Secondhand Literary Biography Books

'A brave process of healing and self reconstruction' Observer'Simply one of the best writers working today. Here's to family, to glamour, and to love' Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic...

'Heart-wrenching, heart-warming and heartfelt - Mother Ship is a beautifully crafted, warts-and-all love letter to our wonderful NHS' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt'Our greatest gift to...

'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...

An exuberant biography of the life of the iconic photographer and naturalist Peter Beard, whose life and work captured the cultural imagination Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist,...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted...

It's not the dream that matters, it's the telling of the dream - the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mindThis is a dreamlike portrait of...

This captivating novel evolves like a detective story, as a family member airbrushed out of history sets out to uncover the well-kept secrets of the three Boleyn women: Why was...

This is an absorbing portrait of a literary genius, whose muse was the desire for wealth and fortune, and whose misplaced entrepreneurial enthusiasms more then once endandgered the very money...

In Let Me Make Myself Plain Catherine Cookson may be said to break new ground as an author. The title echoes her first surprised reaction to a television producer's suggestion...

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,...

The life and times of one of the most important writers of our time, from her peripatetic childhood in the Canadian far north, through the writing of The Handmaid's Tale,...

W.H. Auden was the greatest English poet of the twentieth century. It is nearly fifteen years since his last biography, and the publication and discovery of a mass of new...

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...

Autobiography of Mark Twain READER'S EDITION Now Available! Half the Size, All the Twain! ISBN 978052027255 "I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And...

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 -...

America's greatest living crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir-as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels-about his obsessive search for "atonement in women."The year...

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!...

Reading George Eliot's work was described by one Victorian critic as 'the feeling of entering the confessional in which she sees and hears all the secrets of human psychology--that roar...

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...

In the spring of 1895 the life of Constance Wilde changed irrevocably. Up until the conviction of her husband, Oscar, for homosexual crimes, she had held a privileged position in...

'Extraordinary . . . a profound and beautiful book . . . a moving meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy, wonder and the miracle...

Intimacies with Marlowe, entanglements in London with the mysterious dark lady, the probable fathering of an illegitimate son -- the mysteries of Shakespeare's personal life have proven tantalisingly obscure. In...

*A NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR**WINNER OF THE TONY LOTHIAN PRIZE*'Interesting women have secrets. They also ought to have sisters.'From the beginning of their lives, the...

At 35, despite his determination to be different from his parents, Jonathan Self found his life echoing theirs: he was a twice-divorced absent father with three young children, one in...

From a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson's life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fiction "This magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals...

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria's favourite poet, commanded a wider readership than any other of his time. His ascendancy was neither the triumph of pure genius nor an accident of...