Showing titles in Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence

In this moving collection, Shaun Usher gathers together some of the most powerful letters about love ever written. Whether inspired by love’s first blush or the recriminations at its ending, the regrets of unrequited feelings and the joys of passions known, Letters of Note: Love is essential listening for anyone with a heart.

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Utterly fascinating’ NEW YORK TIMES ‘An act of intimate storytelling’ VOGUE ‘A profound, rich document’ NEW STATESMAN A deeply moving, newly discovered journal from one of America’s most iconic writers, Joan Didion, the author of The Year of...

Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguably the most influential, acclaimed scientist on the planet. As director of the Hayden Planetarium, and host of Cosmos and StarTalk, he has dedicated his life to exploring and explaining the mysteries of the universe. Every year, he receives thousands of letters – from students to prisoners, scientists to priests. Some seek advice, others yearn for inspiration; some are full of despair, others burst with wonder. But they are all searching for understanding, meaning and truth.

Brought to you by Penguin. An intimate history of the most important month of World War II, as experienced by the people who lived through it, completely based on their diaries, letters and memoirs. At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second...

Meet Liz: all she wants is some peace and quiet so she can read a book with her cat Henry, love of her life, by her side. But trampling all over this dream is a group of wild things also known as Liz's family. Namely Richard - a man, a husband, no serious rival to Henry; Thomas - their sensitive seven-year-old son, for whom life is a bed of pain already; and Evie - five-year-old acrobat, gangster, anarchist, daughter. And as if her family's demands weren't enough, Liz must also contend with the madness of parents, friends, bosses and at least one hovering nemesis. 

These letters, in the form of a frank and amusing diary, were written by a private in Wellington's army who fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Private Wheeler's record covers the Peninsular Campaign, keeping order during the coronation of Louis XVIII (whom he called 'an old bloated poltroon') and his later posting to Corfu.

Named by Time as America's Favourite Humorist, the uniquely perceptive and hilarious David Sedaris reads from his essays and diaries for his ninth series for Radio 4. This is the complete recording of Meet David Sedaris Series Nine, which was broadcast on Radio 4. The full listing is: Episode...

The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.

‘Sensational … One of the most explosive political diaries ever to be published … As candid, caustic and colourful as the sensational Alan Clark Diaries of the 1990s’ DAILY MAIL The Sunday Times bestseller As Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Alan Duncan was once described as...

When he turned 65, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the days' events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. One of Britain's most amusing and original writers reflects on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters - a record of shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have ever been so frank about themselves and even fewer so entertaining.

Published in their entirety, Sylvia Plath's journals provide an intimate portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the 20th century. Faithfully transcribed from the 23 journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath includes two journals that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, unsealed just before his death in 1998.

When Delia's beloved first husband, Jerry, died of cancer in 2015, after 35 years of marriage, she struggled without him. Focusing on the day-to-day, she decided to make one small move forward and cancel Jerry's dedicated landline. This spiralled into days of frustration, prompting Delia to turn to words to process her grief and bewilderment. Her New York Times piece about the woes of customer service caught the eye of Peter, who emailed to commiserate.

It's the biggest sporting competition on Earth. A four-yearly chance for our greatest footballers to realise their ultimate dream. A month-long spectacle that's watched by billions. But the inaugural World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930, was semi-professional, poorly attended and haphazardly organized—so how did it become a bonanza of multinational sponsorship, dubious ethics and shadowy characters, and the ultimate stage for football's greatest drama? Simon Kuper is one of very few people to have attended every World Cup since 1990.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Things My Son Needs to Know by Fredrik Backman. From the 13 million copy internationally bestselling author of A Man Called Ove. 'You can be whatever you want to be, but that's nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are'...

The Windsor Diaries are the never-before-seen diaries of Alathea Fitzalan Howard, who lived alongside the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at Windsor Castle during the Second World War. Alathea's home life was an unhappy one. Her parents had separated and so during the war she was sent to...

Brought to you by Penguin. Calming, thought-provoking, poetic and honest, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of writing and musing by documentary-maker, environmentalist and author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin. For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakinkept notebooks. In them, he...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'How much I learned from this brave man... The ultimate Holocaust testimony.' HEATHER MORRIS, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey With an Afterword by JOHN BOYNE, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas _______________ Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor...

A meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray, others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life.

Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer? Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a...