Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Biographies & Memoirs

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

A survive-and-thrive memoir from blogger and social media influencer Laura Jane Williams. When the man Laura Jane Williams thought she'd wed dumped her and married her friend, she was devastated. Empty. Drinking too much, sleeping around, and moving from place to place in a refusal to put down roots, she tried to fill the void - the gaping hole - that heartbreak had left behind. She wanted control. To grab life by the balls. To live boldly. But she rapidly learned it wasn't that simple.

When Alan left school at fifteen little was expected of him. An 'O' level in art is not the most obvious passport to success, but in the ancient greenhouses of the local nursery Mrs T's little lad found his spiritual home, learning his trade and the strange ways of human nature. But

2024 marks both the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Churchill himself. This book brings together General Lord Dannatt, one of Britain's most respected contemporary military leaders, and former head of the British Army, with Allen Packwood, one of the world's foremost Churchill experts, the archivist responsible for the holdings at the landmark Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. Together they take us through the decision-making for the planning and execution of D-Day.

Behind the glitz and glamour, Wayne has always felt like an outsider. Sleep reveals the difficulties for a working-class, gay man in handling the prejudices of his generation and living through the AIDS epidemic. Wayne was also the shortest principal dancer in the Royal Ballet - he had to spin twice as fast and jump twice as high to succeed. In this moving - but also laugh-out-loud and gossip filled - memoir, Wayne Sleep shows how he danced his way to success, fulfilment and love, and how he overcame obstacles and prejudice along the way.

Johnny is 19. He likes music, art and going to the beach. He is also autistic - in his case that means he will probably never get a job, never have a girlfriend, never leave home. And over the last 19 years this is what his father, TV producer and comedy writer Henry Normal and his wife Angela have been trying to come to terms with. This is a book for anyone whose life has been touched by autism - it's about the hope, the despair, and the messy, honest sometimes comical day-to-day world of autism, as well as a wonderful, warm book about the unconditional, unconventional love between a father, a mother and a son.

In Ruth Davidson's Yes She Can we meet world-beating women from fields as diverse as science, politics, the military, business and sport. They share their own journeys to the top - whether that's becoming Prime Minister, winning an Olympic gold medal or teaching male special forces how to fight. They share the bad times, too, the challenges faced and difficulties to hurdle, explaining what they've learned along the way. We also see the author's own path as she tracks the societal shifts that have seen women advance - and discuss how far we've still got to go.

During a summer heatwave, teenagers are going missing. Junior officer Alex Finn takes the case and fears that the disappearances are linked. In a race against the clock to find and rescue the children alive, Finn and his team are only partially successful. Two of the children are saved, but they were too late for Oliver. And the killer got away. DI Alex Finn is still tormented by the cases of his youth - none more than so than the 2009 kidnappings. And it seems someone else has not forgotten either.

Wes Streeting might have ended up in prison rather than in parliament. His maternal grandfather Bill, an unsuccessful armed robber, spent time behind bars, as did his grandmother, who was also a political campaigner. Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him. In One Boy, Two Bills & A Fry Up he brings to life the poverty, humiliation and incredible struggle for them choosing whether to feed the meter and heat the flat, put carpet on the floor, or food on the table.

Jamie Roberts is your quintessential hard man: a six-foot-four, 17-stone slab of rippling muscle, conditioned to run hard into other huge men in an arena where physical dominance is the prime currency. Yet away from rugby, he's a mild-mannered and thoughtful man - a qualified doctor with a thirst for knowledge and a curiosity about the world around him. It's an intriguing contradiction.

One woman's vicarious sexual and emotional adventure told in a no-holds-barred, unapologetic, and compelling way. The project was simple: Robin Rinaldi, a successful magazine journalist, would move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was forty-four, or that she was married to a man she'd been in love with for 18 years.

Black Rainbow is the powerful first-person story of one woman's struggle with depression and how she managed to recover from it through the power of poetry. In 1997, Oxford graduate, working mother, and Times journalist Rachel Kelly went from feeling mildly anxious to being completely unable to function within the space of just three days.

Dirty Gold is a searing exposé on the booming gold mining industry and destruction on the land and people of Latin America. It looks closely at a small US firm in Miami that helped transform the city into the nation's number one importer of gold into the United States. The book follows the meteoric rise and fall of a group of drug traders known as 'the three amigos' who laundered narco money through gold illegally brought into the US and raked in millions before they were caught.

We in the West appear to be at a year zero, with the seeming end of the relative peace and prosperity we took for granted. The pandemic, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, growing tension with China, a rolling back of globalisation, Brexit, the return of inflation and painful interest rates - all these have shattered the illusions of the world as we knew it. For years our politicians have said they were going for growth and would ensure that those with least would benefit disproportionately from the proceeds of that growth. They've failed.

George the Poet knows better than anybody the importance of understanding your surroundings. Born to Ugandan parents on the St Raphael's Estate in Neasden, north-west London, George Mpanga has always been aware of his community. It was both his teacher and his inspiration - giving him the language, the experiences, and the skills to become the person he is today. In Track Record, George unveils the power dynamics that shape our world, shedding light on the forces that restrict Black creativity and put limits on Black excellence.

Samuel Kasumu was the most senior black advisor in Boris Johnson's government, until he left in April 2021. Throughout his time in Whitehall, Samuel became increasingly aware that he was an outsider - that his own experiences, assumptions and language were so different to many of those he found himself surrounded by in Downing Street.

In 2021, Emma Raducanu shocked and charmed the tennis world as she raced to the US Open title with a smile on her face. But how did a little-known 18-year-old from Kent become the first ever qualifier to win a Major? Now Mike Dickson, who as tennis correspondent of the Daily Mail was one of the few journalists present in New York to see her lift the trophy, reveals what it took to become Britain's first woman Grand Slam champion since Virginia Wade in 1977.

In Tree Thieves, Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels and Indigenous communities along the way.

Prince Alexander Sergeevich Obolensky made his name on a cold January day at Twickenham in 1936, his achievements captured for posterity by the newsreels of the time. On his England debut, having already scored one exhilarating try, the striking blond winger collected a pass on the right and, path blocked, veered left at such a pace that a line of opponents were left grasping at thin air. It was a historic try, unrivalled in skill and speed - and it inspired England's first ever victory over the All Blacks.

The Great Storm of 1987 is etched firmly into the national memory. Everyone who was there that night remembers how hurricane-force winds struck Southern Britain without warning, claiming 18 lives, uprooting more than 15 million trees and reshaping the landscape for future generations. Thirty years on, the discovery of an old photograph inspires the author to make a journey into that landscape.