Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in Authors

Agatha Christie’s ‘most absorbing mystery’ – her own autobiography. Over the three decades since her death on 12 January 1976, many of Agatha Christie’s readers and reviewers have maintained that her most compelling book is probably still her least well-known. Her candid Autobiography, written mainly in the 1960s, modestly ignores the fact that Agatha had become the best-selling novelist in history and concentrates on her fascinating private life.

For many years an atheist, C. S. Lewis vividly describes the spiritual quest that convinced him of the truth and reality of Christianity, in his famous autobiography. "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God...perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Thus Lewis describes memorably the crisis of his conversion. Surprised by Joy reveals both that crisis and its momentous conclusion that would determine the shape of Lewis' entire life.

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....

From the great biographer of the Romantics, This Long Pursuit is a sweeping exploration of a career devoted to the art of life-writing. Thirty years ago Richard Holmes published Footsteps - a revolutionary novel that would become a best seller and influence profoundly a whole generation of younger writers. The Long Pursuit is a companion audiobook in that it ranges widely over the arts, science, poetry and inspiration to reflect upon the practice and importance of biographical writing.

Louisa first met Robert Lockhart when they were both 17. Their stop-start romance lasted decades, in which time he became a celebrated composer and she an acclaimed novelist. Always snapping at their heels was Robert’s alcoholism, a helpless, ferocious dependency that affected his personality before crippling and finally, despite five years of hard-won sobriety, killing him. There are a million love stories and a million stories of addiction. This one is truly transcendent.

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.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles. Here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.

Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life.

In Where the Past Begins, best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer.

A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.

A charming, funny, poignant collection of 23 letters from Marcel Proust to his upstairs neighbour. 102 Boulevard Haussmann, an elegant address in Paris' eighth arrondissement. Upstairs lives Madame Williams with her second husband, an American dentist, and her harp. Downstairs lives Marcel Proust, feverishly trying to write In Search of Lost Time, but all too often distracted by the incessant noise from the apartment above him - the footsteps and banging and unbearable moving of boxes and crates.

A short life of Dickens which celebrates the impact of the theatre on his life and work. Two hundred years after his death, Dickens’s work is more popular than ever, in a variety of media, most of them undreamed of during his lifetime. Over the last few decades of intensive research, Dickens the man has become much better known to us and the sheer originality of his personality blazes forth as never before.

The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense. From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth. But who was this man, who lived with over 20,000 books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard?

The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya - the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak, the writer's lover, typist and literary muse Olga was sent twice to Siberian labour camps because of her association with him, miscarrying their child on her first visit. When released, she always assumed that Boris would leave his wife for her, but he failed to do so.

Since her death, people have got Jane Austen wrong. The real Jane - revealed for the first time in this landmark biography - was a less cosy, more spiky, more modern figure than she is usually imagined to be. Far from retelling a familiar story, Byrne’s book uses new research and new techniques to give us Jane Austen for the 21st century.

A radical look at Jane Austen as you've never seen her - as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain's favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies time after time.

In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as ‘a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England. 

In one of the most famous portraits in the world, a pretty girl walks through the grounds of Kenwood House, a vision of aristocratic refinement. But the eye is drawn to the beautiful woman on her right. Pointing at her own cheek, she playfully acknowledges her remarkable position in 18th-century society. For Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the notorious Zong case - the drowning of 142 slaves by an unscrupulous shipping company.

After the death of her partner of 32 years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. The dead of prior generations loomed large and haunting. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry. In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Appignanesi uses all her evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives.

Charles Dickens remains – 200 years after his birth – arguably Britain’s most successful writer. Works such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist have amused and inspired readers in all languages since their original publication in the nineteenth century, and have been adapted countless times for the stage and screen.