Showing titles in Authors

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his...

Giles Wood and Mary Killen - better known as 'Giles and Mary off of Gogglebox' - joined us in the Audible Studios to discuss their debut audiobook The Diary of Two Nobodies. Believe it or not, they have a life outside that Channel 4 smash-hit programme: Giles is a brilliant artist and Mary a prolific author and journalist. They spoke to us about how they ended up on Gogglebox, what the most annoying things about each other are and the unusual term of endearment they use for each other.

Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt...

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts...

THE GLOBAL BESTSELLER Books, feminism, school bullies, Hollywood stars, bears, The Handmaid's Tale, vengeance, love, creativity, death -- welcome to Margaret Atwood's world. With her trademark wit, infamous wisdom and frankly astonishing recall, the creative icon takes us on a tour of her life...

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, the sequel to Lemons, follows the lives of Chris, Ana and their daughter, Chloë, as they get to grips with a misanthropic parrot who joins their home, Spanish school life, neighbours in love, their amazement at Chris appearing on the bestseller lists . . and their shock at discovering that their beloved valley is once more under threat of a dam.

In the early decades of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and several of their friends and colleagues at Oxford University began meeting together to share and discuss their writing. Some were novelists, poets, philosophers, and scholars, while others were simply there to revel in language, stories, and ideas.

Brought to you by Penguin. A fascinating journey into the life of H.G. Wells, from one of Britain's best biographers. How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction? From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to...

Patricia Highsmith's first novel was picked up by Hitchcock and was a world-wide success. Her second novel was meant to tell everything about her true inside and dare what no-one had dared to write before: a lesbian love-story with a happy ending. But when she eventually relented to publish it under a pseudonym, it was a decision that would shape her life more than she could have guessed at the time. Henceforth she would vent her inner life either encoded in her future novels or—unbeknownst to most—in the 18 diaries and 38 notebooks she kept throughout her life.

A “sublime” and “radically original” exploration of the Sierra Nevadas, the best mountains on Earth for hiking and camping, from New York Times bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (—Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder). Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains...

Two new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations of Roald Dahl's gripping autobiographical stories. These two compelling adaptations, based on Roald Dahl’s real-life tales of his of his boyhood and youthful overseas adventures, celebrate his remarkable life and commemorate his genius. Boy Dahl’s...

An illuminating new life of the peerless thinker, artist and author of Ways of Seeing Tom Overton got to know John Berger around 2010, after he gave his archive to the British Library: a kind of homecoming to the city of his birth, after a life lived mostly in self-imposed exile in Switzerland...

Charming, vibrant, witty and edifying, The Life of Samuel Johnson is a work of great obsession and boundless reverence. The literary critic Samuel Johnson was 54 when he first encountered Boswell; the friendship that developed spawned one of the greatest biographies in the history of world literature. The book is full of humorous anecdote and rich characterization, and paints a vivid picture of 18th-century London, peopled by prominent personalities of the time.

Bloomsbury presents Speak, Silence by Carole Angier, read by Kristin Atherton. A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands ‘Spectacular’ Observer ‘A remarkable portrait’ Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of the most...

Sportsman, womanizer, naval commander, world-traveler, spy, this suave Old Etonian creator of the Cold War's archetypal secret agent was infinitely more complicated and interesting than his major fictional character, Agent 007.

Brought to you by Penguin. An illuminating new essay collection from one of the most distinctive, exciting and acclaimed writers of her generation, Zadie Smith In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have...

A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia, the subject of the PBS documentary Letters from Baghdad, voiced by Tilda Swinton, and the major motion picture Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, and Robert Pattinson and directed by Werner Herzog...

Valentino Achak Deng is just a boy when conflict separates him from his family and forces him to leave his small Sudanese village, joining thousands of other orphans on their long, long walk to Ethiopia, where they find safety for a time. Along the way Valentino encounters enemy soldiers...

* AN OBSERVER AND DAILY MAIL "BOOKS OF 2022" PICK * Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from...

Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of...