Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: GENERAL. With an introduction by Xiaolu Guo A classic memoir set during the Chinese revolution of the 1940s and inspired by folklore, providing a unique insight into the life of an immigrant in America When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learn...

ROCK & POP MUSIC. Adele touches the hearts of millions of people who love her for her music and share the real and honest emotion she brings to each and every song. In a cynical age, she is a phenomenon. In Adele, bestselling biographer Sean Smith talks to those close to her as he follows her ast...

Ah, Well, Nobody's Perfect is a funny, eye-opening, nostalgic, warm and utterly compelling collection of Molly's best stories and anecdotes from across his life. They feature everyone from Prince, Madonna, David Bowie and The Beatles to the St Kilda Football Club, the Melbourne Storm and the Aust...

From a National Book Award-winning biographer, the first complete life of legendary gangster Al Capone to be produced with the cooperation of his family, who provided the author with exclusive access to personal testimony and archival documents. Born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, to poor, Itali...

This work draws on the author's vast personal life experiences by highlighting intriguing, interesting and thought-provoking characters and several close death encounters.

The great modern biography of Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire. Born to a plebeian family in 63 BC, Octavian was a young solder training abroad when he heard news of Julius Caesar's brutal assassination - and discovered that he was the dictator's sole political heir. With the opportunism and...

Jocie Loch was an extraordinary Australian. She had the inspired courage that saved many hundreds of Jews and Poles in World War II, the compassion that made her a self-trained doctor to tens of thousands of refugees, the incredible gift that took her close to death in several theatres of war, an...

Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing the same honesty, humour, and originality found in his songs. He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagi...

The remarkable true stories in The Boy Behind the Curtain reveal an intimate and rare view of Tim Winton's imagination at work and play. A chronicler of sudden turnings, brutal revelations and tender sideswipes, Tim Winton has always been in the business of trouble. In his novels chaos waits in t...

Carly Simon is a household name. She was the staple of the '70s and '80s Billboard charts and was famously married to James Taylor with whom she has two children. She has had a career that has spanned four decades, with thirteen top 40 hits, including the Number 1 song 'You're So Vain', numerous ...

It was history's most successful political partnership as sensual and fiery as it was creative and visionary. Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin wildly flamboyant and sublimely talented was the love of her life and her co-ruler. Together th...

In June 1989, Paul Du Noyer was contacted by Paul McCartney's office in London and asked to interview the star as they had met once before and enjoyed a good raport. In the years that followed, Paul Du Noyer continued to meet, interview and work for Paul McCartney on a regular basis, producing ma...

"At 21, small-town Oregon girl Holly Sue Cullen became Holly Madison, Hugh Hefner's number one girlfriend. But like Alice's journey into Wonderland, Holly's plunge down the rabbit hole took her to a world where all was not as it seemed. The fairy-tale life inside the Playboy Mansion -- which incl...

Art & Life contains extracts from diaries, letters, essays, travelogues and poetry written by Elizabeth Durack (1915..2́000) over the course of seven decades. With wit and candour, the writing reveals some of the most important influences and episodes - and the paradox - of her life. Durack rea...

LITERARY ESSAYS. AUSTRALIAN. Helen Garner is one of Australia's greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. I...

'I'd stare at my opponent from across that cage and think, What the f**k are you gonna do to me? Nothing's gonna break me, you don't know where I've been.' From fighting to survive as a kid to doing combat in the world's most brutal arena, this is the remarkable story of one of the first Australi...

Celebrity butcher Vince Garreffa's crowd-funded recipe book, focuses on his Calabrian heritage and his arrival from Italy to Western Australia as a five-year-old in the 1950s and the experiences that shaped his life. There is plenty of humour in the book as he tells some of the stories he has bec...

The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal families and trans...

Everyone from Sir Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page to Queens of the Stone Age now relishes the chance to share a stage with Dave Grohl and his legendary Foo Fighters. The question is: why? Musical depth? Not really. Major success? Well, yes. Despite no longer shifting albums in the same quantity as ...

MUSIC. Explores Harrison's work both within and without the Beatles and at the same time examining in detail his private and public passions, from Eastern spiritualism to horticulture, from comedy to film-making, from fast cars to working with UNICEF. His career renaissance in the 80s with the Tr...

George Lucas is one of the most influential filmmakers of the past fifty years. He is an icon, and his fans will be eager to read a biography as impressive as his achievements.

Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as 'Human Computers', calculating the flight paths ...

Scope and content: In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world's largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars, and corporate titans -- some famous, some unjustly forgotten -- bring feel...

As the nineteenth century unfolded, its inhabitants had to come to terms with an unparalleled range of political, economic, religious and intellectual challenges. Distances shrank, new towns sprang up, and ingenious inventions transformed the industrial landscape. It was an era dominated by new i...

Michael has an absolute passion and belief in people’s ability to change direction and become who they truly want to be and achieve success. This passion stems from his own story …Before Michael was even one year old, he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer of the central nervous system – a tu...

A true story of survival and triumph against incredible odds. When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines. Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five. Not knowing the name of his family or where he was from, h...

Traces the author's journey of self-discovery after the dissolution of her marriage, revealing how she found healing by rejecting gender standards and refusing to settle for a "good-enough" life.

Welcome to the magnificent Making It Up as I Go Along - aka the World According to Marian Keyes - a bold, brilliant book bursting with Marian's hilarious and heartfelt observations on modern life, love and much, much else besides. Such as? you are determined to ask. Well, how about her guide to b...

Love him or hate him, Trump's influence is undeniable. A man of great media savvy, entrepreneurial spirit, and political clout, Trump's career has been plagued by legal troubles and mounting controversy. Johnston tells the full story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, NY would become an...