Memoirs
Showing 1–16 of 100 results
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
£25.001000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei – one of the world’s most famous artists and activists – tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation’s most celebrated poet.
£25.00 -
A Dutiful Boy
£8.99A Dutiful Boy
Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of east London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different but in a home where being gay was inconceivable he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor, brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim. However Mohsin had incredible drive and he used education as a way out of his home life and to throw himself into a new kind of life. He became the first person from his school to go to Oxford University and there he found the freedom to come out to his friends. But Oxford was a whole different world with its own huge challenges and Mohsin found himself increasingly conflicted.
£8.99 -
A Ghost In The Throat
£8.99A Ghost In The Throat
In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story.
£8.99 -
A Girl’s Story
£10.99A Girl’s Story
In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, her first away from home, and recounts the first night she spent with a man.
£10.99 -
A Waiter in Paris
£16.99A Waiter in Paris
A waiter’s job is to deceive you. They want you to believe in a luxurious calm because on the other side of that door is hell. Edward Chisholm’s spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter takes you below the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world and right into its glorious underbelly. He inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; scraping by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, often under sadistic managers, with a wage so low you’re fighting your colleagues for tips. Colleagues – including thieves, narcissists, ex-Legionnaires, paperless immigrants, wannabe actors and drug dealers – who are the closest thing to family that you’ve got. It’s physically demanding, frequently humiliating and incredibly competitive. But it doesn’t matter because you’re in Paris, the centre of the universe, and there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.
£16.99 -
Alice’s Book
£20.00Alice’s Book
What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn? The story of a Jewish chef whose bestselling cookbook was expropriated under the Nazi regime. Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis. Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else’s name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach – Alice’s granddaughter – sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America.
£20.00 -
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
£9.99An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is an inspirational memoir of space exploration and hard-won wisdom, from an astronaut who has spent a lifetime making the impossible a reality.
£9.99 -
And a Dog Called Fig
£14.99And a Dog Called Fig
And A Dog called Fig is a study of how animals help writers deal with the challenges of the creative process, insterspersing the author’s own experience with stories of other famous writers and their dogs
£14.99 -
Autumn
£10.99Autumn
This title begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark.
£10.99 -
Back in the Day
£20.00Back in the Day
Melvyn Bragg’s first ever memoir – an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from his early childhood during the war to the moment he had to decide between staying on or spreading his wings. This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study – though that didn’t stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love. It is equally the tale of the people and place that formed him.
£20.00 -
Birdgirl
£16.99Birdgirl
Meet Mya-Rose – otherwise known as ‘Birdgirl’. To date she has seen over five thousand different types of bird: half the world’s species. Every single bird a treasure. She has visited every continent to pursue her passion, seeing first-hand the inequality and reckless destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And the simple, mindful act of looking for birds has made her ever-more determined to campaign for all our survival. This is her story; a journey defined by her love for these extraordinary creatures.
£16.99 -
Breadsong
£20.00Breadsong
A cookbook with bags of heart about the redemptive power of baking ‘Breadsong’ tells the story of Kitty Tait who was a chatty, bouncy and full-of-life 14 year old until she was overwhelmed by an ever-thickening cloud of depression and anxiety. Her life changed overnight and she withdrew from the world. Her desperate family tried everything to help her but she slipped further away from them. One day her dad Alex, a teacher, baked a loaf of bread with her and that small moment changed everything. One loaf quickly escalated into an obsession and Kitty started to find her way out of the terrible place she was in. ‘Breadsong’ is a cookbook with Kitty’s favourite recipes including Happy Bread filled with salted caramel and Comfort Bread made with Marmite, sticky buns galore with flavours such as Cardamom and Orange, and the ultimate Tahini and Dark Chocolate Cookies.
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Break A Leg
£16.99Break A Leg
This is the story of amateur dramatics in Britain. In a triumphant mix of memoir, social history, interviews and manifesto, Jenny Landreth opens our eyes to am-dram and shows us a vibrant world that is a crucial part of our culture. Starting with the Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages, we move, via Shakespeare, to the Georgian aristocrats who built opulent private theatres in their own homes, then to the halcyon days of radical lefties taking political theatre to the streets, and on to the present day. Along the way, we visit several thriving theatres – across the country, and beyond our shores – and meet a cast of characters who tell us about the joy amateur theatre brings them.
£16.99 -
Break a Leg
£9.99Break a Leg
This is the story of amateur dramatics in Britain. In a triumphant mix of memoir, social history, interviews and manifesto, Jenny Landreth opens our eyes to am-dram and shows us a vibrant world that is a crucial part of our culture. Starting with the Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages, we move, via Shakespeare, to the Georgian aristocrats who built opulent private theatres in their own homes, then to the halcyon days of radical lefties taking political theatre to the streets, and on to the present day. Along the way, we visit several thriving theatres – across the country, and beyond our shores – and meet a cast of characters who tell us about the joy amateur theatre brings them.
£9.99 -
Broken Wafers
£12.99Broken Wafers
British author Martin Knight was born at the end of the 1950s on the outskirts of semi-rural South London. ‘Broken Wafers’ tells the story of his life on a council estate as he navigates the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. Knight charts a period when Britain emerged from post-war austerity into a more vibrant, hopeful, comfortable and colourful age. He recalls everyday life in his multi-racial family and the thrill of the gradual arrival of such innovations as the refrigerator, the telephone, the colour television and hormones. ‘Broken Wafers’ is an unashamed and forensic wallow in nostalgia.
£12.99 -
Burn
£16.99Burn
On the outside, Ben Short looks like he has it all – a successful career in advertising, a flat in a trendy area of London, an expensive motorbike. But inside, he’s a wreck. Years of suffering with an anxiety disorder and depression have broken him, and his ‘creative’ career has become sterile and suffocating. A drastic change is needed. Like his neighbour’s rescue hawk, he acts on instinct and escapes the city. For a time, he takes on odd jobs – gardening, hedge-laying and labouring in the Cambridgeshire Fens and in the Devon countryside, trying to find somewhere he belongs. That is until he feels the call of the furnace: a glowing charcoal kiln in the West Dorset woods, where he can re-forge his thoughts, put the years of suffering behind him and start afresh by immersing himself in the ancient ways of woods and fire.
£16.99