Secondhand Literary Biography Books

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attache to the...

Between 1948 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, ran with the...

'Screamingly funny and deliciously candid, full of wisdom and joie de vivre, this is memoir with the grip of a thriller' ERIN KELLY'A rollercoaster ride' THE TIMES'Fascinating and funny' SUNDAY...

'Dolly Alderton at her wise, warm and witty best' RedSince early 2020, Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written in...

'A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography' - Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: The Biography'Anyone who loves [Dostoevsky's] novels will be fascinated by this book' - Sue...

*THE NO.3 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* 'Raw, compelling, wise and tender' Dolly Alderton'Motherwell is razor-sharp, fearless and wonderful' Adam Kay'Utterly candid and staggeringly good, both as the history of a woman...

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...

Forty years ago Norman Jeffares published his first biography of W.B.Yeats, however since that time much new material has come to light, both written and illustrative. This volume is a...

Poetess, fallen woman and wit, Laetitia Pilkington spent her life as close to fame as she was near to ruin. Favoured by, among others, the newly celebrated Jonathan Swift in...

An essentially private person, Siegfried Sassoon's work nevertheless constitutes a chorus of self-revelation. John Stuart Roberts has written the first full length biography of this complex man. A quintessential Edwardian...

In this, the celebrated, bestselling first volume of her autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American South of the 1930s. She learns the power...

A full-scale biography of naval administrator Samuel Pepys, who was well-known for being the friend of the famous and powerful. This text, which draws on Pepys' own personal diary, covers...

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir,...

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...

'I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged...

Winner of the Crime Fest HRF Keating Award'Not merely the conclusive homage to a compulsively fascinating character, but an insightful study into the biographical process itself' Nicholas Shakespeare'Now that he...

John Steinbeck was born in a small town in northern California in 1902, and his career mirrors the highs and lows of the 20th century. A difficult relationship with his...

Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest account of Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians, and the writing of his masterpiece, The...

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...

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian....

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...

Written with a mixture of memoir and dramatic stories, this text is an exploration into what it means to be a wife, particularly a "good wife", then and now, looked...

WINNER OF THE 2020 CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONChosen as one of Barack Obama's favourite books of 2019'A triumph...

Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century. When she died in 1992 at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction...

When Stephen Ambrose became interested in American history at age 18, there was much that America had done that made him proud, but there were many things he condemned as...

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...

James Lees-Milne (1908-97) - known to friends as Jim - is remembered for his work for the National Trust, rescuing some of England's greatest architectural treasures, and for the vivid...

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenaged - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America...

"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (1933-1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was...

A Guardian Book of the YearAn Evening Standard Book of the YearAn Independent Book of the Year Netgalley's non-fiction Book of the YearA national treasure's journey to the brink and...

M. Scott Peck was hailed as 'a prophet to the Seventies' when The Road Less Travelled was published. His book spent in excess of 10 years on the New York...

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....