Showing titles in Authors

Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the most intense romances of Charles Dickens’ life and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections and serve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely. Charles Dickens has no rival as the most fertile creative imagination since William Shakespeare, and no one influenced his imagination more powerfully than these three women, his muses and teachers in the school of love.

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.

Maya Angelou's six volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In this first...

Long days of boredom in confinement, the general inefficiency of prison bureaucracy and a critically over-stretched prison service. The tediousness of prison life kicks in for prisoner FF8282, also known as author Jeffrey Archer, in the second volume of his best-selling series The Prison Diaries. Still his fellow inmates show inspiring spirit and courage, amid an otherwise gloomy prison landscape, revealing that even in the darkest hours light can always be found.

Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many people – and he had many sides. But no part of his identity was more important to him than that of a writer; it was one of the central ways he saw himself. Revealing Anthony Bourdain's observant, curious and hungry mind, The Anthony Bourdain Reader is a collection of Bourdain's best writing and touches on his many pursuits and passions, from restaurant life to family life to the 'low life', from TV to travel through places like Vietnam, Buenos Aires, Paris and Shanghai.

'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs . . .' So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding-school headmaster. For most of his life, Roald...

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.

A ‘Book of the Year’ for The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Daily Express, The Spectator, The Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and the I 'I must confess my devotion immediately: I read every word this man writes. I wait for every new novel and the wait has been worth it...

Sir Terry Pratchett was a much-loved writer who gained international fame for his Discworld fantasy series. In this recording we hear - in his own words - about science-fantasy and comedy writing. He discusses his fans and followers, how he enjoys writing and the importance of the Discworld...

When Jan Morris joined the 1953 Everest expedition and was first to get news of the ascent back to London, she became the most famous journalist in the world. So began a glittering career covering the Eichmann trial, interviewing Che Guevara and scooping the story of Suez collusion. Morris transitioned in the early seventies and documented the experience in Conundrum. She was a pioneer and her books, including Venice and the Pax Britannica trilogy, have inspired readers across the globe.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a...

Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead. So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves. Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner, no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I'm getting ahead of myself. During the course of my life, I've barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau.

Brought to you by Penguin. The greatest writer of our time tells her own story. Immerse yourself in the creative universe of Margaret Atwood for a riot of life, art and everything in between Raised by scientifically minded parents, Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern...

Brought to you by Penguin. A love letter to all those who come alive when they pull a new treasure off the shelf, stay up late reading just one more page and pack their suitcases with clothes wedged between books instead of the other way around. From well-worn literary classics to steamy...

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life.

Brought to you by Penguin. An enhanced audio edition containing original audio interviews with the author, Laurie Lee. A moving, never-before-published portrait of the landscape that shaped the life of Laurie Lee, the beloved author of Cider With Rosie 'Before I left the valley I thought...

'For myself/ I knew as soon as I could read and write/ That I must be a poet. Even today,/ When all the way from Cambridge comes a wind/ To blow the lamps out every time they're lit/ I know that I must light mine up again.' From his earliest boyhood memories of Highgate and Archibald, his old...

Although it is said that he owed his poetic vision to his Sephardic Jewish roots, Siegfried Sassoon was, in many ways, a conventionally Edwardian squire. A gifted poet, who refused to become part of any literary movement, his poetry shattered the ideals of wartime heroism, and his friendships ranged from Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves to the Sitwells, Rupert Brooke and T.E. Lawrence. In this acclaimed biography, John Stuart Roberts skillfully chronicles Sassoon's life and work, including his homosexuality, his marriage and his quest for a personal religious faith.