Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. At once ambitious and intimate, 10...

Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last 100 years while illuminating his artistic process. Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei's father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a d...

Provides in-depth, fascinating facts about the famous scientist and mathematician - including details about his personal life, scientific discoveries, interactions with his contemporaries, thoughts on war, religion, and politics, and his impact on the world since his death. Whether you're seeking...

The years after high school are difficult to navigate – now more than ever. Young people now are more overwhelmed than ever before by the incredible array of options they are presented with, but leave high school unprepared to navigate what comes after. 18 & Lost? So Were We brings together nine ...

A brutally honest memoir that completely rethinks what it means to be a man. Continually told he was born with footballing blood, Brandon Jack has spent his life uncertain of the relationship he holds with the games he's played. Now a writer and musician, he sits in his apartment and reflects upo...

This insightful and engaging history examines the key qualities that empowered 50 of history's most charismatic and inspiring leaders in the fields of politics, religion, culture and the arts. Read on and investigate the gripping events through which these men and women won renown or infamy. From...

Women have traditionally been discouraged from participating in sporting activities. Undaunted, sportswomen of all kinds have demonstrated their determination to break records and demolish outdated notions of the weaker sex. Now, the professionalisation of women's sports such as football, rugby a...

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom , Nelson Mandela describes his house at 8115 Vilikazi Street, Soweto, as ' identical to hundreds of others it had the same standard tin roof, the same cement floor, a narrow kitchen, and a bucket toilet at the back.' Little did Mandela know when he first...

The author describes the abuse she suffered in childhood before being forcibly married to an older man at the age of twelve, her escape with her children into a life of servitude, and the dramatic changes she experienced after a kind professor taught her to read.

Not long after he was born in 1990, Dylan Alcott was found to have a tumour on his spine. The surgery to remove it was successful but left Dylan a paraplegic. The youngest of two sons growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, Dylan experienced his fair share of bullying and loneliness. By early hig...

"I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person," Robert Glück, widely acclaimed as a novelist and as a theorist of "the new narrative," recently told the Paris Review, in which a section of About Ed has appeared. About Ed is Glück's portrait of t...

Nine months after the spill that catapulted Scott Morrison to the top job, he won the 2019 election, surprising politicians and pundits throughout the nation. Yet, little was really known about the former marketing man whose hard-nosed political instincts and 'daggy dad' persona took him all the ...

The Year of Magical Thinking meets Salvation Creek in a powerful memoir of love, loss and discovery - the third act in an extraordinary life. Mary Moody's bestselling memoirs about her adventures in France, Au Revoir and Last Tango in Toulouse, inspired thousands of women. The Accidental Tour Gui...

The co-founder of the Red Hot Chili Peppers chronicles his life from his birth in Australia and upbringing on the streets of Los Angeles through his rise to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee.

There's no such thing as a perfect life, but there are perfectly hilarious moments. The best stories are often about the lowest points in our lives - the soul-crushing jobs, the bad boyfriends, the terrible holidays, the betrayals and heartbreaks. These are the stories I tell people to make them ...

With humour, honesty and self-deprecating charm, one of Australia's best known TV actresses lifts the lid on life -- both on-screen and off. "From a young age, I could lie like a chop in gravy. I loved the thrill of crafting a story. It wasn't until my twenties that I made the connection that lyi...

Going in first or seventh, wearing whites or colours, Adam Gilchrist was the most exhilarating cricketer of the modern age. This is the most complete, intimate and fascinating illustrated autobiography of ‘Gilly’, one of the most loved sportsmen of his generation. Featuring personal photographs, ...

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...

Adele has captured the hearts of millions and this intimate biography tells the astonishing journey of the Queen of Pop. The trademark authenticity of Adele's songs has been hard earned: she was raised by a single mother and has been tested by bereavements and a string of break-ups. Just when she...

Kendra James began her professional life selling a lie. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for select prep schools, her job was persuading students and families to embark on the same perilous journey, attending cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft Sc...

The iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), a storied serial seducer, was also an aspiring priest, an army officer, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy, and a con man. Leo Damrosch vibrantly brings to life Casanova and the world he inhabited.

In the many years Jim has spent talking and writing about the quirkier events and people in our history, he has come across characters whose lives have amazed, surprised and amused him. This is a book about some of those people and their bizarre, remarkable and out of the ordinary lives. And in o...

Amanda Owen loves her traditional life on her hill farm alongside her nine children and husband Clive. And, as readers of her previous bestsellers will know, every day at Ravenseat brings surprises. In Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda takes us from her family's desperate race to sav...

Raised in Alabama, she sent shockwaves through the South when she launched a public broadside against Jim Crow and donated to the NAACP. She used her fame to oppose American intervention in WWI. She spoke out against Hitler the month he took power in 1933 and embraced the anti-fascist cause durin...

Escaping from Taliban persecution in Afghanistan, Abbas Nazari's parents fled the country in 2001 to find a safe place in which to bring up their five children. Their six-month journey through Pakistan and Indonesia searching for asylum culminated in being crammed onto a small fishing boat with 4...

Nadia Owusu grew up all over the world -- from Rome and London to Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala. When her mother abandoned her when she was two years old, the rejection caused Nadia to be confused about her identity. Even after her father died when she was thirteen and she was raised by her stepmothe...

The gut-wrenching, heroic story of how one of Australia's finest surfers overcame brain injury and despair to win an Olympic medal. Australian surfer Owen Wright entered the water at Pipeline, Hawaii, on the eve of an event that, all going well, could have made him a world champion. But after bei...

It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. But who was the woman behind these mystifying, yet eternally pleasing, puzzlers? Thompson reveals the Edwardian world in which Christie grew up, explores her relationships, includi...

'Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.' Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. She went surfing in Hawaii, she lov...