Autobiography: literary
Showing 1–16 of 22 results
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Ammonites and leaping fish
£9.99Ammonites and leaping fish
Taking in old age, the context of one’s life and times, memory, reading and writing, and the identifying cargo of possessions – two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others – this is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.
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Boy
£7.99Boy
‘Boy’ is the story of Roald Dahl’s very own boyhood, including tales of sweet-shops and chocolate, mean old ladies and a great mouse plot – the inspiration for some of his most marvellous storybooks in the years to come.
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Cider With Rosie
£9.99Cider With Rosie
This is a vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belonging to a now distant past.
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Confessions
£10.99Confessions
Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A.N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love (sacred and profane) and his life in Grub Street as a prolific writer.
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Elizabeth Bishop
£8.99Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the ‘best-loved’ poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century. This book explores the published poems at the core of her remarkable canon of verse, along with her letters and other writings, and draws out key themes of the environment, balance, and ideas of love and loss.
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Father and son
£10.99Father and son
An extraordinary memoir about family, the past and mortality, and the final work from the peerless Jonathan Raban.
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Four stars
£16.99Four stars
The second book from acclaimed writer and journalist Joel Golby
‘There’s no one funnier than Joel Golby’ GREG JAMES
‘I love this book’ DOLLY ALDERTON
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Going solo
£7.99Going solo
‘It was truly the most breathless and in a way the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life’. This beautiful edition of ‘Going Solo’, part of ‘The Roald Dahl Classic Collection’, features official archive material from the Roald Dahl Museum and is perfect for Dahl fans old and new. So, enter a world where invention and mischief can be found on every page and where magic might be at the very tips of your fingers.
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How to say Babylon
£16.99How to say Babylon
‘Dazzling. Potent. Vital’ TARA WESTOVER
‘To read it is to believe that words can save’ MARLON JAMES
‘I adored this book ? Unforgettable, heartbreaking and heartwarming’ ELIF SHAFAK
‘A breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood’NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
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I know why the caged bird sings
£10.99I know why the caged bird sings
In this, the first volume of her autobiography, writer and poet Maya Angelou reflects on her childhood spent growing up in the American South of the 1930s. There she learned the power of the white townsfolk and suffered the trauma of rape.
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Knife
£20.00Knife
Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12th, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. ‘Knife’ is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again.
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Lifescapes
£10.99Lifescapes
‘What is life?’ asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In ‘Lifescapes’, acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls.
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My good bright wolf
£10.99My good bright wolf
From bestselling author Sarah Moss, a boundary-breaking memoir about the battleground of the female body, and about how reading and thinking can save you.
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Tell Me Good Things
£12.99Tell Me Good Things
James Runcie’s wife Marilyn Imrie died in August 2020. Their 35 year marriage had been miraculously happy – until, in the last two years of Marilyn’s life, she descended into the pain and humiliation of motor neurone disease. In the wake of her death, Runcie stumbled in the dark. How do you make sense of the decline and death of the most alive person you have ever met? And how do you go about building a life worth living in their absence? In this book, Runcie tells the story of Marilyn’s illness and death – in all its moments of tragedy, rage, farce and surrealness – while painting a vivid portrait of her life and their marriage: a partnership defined by a shared love of beauty, conviviality and storytelling. And during that first year of loss, he awakens to the strange paradox of grief: that the way to survive Marilyn’s death is to understand how very good she was at living.
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The outrun
£10.99The outrun
When Amy returns to Orkney after more than a decade away, she is drawn back to the sheep farm where she grew up. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey. Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and her father’s mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now 30, she finds herself washed up back home on Orkney, trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London.
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The prime of life
£10.99The prime of life
This is the second volume in Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography. In it she continues the story of her life from the age of 21, through the uneasy rebellious 30s, the war years and finally to the liberation of Paris in 1944.
£10.99