Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

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...

"When Richard Gosling's young daughter faced emergency surgery, a colleague carelessly asked what would happen if she died. In that moment, Richard was forced to picture his own daughter's funeral, and the people who are there to help families after the worst has happened. Aged 40, Richard left h...

"A private investigator with a haunting past, Bill Edgar's life was never destined to be ordinary. Rising to international fame as the 'Coffin Confessor' - the man who crashes funerals on behalf of the deceased, giving voice to their last wishes - Bill dismantled many of the assumptions we hold a...

The gut-wrenching, heroic story of how one of Australia's finest surfers overcame brain injury and despair to win an Olympic medal.

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...