our fasc...
"Now raising their four-year-old daughter, Indiana, alone, after Joey's passing, Rory Feek digs deeper into the soil of his life and the unusual choices he and his wife, Joey, made together and the ones he's making now to lead his family into the fut...
"Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged 16, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe,...
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