Showing titles in Authors

Alfred Wainwright's unique hand-drawn and hand-written Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells have been an inspiration to walkers for over 40 years. Yet despite many bestselling books and three television series, Wainwright remained an intensely private person. With full access to Alfred Wainwright's private letters and unpublished material, Hunter Davies reveals a man more passionate, witty and generous than readers of his guides have come to expect.

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions - our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems - through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright.

A beautifully illustrated travelogue, chronicling the life and work of one of the world greatest poets. Du Fu (712-70) is one of China’s greatest poets. His career coincided with periods of famine, war and huge upheaval, yet his secular philosophical vision, combined with his empathy for the...

After the birth of her first child in 2006, Turkish writer Elif Shafak suffered from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. In this elegantly written memoir, she retraces her journey from free-spirited, nomadic artist to dedicated but emotionally wrought mother. As she intersperses her own experience with the lives of prominent authors such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Ayn Rand and Zelda Fitzgerald, Shafak looks for a solution to the inherent conflict between artistic creation and responsible parenting.

Here is one of the great autobiographies of the English language - exuberant, wonderfully contemporary in spirit, by a man twice as large as life who—he said so himself—had no trouble remembering everything that had ever happened to him and a lot of things besides.

In 2010,Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do," James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write". James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list.

Known for the wit of her writing, Catherine Cookson was the UK's most widely read novelist during her lifetime. When her Estate discovered this never-before-published memoir in the attic of her home, it was an astonishing find. Before I Go is the definitive story of her life, in the author's own candid words.

In Lessico famigliare, il riaffiorare alla memoria di parole, espressioni, frasi e modi di dire sentiti tante volte in casa da Natalia Ginzburg, scandisce, con ironia e tenerezza, la storia della sua famiglia - i Levi - ebrei e antifascisti, nell'Italia tra gli anni Venti e gli anni Cinquanta del Novecento.

An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be. The theory that Shakespeare may...

When rare books dealer Rebecca Romney found an emerald clothbound edition of Evelina by Frances Burney, she was happy to discover that she'd stumbled across a novel by one of Jane Austen's favourite authors. Inspired by the connection between the two writers, she returned to Austen's books with a new lens, picking out clues sprinkled throughout her works that pointed to the writers she had admired.

"When I'm writing non-fiction I have to be very aware of my tendency to let the words take their own course, leading me softly, happily, away from fact, away from rigorous connection of ideas, toward my native country, fiction and poetry, where truths are expressed and thoughts connected in an...

Bloomsbury presents This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz, read by Christine Rendel The first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades. Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years...

In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was in full swing. Her parents veered from being determined farmers to being blind drunk, whilst Alexandra and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart songs from sun bleached rocks.

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë created some of the greatest works of 19th-century English literature. How did these three young women, born into a humble parsonage on the isolated moors of Northern England, write such striking work? What influenced them? How did they get their stories out into the world? Why do their novels continue to grip readers to this day? These and other questions are what you will explore in The Brontës: Romantic Passion and Social Justice.

Ernest Hemingway’s classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, now available in a restored edition, includes the original manuscript along with insightful recollections and unfinished sketches. Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring works...

Ernest Hemingway's classic exploration of the history and pageantry of bullfighting, and the deeper themes of cowardice, bravery, sport and tragedy that it inspires. Still considered one of the best books ever written about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon reflects Hemingway's belief that...

From the award-winning author of MY NAME IS LEON, THE TRICK TO TIME and SUPPORTING CAST comes a childhood memoir set to become a classic: stinging, warm-hearted, and true. Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and...

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject.

Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker. ‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ Olivia Laing ‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant ‘A life-changing book’ Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times ‘Fabulously...