Literary Biography

David Sedaris's remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this new...

TWO LIVES tells the remarkable story of Seth's great uncle and aunt. His great uncle Shanti left India for medical school in Berlin in the 1930s and lodged with a...

Bruce Chatwin's death in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia.Chatwin himself was...

'For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.'John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an...

THE EDGE OF LOVE is a beautiful, heart-rending account of the point in Dylan Thomas's life that he was torn between two women. His letters to the many women in...

Written in an even more vivid and direct style than her celebrated memoirs, Diana Athill's letters to the American poet Edward Field reveal a sharply intelligent woman with a brilliant...

Celebrated novelist Daphne Du Maurier and her sisters, eclipsed by her fame, are revealed in all their surprising complexity in this riveting new biography. The middle sister in a famous...

A brilliant memoir from the celebrated Chilean novelist on friends, family and life in California, her adopted home. Isabel Allende has sold more than 50 million copies of her books...

A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England's greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of...

In this wonderful addition to the Eminent Lives series, widely acclaimed biographer Brenda Maddox sheds a fascinating new light on the life of legendary novelist George Eliot. On 22 November...

The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my...

In this much anticipated addition to the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet...

In December 1991, Allende's daughter Paula, aged 28 fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. This book started as a letter to Paula written during the hours spent at...

A comprehensive collection of letters spanning the adult life (1914-1973) of one of the world's most famous storytellers. 'It is not possible even at great length to "pot" The Lord...

Shot through with Stoppard's voice, and illuminating all his plays, Lee's gripping narrative draws on unprecedented access to archive material, interviews and long conversations with Stoppard himself. She traces the...

"In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven... two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran...

I am no good at letters. John McGahern, 1963John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of...