Anne Watts grew up in a small village in north Wales in the 1940s. Inspired by school geography lessons that told of far-off lands, she broke out of the conventional options open to women in post-war Britain, defying her father’s dated views. She trained as a nurse and midwife, joined the Save the Children Fund and was posted to Vietnam in 1967.

Robert B. Sherman has forged a phenomenal career as a songwriter, screenwriter and painter. Along with his brother, Richard, he is responsible for the iconic scores of many feature films. But to fully appreciate the impact of his songs, one has to get to know the man behind them first.

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 desperately seeking work and even spent time on the streets. This warts-and-all story of his rise to fame is an inspiration. It explores the wider class history that permeated the country in the '60s and '70s and still lingers today. Above all, it is an honest tale of rejection and redemption and will appeal to all who have the ambition to better themselves.

In 2017 Susie Kennaway asked her son Guy to kill her. 88 years old, with an older and infirm husband, Susie wanted to avoid sliding into infantilised catatonia. Her son immediately started taking notes and Time to Go is the result. In turns a manual for those considering the benefits of assisted dying, a portrait of a mother - son relationship, and a sympathetic description of old age, this audiobook is a route map through the moral, legal, emotional, intellectual and practical maze that is the biggest issue facing the senior generations today: leaving life on their own terms. 

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 92 years in the valley, and drawing on years of historical research, interviews and anecdotes, The Valley lets us into generations of carousing and banter as the family's attempts to build a better and fairer world for themselves meet sometimes with triumph, sometimes with bitter defeat.

Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a 'trailing spouse', Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world. Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from a tick and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort.

On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassin's bomb. Axel von Gottberg and his conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat hooks, and the executions filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of papers by von Gottberg's close friend, the legendary Oxford professor Elya Mendel, and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and finding the brutal film.

This is not a mere exercise in nostalgia; rather it is a journey through the England of the late 1940s in all its shabby wonder. It also tells the somewhat strange and often deeply painful story of John Simpson's family. Here we meet his father and his grandmother, who is still living in the small and rather depressing south London suburb that his family had built and dominated, and finally declined with.

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow.

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Walk Through Walls, written and read by Marina Abramovic. This memoir spans Marina Abramovic's five-decade career and tells a life story that is almost as exhilarating and extraordinary as her groundbreaking performance art.

When the moment for Gene to take Nancy to her desired death in Coffeeville arrives, she is unexpectedly admitted to the secure unit of a nursing home, and he has to call upon his two remaining friends to help break her out: one his godson, a disgraced weatherman in the throes of a midlife crisis, and the other an ex-army marksman officially dead for 40 years.

Tom Stewart leaves England just before the Great Depression to seek his fortune and find it running Hong Kong's best hotel. Sister Maria is a beautiful, uncompromising Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the boat out from England; their friendship spans decades and changes both their lives. Dawn Stone is an English journalist who becomes the public face of money and power and big business. And Matthew Ho is a Chinese entrepreneur facing difficulties and opportunities in the twenty-first century.

As one of Lord Sugar's closest advisers, Nick Hewer came late to wider public attention when he was recruited to work with him on The Apprentice, joining from the first series that aired in 2005 and staying with the show for 10 seasons. He quickly developed a reputation for his wry sense of humour while his astute insights into the foibles and failings of the apprentices won him a cult following. Now, in Hewer's first book, he takes us through his life from A for Apprentice (of course) to Z for Zed list. 

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 '80s. We follow William through the ups and downs of childhood, as he explores the back gardens and homes of his famous neighbours, attends dramatic rehearsals with his dad, Jonathan Miller, fails exams and is bullied at school, gets drugs from the philosopher A. J. Ayer's wife, and tries to watch the moon landing with Alan Bennett and a room full of writers. 

During his years of reporting from the world's most savage and turbulent regions, Fergal Keane has witnessed the violence of the South African townships and the terror in Rwanda, the most extreme kinds of human behaviour, the horror of genocide, and the bravery of peacekeepers faced with overwhelming odds. As one of the BBC's leading correspondents, he recounts extraordinary encounters on the front lines.