Showing titles in Authors

How do you begin your life again when you've lost everything you've worked for and your dreams have been shattered? That was the question beloved Australian author Belinda Alexandra faced one freezing winter night when she ran from her home in terror, clutching only her wallet, her phone and her latest manuscript on a USB stick. To pull herself up from rock bottom, Belinda drew strength from the real life women who had inspired her bestselling historical fiction.

Though many Australians know lines from Dorothea Mackellar’s classic poem ‘My Country’ by heart, very little has been written about the poet’s extraordinary life. From her childhood and youth in Sydney’s Point Piper, to discovering her love for the Australian landscape on the family farm in Gunnedah, Dorothea engaged with the intellectual elite of Sydney and abroad as she embarked on a decades-long literary career that saw her linked to some of the leading lights of her day.

In Fires Which Burned Brightly, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists.

His books have sold millions and include classics like Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Yet C. S. Lewis was not always a literary giant of Christian faith. How did he evolve from staunch atheism to become one of the most beloved and renowned Christian authors of our time?

Discover the extraordinary life of America's greatest storyteller in this captivating biography of Mark Twain. From his Mississippi riverboat days to becoming the voice of a nation, explore how Samuel Clemens transformed into the legendary author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Uncover the wit, wisdom, and contradictions of the man who defined American humor while grappling with personal tragedy, financial ruin, and the social upheavals of the Gilded Age. A compelling portrait of the complex genius behind the white suit and cigar.

The original authorised biography, and the only one written by an author who actually met J. R. R. Tolkien. In the 25 years since Tolkien’s death in September 1973, millions have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. Born in Bloemfontein in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood, brought up in near poverty and almost thwarted in adolescent romance....

In this incredible second book in a series of autobiographies, the poet, still in her teens, gives birth to a son, tries to keep a job, falls in love, dances, falls out of love, chases after her kidnapped baby, and goes to work in a house of prostitution thinking she is helping the man she loves.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, Jenn Ashworth emerged from lockdown with a compulsive need to walk—and to walk away. Armed with little more than the knowledge imparted by a two-day orienteering course and a set of maps, she embarked on the most epic of English walks: Wainwright's Coast to Coast. Guided not just by Wainwright's writing but also by daily letters from her friend Clive—facing an epic journey of his own—Jenn's pilgrimage soon becomes more than just walking: a chance to reconnect and excavate, to re-engage with the act of caring for others and for oneself.

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.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has captured the imaginations of millions. In C. S. Lewis - A Life, Dr. Alister McGrath recounts the unlikely path of this Oxford don, who spent his days teaching English literature to the brightest students in the world and his spare time writing.

Robert Dessaix’s Chameleon is about everything that matters, a book of memories that flow so freely they seem to happen as we read. Cartwheeling from story to story, Dessaix describes an identity in flux: his beginnings as an adopted child named Thomas Robert Jones, his youthful interest in religious thinking, his obsession with all things Russian, his marriage to Lisa and divorce, his discovery of travel.

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. Read by the actor Alex Jennings.

When 81-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enrol in the undergraduate seminar on The Odyssey that his son Daniel teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his 'one last chance' to learn about the great literature he'd neglected in his youth - and, even more, a final opportunity to understand his son.

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.

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies—of strength, style, and creativity—shaped Woolf’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf’s French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L’Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer.

If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.

In this dazzling memoir, the acclaimed writer behind Babylon 5, Sense8, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, and Marvel’s Thor reveals how the power of creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and a dysfunctional family haunted by madness, murder, and a terrible secret.

Starting with the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in 1902, Beatrix Potter went on to become one of the world’s most successful children’s authors. This biographical audiobook takes the reader through the whole of her life, from her Victorian childhood in London to her final years farming in the Lake District. Regarded as a standard work on Beatrix Potter’s life, this work has been updated regularly to include fresh material that has come to light as interest in Beatrix Potter continues to grow.

Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed fictional character of all time, and he has been reimagined by actors, playwrights and directors over centuries - but who is the creator behind the detective?