Secondhand Literary Biography Books

"Phil doesn't like physical affection. She doesn't love you because you don't exist. She doesn't care if you have something important coming up. A busy week, a daunting appointment, a...

Brighid 'Biddy' McLaughlin, the acclaimed Irish journalist and storyteller, has endured unthinkable tragedy-the murder of her beloved sister Siobhan and the devastating drowning of her husband. Yet, in the face...

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDLonglisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fictionHow do you tell the real story of someone misremembered - an icon and idol -...

'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs . . .'So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old...

The Boy Behind the Curtain is a portrait of a life, a place and a man. In this deeply personal collection of true stories and essays Tim Winton shows how...

In this memoir of his childhood, O'Driscoll eloquently examines his troubled relationship with his father, whose bullying and mental abuse have affected him profoundly throughout his life. The task the...

'Are you going into town today?' she says, which annoys me because it's something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, 'Jesus, Mum,...

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She...

More than a memoir, My Crazy Century explores the ways in which the epoch and its dominating totalitarian ideologies impacted the lives, character, and morality of Klima's generation. Klima's story...

A powerful, personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today's Britain.'One of the most important books of the year' Guardian'When every day of your life you have been told you have...

From the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter, a memoir of survival, starting over, and love in all its complicated guises. Even after achieving her dream of selling her debut...

Over 15 years ago, The Big Issue began to ask well-known figures from the worlds of entertainment, politics, literature, business and more, one simple question:If you could write a letter...

A deluded mother who invented her past, an alcoholic father who couldn't deal with the present, a son who wondered if this could really be his family. Richard Glover's favourite...

Hailed by Virginia Woolf and many others as the all-time great letter writer, Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, is not as well known today as she should be....

Available for the first time and collected in one volume, the letters of one of America's most beloved authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder-a treasure trove that offers new and unexpected understanding...

The father fled East Prussia to escape the 1880s pogroms and, as a penniless immigrant boy, hawked newspapers on the streets of Chicago. The son, who lives on Philadelphia's Main...

In spring 2004, Susan Sontag was diagnosed with the incurable blood cancer. She had a huge appetite for experience, and a wild, extravagant desire to live. Rieff writes movingly about...

'Absolutely exquisite . . . a contemporary classic' Dave Eggers'Death in Venice with more sex, more booze, more action.' FTBBC Radio 4 Book of the WeekOstend, 1936: the Belgian seaside...

In this biography of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) the author shows him through a life of tumultuous creativity through which he strove to bring new meaning to poetry, vision and politics....

Dan Brown is already one of the bestselling authors that the world has ever seen.Due to the success of his gripping novels Digital Fortress, Deception Point, Angels and Demons, The...

When we spend so much of our time immersed in books, who's to say where reading ends and living begins? The two are impossibly and gloriously wedded, as Hill shows...

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...

The work of the poet Peter Redgrove is one of the great unexplored treasures of late twentieth century literature. His prolific output presents an intriguing variety of personae: magician, scientist,...

This biography of Evelyn Waugh traces the career of a writer who, though respected, was always controversial and undoubtedly eccentric. In particular it focuses on his difficult relationship with his...

He has written a masterful biography, rich in enlivened critical detail, which more than any other study of Waugh to date, works to redress the bias against its subject that...

Vaclav Havel is one of the most important European writers of our time. In 1979 he was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labour for his involvement...

This record of the early life of James Joyce is based on years of research into his education, religious and sexual experiences, family life and his roamings around Dublin -...

Conrad's impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as "heart of darkness" and "The horror!...

'This delicious acorn of a book is as spare, elegant and to-the-point as the literary oak it describes.'- Emma ThompsonJane Austen lived to just 41, never married, never had children,...

Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee are respectively responsible for some of the great contemporary works of fiction: Auster's The New York Trilogy or Coetzee's Disgrace are only two of...

Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed on big and small screens. But who was she? And what world did she...

*The Sunday Times bestseller* 'Funny, intimate and honest' Louis Theroux 'Moving and funny. I absolutely loved it' Claudia Winkleman 'Heartbreaking, hilarious, comforting' Marie Claire Dear 2020 - can we just...

Married at sixteen to a man twenty years her senior who spoke no English, she was taken to his ancestral home and estate where she found herself living in the...