Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Biographies & Memoirs

Elisabeth Luard, one of the food world's most entertaining and evocative writers, has travelled extensively throughout her life, meeting fascinating people, observing different cultures and uncovering extraordinary ingredients in unusual places. In this enchanting food memoir, she shares tales and dishes gathered from her global ramblings.

Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: Prior to immigration, he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in.

This cultural history and memoir of stage fright will resonate with anyone terrified of speaking or performing in public. Stage fright is one of the human psyche's deepest fears, challenging actors, musicians, professional athletes, and people from all walks of life. Surveys in the United States repeatedly rank public speaking as one of the top fears, affecting up to 74 percent of people.

Joanna Jepson was born with a facial deformity that led to her being mercilessly bullied through childhood and adolescence while a strict evangelical upbringing imposed further challenges. Reconstructive facial surgery and a religious meltdown left her unrecognizable and disorientated and triggered a search for identity and belonging.

When Countrywise presenter Paul Heiney's son, Nicholas, committed suicide aged 23, Paul and his wife, Times columnist Libby Purves, were rocked to the core. Nicholas had been a highly gifted, promising young man, although he had struggled to keep his head above water at times as severe depression slowly dragged him down over many years.

Publishing is a personal story of a writer's hunger to be published, the pursuit of that goal, and then the long haul - for Gail Godwin, 45 years of being a published writer and all that goes with it. A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1958, Godwin met with Knopf scouts who came to campus every spring in search of new talent.

Author, academic, and adventurer, Denise Inge grew up in a large and rambunctious family on the east coast of America. She crossed the Sahara, charmed snakes in Marrakech and cycled the Adirondack mountains, but her latest adventure is an interior one. It starts with the discovery that her house is built on a crypt full of human skeletons. Facing her fear of these strangers' bones takes her to other charnel houses in Europe and on a journey into the meaning of bones themselves.

After a fire destroyed everything they owned, the couple decided to build their own classic sailing yacht and live aboard in the wilds of Scotland - up creeks, in rocky pools, in lovely desolate places whose descriptions would make any armchair traveler ache to go there. They started their new life by felling trees for the timber they needed to build their boat, the first unusual step in their unique story. With a wonderful turn of phrase, Justin's humorous narrative will engage those who dream of living a similar lifestyle.

After Justin and Linda Tyers lost everything in a devastating house fire, they rebuilt their lives by building a classic wooden yacht from scratch - starting by felling the trees. This story was told in their first book, Phoenix from the Ashes. This sequel follows their voyage from the Scottish Islands across to Ireland, down the Irish Sea to Cornwall and thence to Brittany, meeting interesting, curious and larger-than-life characters along the way.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

Lynn Barber, by her own admission, has always suffered from a compelling sense of nosiness. An exceptionally inquisitive child she constantly questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. This talent for nosiness, coupled with her unusual lack of the very English fear of social embarrassment, is the perfect blend for a celebrity interviewer.

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.

During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country’s premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix.

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism. Working from 19th-century letters and diaries, Sims charts Henry’s course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond. Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreau - the rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brother’s choices in life.

2006, Lilian Pizzichini swaps life on dry land for a narrowboat on the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal. The Adam Bonny, moored between Newlocks and Shackleton Estates, is to be the place she can learn more about her extensive working-class London family – and the place where she will become pulled into a strange underbelly of drugs, vagrant neighbours and criminals.

On and on we dream, we wish, we love — no matter that the dreams come to an end, the wishes evolve or that love dissipates like dust in the wind. Perhaps, what matters only is that we have lived long enough to dream, hard enough to wish and indisputably enough to love. One of Maria’s early memories growing up in Dhaka is of planning to run away with her friend Nadia. Even then, Maria couldn’t quite figure out why she longed to escape.

In 1968 Mick Jagger couldn't understand why the Rolling Stones were broke. The man he asked for help was a German prince, a merchant banker. They forged an unlikely alliance which re-invented the business of rock 'n' roll. As a youthquake shook the Establishment, Prince Rupert Loewenstein thrived in both worlds, never relinquishing his elegance or decorum. Coolly impartial and dryly humorous, this is a refreshingly different take on the rock 'n' roll world from within its inner sanctum.

Uprooted from her beloved Great Western Beach, Emma Smith moves with her family from Newquay to the Devonshire village of Crapstone. But the dust has hardly settled when tragedy strikes, and Emma’s father, a DSO-decorated hero of the Great War, is so frustrated by the hardship of life as a lowly bank clerk and by his thwarted artistic ambitions that he suffers a catastrophic breakdown - from which disaster Emma's resourceful mother rallies courageously. Then, in 1939, the war again becomes a reality.

Hannah Evans has three small boys. It's a world of mud - and just occasionally blood - sweat and tears. It is also a world of indescribable joy. MOB Rule is the funny, honest and eye-opening account of Hannah's experiences as a Mother of Boys. You may be outnumbered, your face may be frazzled and your toe-nails black and bare, but know that, far from being alone, you're part of a very special club. Welcome to...the MOB!