Secondhand Biographies

With great humour and vitality, Robert Roberts evokes his Edwardian childhood in the vivid portrait of a vanished community. Breathing the smoke from the factory chimneys, the children of Salford...

Richard Madeley is fascinated by the speed of change in family life and how being a father has changed since the time of his father and grandfather. InFathers & Sons,...

This is a funny yet poignant evocation of an Italian family in Canada, recounted through the tales Joe Fiorito's father would tell and retell at the kitchen table after a...

'A manifesto for recalibrating' DAILY MAIL'I can't think of many books where the reader feels so passionately on the side of the narrator' Guardian'Full of kindness, A Still Life will...

When Saigon fell to the Viet Cong in April, 1975, Kien Nguyen was there. He watched the last US Army helicopter leave without him, without his brother, his mother or...

In 2008 the art critic Tom Lubbock was diagnosed with a brain tumour. The tumour was located in the area controlling speech and language, and would eventually rob him of...

WINNER OF THE TADEUSZ BRADECKI PRIZE A SERVICE95 BOOKCLUB HYPE READ + HARPERS BAZAAR BEST BOOK OF AUTUMN 2025'Extraordinary' ROXANE GAY'Astonishing' FRANCIS SPUFFORD'A powerful, beautiful, wrenching masterpiece' REBECCA SOLNIT'The book...

Christopher Bigsby and Arthur Miller shared a regular correspondence which stretched over nearly three decades of friendship. Their interaction and collaboration included a unique series of recorded interviews which now...

'An unflinching examination of contemporary culture's quest for the quick fix to emotional pain' LAURA DELANOWhy do so many of us need drugs to make it through the day? What...

Kate Adie's story is an unusual one. Raised in post-war Sunderland, where life was 'a sunny experience, full of meat-paste sandwiches and Sunday school', she has reported memorably and courageously...

Who is The Stig? Where did he come from? Why does he never speak? To answer these questions, award-winning biographer Simon du Beaumarche spent a year chasing The Stig and...

Suspense, excess, danger and exuberant fun come together in Chuck Barris's unlikely autobiography - the tale of a wildly flamboyant 1970s television producer of innovative game shows such as The...

While Felicia Pearson is a brilliant actor in a truly chilling role, what's most remarkable about 'Snoop' is what she has overcome in real life. Born a three-pound, cross-eyed crack...

Damian longs for home, but one man stands in his way ... Damian is just seven when he is taken in by foster carer Cathy Glass. His mother, Rachel, loves...

"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an...

Paul Burrell pays tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales in this celebration of her life. From the inside, he takes the reader into Kensington Palace and the extraordinary life she...

Bestselling author Jean Sasson tells the dramatic true story of a young woman caught up in Saddam Hussein's genocide of the Kurdish people of Iraq.One morning Joanna, a young bride...

A biography of an infamous swindler and moral Houdini, Arthur Samuels "Duke" Wolff. Wolff's life of deception is documented by perhaps the only person he could not con - his...

John Wesley led the Second English Reformation. His Methodist "Connexion" was divided from the Church of England, not by dogma and doctrine but by the new relationship which it created...

Our world as it once was In August 2014, Farida was, like any ordinary teenager, enjoying the last days of summer before her final year at school. However, her peaceful...

'Like Salvador Dali's confessions, only far funnier and more self-deprecating, Dandy in the Underworld entertains as much as it revolts, is as tender as it is shocking, and as genuine...

In 1993 Linda Grant's mother, Rose, was diagnosed with dementia. With Rose's memory deteriorating, a whole world was in the process of being lost. In this work she looks at...

Dan Davin here sets down his recollections of seven writers who were all close friends: Dylan Thomas, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Louis MacNeice, Joyce Cary, W. R. Rodgers, Enid Starkie, and Itzik...

When Alexandra "Bo" Fuller was in Zambia a few years ago visiting her parents, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known as being a "tough...