Biography / Memoir

A thrilling and very personal history of flight by the world-famous adventurer and businessman. As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last two hundred years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They're inventors and toymakers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers and, yes, crackpots. Some have called them irresponsible, even dangerous. But I have met many of them. I have worked with them, and funded th... read more

Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant. In a fevered, mesmerising voice, Joshua chronicles his battle against cancer with breathtaking audacity. Slaloming effortlessly between references to Ezra Pound, The Rollin... read more

As seen on ABC TV's Australian Story Sally Nielsen is a wedding planner, whose own wedding plans were turned upside down when her fiance suffered a catastrophic stroke, leaving him completely dependent on her and his family for all his needs. When others said she should put him in a home and get on with her life, Sally refused. Sam was the love of her life and she was going to stand by him regardless.
As Sally fought to bring back the man who was her world, she wrote in a series of diaries about her hopes, her anger and her ... read more

In Bligh, the story of the most notorious of all Pacific explorers is told through a new lens as a significant episode in the history of the world, not simply of the West. Award-winning anthropologist Anne Salmond recounts the triumphs and disasters of William Bligh's life and career in a riveting narrative that for the first time portrays the Pacific islanders as key players.
From 1777, Salmond charts Bligh's three Pacific voyages - with Captain James Cook in the Resolution, on board the Bounty and as commander of the Provid... read more

In Ghost Wave, Chris Dixon dives deep into the fascinating history of Cortes Bank and the motley brotherhood of argumentative, damaged, brave and quirky margin walkers who discovered and scaled the tallest mountain in the sea. Along the way, he'll show how these pioneering wave-addicts changed our very understanding of the science of surfing, while giving sea-level credence to environmentalists' fears that the weather is indeed going haywire.Ghost Wave is the result of extensive interviews not only with these surfers and those clos... read more

To the uninitiated, tango is just a dance, albeit a dance with an exotic and sensuous allure. To the true tanguero, it is something akin to a religion, attracting the lost, the lonely, and the fanatical with its formal rituals, its sense of belonging, and its intense emotions. Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and, from that moment, she was hooked. With the pulse of tango thruming through her body and the music filling in her head, she's danced through the night, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin ... read more

Brilliantly researched and wonderfully written, LOVE AND CAPITAL is a heartbreaking and dramatic saga of the family side of the man whose works would redefine the world after his death. Drawing upon years of research, acclaimed biographer Mary Gabriel brings to light the story of Karl and Jenny Marx's marriage. We follow them as they roam Europe, on the run from hostile governments amidst a secret network of would-be revolutionaries, and see Karl not only as an intellectual, but as a protective father and loving husband, a visionar... read more

On an icy morning in Paris in January 1943, 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz — the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer’s wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers.
Caroline Moorehead’s remarkable new book is the story of these women... read more

Pani Thomas lives in a small town in New Zealand. She does the same thing as other women – visits the supermarket, calls on neighbours, goes out with her husband, swims, goes bike-riding, does housework, enjoys gardening, helps in the church stall... yet Pani carries memories that will never leave her, horrific memories of her life in Cambodia during the years that Pol Pot held power there. This story speaks of deep sorrow, of incredible hardship and of shocking humanity. But it is also a story of triumph! Pani lived to tell ... read more

Prince William and Kate Middleton's fairytale romance is the greatest love story of the century, with a happy ending to come - a Royal wedding that will truly capture the hearts of the British people. Will was the boy who would one day be king; Kate was the middle class girl who had harboured a crush on him since her school days. Both were new students at the University of St Andrews in 2001, facing the same challenges that any new student faces -- away from the family nest and striving to find their niche -- albeit under the scru... read more

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

"A wonderful story of a modern woman's journey from worldly pursuits - fame, fortune, love - to initiation into an ancient, sacred traditional lineage of Hindu monks. How Jeanette O'Shea becomes Swamini Nityananda on the banks of Ganges in a city where sooner or later all freedom seekers come." Mary Lou (Meya) Miller From a life of privilege, of luxury yachts, Gucci t-shirts and Louis Vuitton handbags, newspaper journalist Jeanette O'Shea left it all for a Himalayan hermitage, and ultimately initiation into the sacred order of Vedi... read more

The impressionistic memoir of an artist who was blinded in a sudden act of violence, leading to a profound meditation on what it means to see and be seen""You live in a city like New York. You read the papers. You look at the television. But you never think it will happen to you. It happened to me one evening." "One summer night in 1978, Hugues de Montalembert returned home to his New York City apartment to find two men robbing him. In a violent struggle, one of the assailants threw paint thinner in Hugues' face. Within a few hours... read more

A gripping, triumphant memoir about the power of addiction and its effect on the brain. Marc Lewis knows addiction: that desperate ambition to get high accompanied him around the world for many years. In the 1960s, Lewis was a teenager in boarding school, experimenting with cough syrup and alcohol to assuage his depression. When he moved to Berkeley, California, the pulsing heart of the counter-cultural movement, he began using LSD and heroin. His spiralling journey of addiction eventually led him to Asia, where he sniffed nitr... read more

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. This title gives an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas' fatal decision to fight in the war. It culminates in Thomas' tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. "The Essays" was an instant be... read more

When five-year-old Miriam boards the Serpia Pinto in 1941, she is unaware that she and her mother Kate are escaping the round-ups, separations extermination camps of Nazi Germany. By the age of 12, Miriam has fled two wars and lived on three continents. Gradually understanding her own history, she begins to train as a doctor at the tender age of 16 and eventually returns to Europe, where she settles in London and marries a German artist, former assistant to Oscar Kokoschka. An elegantly written memoir of a truly fascinating life.

Michael Parkinson occupies a unique place in the public consciousness. Through his perceptive onscreen interviews over the past five decades, he has introduced millions of people to the personalities of major international figures in sport, showbiz, politics, the arts and journalism. In Parky's People, Parkinson sets down on record the highlights of his interviews which provide an intimate insight into the private lives and personal characters of great celebrities from around the world, from Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger, John Bet... read more

Kunsang thought she would never leave Tibet. One of Tibet’s youngest nuns, she grew up in a remote mountain village where, as a teenager, she entered the local nunnery. Though simple, Kunsang’s life gave her all she needed: a oneness with nature, a sense of the spiritual in all things. She married a monk, had two children and lived in peace and prayer. But not for long. There was a saying in Tibet: ‘When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the fac... read more

During his long career, Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut - which collects interviews from throughout his career - we learn much about what drove Vonnegut to write and how he viewed his work at the end. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was a grandmaster of contemporary American letters whose contribution to literature is immense. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century, with works including Slaughterhouse F... read more