Showing titles in Authors

The authorised biography of one of the greatest storytellers of all time. "Irresistible. I thought I knew quite a lot about Roald Dahl, but now I know much much more. Donald Sturrock's book lucidly describes a complicated life and relates it to the richness of Dahl's storytelling."Quentin Blake...

‘A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots’ Sunday Times A celebrated modern classic that has revolutionised our understanding of the Bloomsbury group and remains the definitive biography of the group’s gloriously eccentric patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Met with widespread acclaim and...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin, read by Jill Balcon and David Shaw-Parker. Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest...

‘The best kind of book: the one you didn’t know you were craving until it appeared . . . self-interrogative, intricately perceptive. I absolutely inhaled it’ JIA TOLENTINO ‘A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories with such...

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘One truth I have learnt, as middle age enmeshes me like Virginia creeper, is that I shall never change—because my capacity for self-improvement is absolutely nil.’ A classic collection of journalism from the legendary Jilly Cooper. Wonderfully warm and...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War...

Prisoner FF8282 gazes out from confinement on what he deems must be a glorious summer’s day, rays of sunlight bursting through the barred windows of his cell. Within the thick prison walls separating society from its dangerous criminals, a multitude of harrowing fates unfold, seldomly explored by the public. First-time offenders thrown in cells with hardened criminals, several inmates becoming heroin addicts and a system riddled with flaws. However, even in prison the sunlight cannot be kept out.

May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

“You don’t have to be Irish to cherish this literary gift—just being human and curious and from a family will suffice.” —Malachy McCourt, New York Times bestselling author of A Monk Swimming In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through...

A selection of the lively letters between one of the world’s greatest literary critics and the poets, novelists, and scholars he most admired Bringing together a collection of Harold Bloom’s letters to and from eight of his favorite contemporary writers, Heather Cass White provides an...

Brought to you by Penguin. Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, Irish Book Awards Shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2025 How far would you go for the missing? Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about...

Emily Dickinson's uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson. For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six-year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson...

Since his death in 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien's major works - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion - have sold over half a billion copies, been made into prodigiously successful films and had an incalculable influence on the generations of fantasy writers who followed in their wake...

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Completely fascinating, authoritative and intriguing' William Boyd 'The big bang on Bond books... Beautiful, brilliant' Tony Parsons Goldeneye: the story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of British national icon, James Bond. From 1946 until the end...

What kind of man creates a boy who never grows up? More than 100 years after Peter Pan first appeared on the London stage, author J. M. Barrie remains one of the most complex and enigmatic figures in modern literature. A few facts, of course, are widely known: Peter Pan made Barrie the richest author of his time, and he bequeathed the royalties to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. In this brilliant biography, Lisa Chaney goes beyond the myths to discover the fascinating, frequently misunderstood man behind the famous boy.

Born to the ranks of the lower English gentry in 1775, Jane Austen led what some have mistakenly described as an ordinary and unremarkable life - a life that ended all too soon at the age of 41. But from this life, Austen drew inspiration for six novels that all rank as literary masterpieces, including the widely beloved Pride and Prejudice. So, what do we really know about Austen’s life and influences?

The devastating and powerful memoir from a French publisher who was abused by a famous writer from the age of thirteen ‘Dazzling’ New York Times ‘A gut-punch of a memoir with prose that cuts like a knife’ Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of My Dark Vanessa Thirty years ago, Vanessa...

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical...

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography.

In this innovative biography, Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary of her years in hiding, now translated into more than seventy languages, is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust. Comprehensively researched but experimental in spirit, this book chronicles and interprets Anne’s life as a Jew in Amsterdam during World War II while also telling the story of the diary—its multiple drafts, its discovery, its reception, and its message for today’s world.