Funny, irreverent and sometimes sad, here is the story of the early life of Roald Dahl,one of the world's best-loved authors. From the evocation of an enchanted boyhood spent in Wales and Norway to his unhappy experiences at an English public school, these sparkling memoirs are filled with wit, high spirits and more than a touch of the macabre. Paperback (B-Format)
First published in 1960, Jessica Mitford's autobiography recounts her enclosed and eccentric childhood with her sisters. It tells of her commitment to communism and of her elopement to the Spanish Civil War with Esmond Romilly.
The frank and intimate journey of self-discovery by author, critic and arts commentator Robert Dessaix. Confronting, revealing and candid, the book traces his life from adoption towards the end of World War II, to a most unusual childhood on Sydney's North Shore, to his fascination with Russia and his time spent studying in Cold War Moscow, and to his years spent criss-crossing the globe from Kashmir to Peru on various study trips. But a life that might have been exciting to others, to Robert was empty at its core. Constantly haunt... read more
The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man on the legendary island of Capri by the renowned author of THE TRANSIT OF VENUS
The history of a family through 264 objects - set against a turbulent century - from an acclaimed writer and potter. 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: Potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined... The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Ch... read more
An entertaining biography of Charles Dickens by one of our finest actors Acclaimed actor and writer Simon Callow captures the essence of Charles Dickens in a sparkling biography that explores the central importance of the theatre to the life of the greatest storyteller in the English language. From his early years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth to his reluctant retirement from 'these garish lights' just before his death, Dickens was obsessed with the stage. Not only was he a dazzling mimic who wrote, acted in and stage-manage... read more
Of Marilynne Robinson, Michael Arditti said that there is 'no contemporary novelist whose work I would rather read' However she is not only a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, but also a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In this luminous new collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her bestselling novels: the place literature has in life, the role of faith in modern living, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded ... read more
PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, "Reading My Father "is the story of a daughter coming to know her father at last. "A natural writer, fluid, and engaging" ("The Boston Globe"), Alexandra Styron grew up in Connecticut and on Martha's Vineyard, where her family's vibrant social life included writers, presidents, and entertainers. She was raised under both the halo of her father's brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. William Styron, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, was a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, "Da... read more
'A slip of a wild boy: with quicksilver eyes' is how "Virginia Woolf" characterised the young Christopher Isherwood. This final volume of his diaries, capstone of a million-word masterwork, records the golden decades of the life-long adventurer, the boy who never wanted to grow up. He greets advancing age with his familiar, unquenchable appetite for the new, and writes with disarming candour about his fear of death. The mainstays of his mature contentment, his Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavnananda, and his long-term companion, Don Bacha... read more
"A Book of Secrets" is a masterfully atmospheric treasure-trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries. Acclaimed biographer Michael Holroyd peers into dusty corners to bring a company of unknown women into the light: Alice Keppel was the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; Eve Fairfax was Lord Grimthorpe's abandoned fiancee and sometime muse of Auguste Rodin; and, the novelist Violet Trefusis was the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Taking the reader on a journey of discovery ... read more
Susan Swingler is the step-daughter of one of Australia's most revered writers - Elizabeth Jolley. Abandoned by her father Leonard at the age of four, Susan had no contact with the Jolley family until they found and reclaimed her at the age of twenty-one. Why they were kept apart is the subject of this startling new memoir. The House of Fiction tells the story of Swingler's quest to find her father. As she painstakingly traces and documents clues to a better understanding of Leonard, she inadvertently unravels an intricate fiction ... read more
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation. "Oranges" was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed ove... read more
Martin Amis son of one of the popular novelists of the post-War era, has forged a groundbreaking manner of writing that owes nothing to the style of his father, nor indeed to anyone else. This title offers the real Martin Amis, a cabinet of contrasts: tortured, eloquently aloof, kind, obsessive, loved by women, and a dedicated family man.
A literary milestone in its own right, this selection of correspondence connects us as never before to one of the greatest writers of our time. Saul Bellow was winner of the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also wrote marvelously acute, unsparing, tender, ferocious, hilarious, and wise letters throughout his long life (1915-2005). Including letters to William Faulkner, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, Martin Amis, and many others, this vast self-portrait-shows the influenc... read more
For much of the twentieth century, Australia banned more books and more serious books than most other English-speaking or Western countries, from the Kama Sutra through to Huxley's Brave New World and Joyce's Ulysses. The Censor's Library is the first comprehensive examination of Australian book censorship, based around the author's discovery of the secret 'censor's library' in the National Archive - 793 boxes of banned books, prohibited from the 1920s to the 1980s. As it has for much of Australia's history, censorship continues to... read more
In 1978, in the final, bloodiest phase of Rhodesia's struggle to become Zimbabwe, eleven-year-old Lauren St John moves with her family to a wild, beautiful farm on the banks of a slow-flowing river. The house was the scene of a horrific guerrilla attack, and settling there changes Lauren's life irrevocably. RAINBOW'S END captures the overwhelming beauty and extraordinary danger of life in the African bush. Lauren's childhood reads like a girl's own adventure story as, at the height of the war, she rides through the wilderness on he... read more
"How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell." That would be in the autumn of 1972, when a very young and green James Wolcott arrived from Maryland, full of literary dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him. Landing at a time of accelerating municipal squalor and, paradoxically, gathering cultural energy in all spheres as "Downtown" became a category of art and life unto itself, he embarked upon his sentimental education, sev... read more
Hans Fallada was a drug addict, womanizer, alcoholic, jailbird and thief. Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including "Alone in Berlin", portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a powerful humanity. This acclaimed biography, newly revised and completely updated, tells the remarkable story of Hans Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen. Jenny Williams chronicles his turbulent life as a writer, husband and father, shadowed by mental torment and long periods ... read more
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life', Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and avidly read by generations of readers. Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist t... read more
Geoff Dyer, described by the Daily Telegraph as 'possibly the best living writer in Britain', takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life. Magnificently unpredictable and hilarious (and surely one of the most unusual books ever written about cinema), Zona takes the reader on an enthralling, thought-provoking journey. The ostensible subject of Zona is the film Stalker, by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. As Dyer immerses us in the movie, it becomes apparent that Stalker... read more
