Literary Figures

'An intimate and insightful portrait of the peerless observer of rural life' RICHARD MABEY'Moving, candid, vivid, it is all that we could hope for in a memoir of this unique and treasured writer' ROWAN WILLIAMS'As a boy I dreamed of scholars and saints...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024****WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION**A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean.'Brilliant'...

It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death,...

Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time. 'The re-appearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift... Cahun's writing is stylish,...

Paul Foot was one of the most influential investigative reporters of his generation. For nearly fifty years, he was the scourge of corrupt politicians and dodgy businessmen, a champion of the underdog.In this, the first biography of Paul Foot, journalist...

'The book I've been waiting for my entire life' DOLLY ALDERTONIs it possible that life without romantic love isn't so bad?When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional...

A TIME magazine Must-Read Book of the Year Ever wonder what your therapist is thinking? Now you can find out, as therapist and New York Times bestselling author Lori Gottlieb takes us behind the scenes of her practice - where her patients are looking...

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and...

David Riggs evokes the atmosphere and texture of Marlowe's life, from the stench and poverty of a childhood spent near Canterbury's abattoirs to the fanatical pursuit of classical learning at school. Marlowe won a place at Cambridge University, where...

'Beautiful, deep, transfixing . . . it will burn a home in your heart' LEMN SISSAY'Essential reading, life-changing' SAMANTHA MORTON'An astonishing piece of work' NIALL GRIFFITHSThe government told a story about me before I was born.Jenni Fagan was...

'Alcohol flows across families like water over a landscape. Sometimes it moves in torrents, sometimes in floods, sometimes in trickles. It always shapes the ground it covers in unmistakable ways.' In the Blood is a...

**A Sunday Times top ten bestseller****Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2023****Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction 2023****Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize 2023**'Masterly.'...

'Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional'A compelling mediation on the power of running and a fascinating insight into the life of this internationally bestselling writer. A perfect reading companion for runners.In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'This is my kind of history: carefully researched but so vivid that you are convinced Lucy Worsley was actually there at the party - or the parsonage.' Antonia Fraser'A refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and...

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King Part memoir, part masterclass by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781914198984Author Vivian GornickFormat PaperbackPage Count 184Imprint Daunt BooksPublisher Daunt Books

THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Gripping' NEW YORK TIMES'At last, the Ripper's victims get a voice... An eloquent, stirring challenge to reject the prevailing Ripper myth' MAIL ON SUNDAY____________Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine...

The comprehensive collection of letters spanning the adult life of one of the world's greatest storytellers, now revised and expanded to include more than 150 previously unseen letters, with revealing new insights into The Hobbit, The Lord...

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writerIn The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing...

'Extraordinarily powerful' Emma Thompson There are a million love stories, and a million stories of addiction. This one is transcendent. Louisa Young met Robert Lockhart when they were both 17. Their...

'So bold and so vulnerable at the same time. I don't know how she did it' - Phoebe Waller-BridgeNow with an introduction from Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love, revealing how a new generation of women can take inspiration from Nora's...

The bestselling book that inspired the cult classic film, Girl, Interrupted, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie."Not since Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim" TIME...

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society.'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you...

Take a trip down memory lane and read about the life of Britain's most beloved vet, who charmed us all with his bestselling tales of veterinary life in Yorkshire.'A wonderful, glorious insight into the life of the man behind the books' 5***** Reader...

Agatha Christie's Complete Secret Notebooks brings together for the first time Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making, two volumes that explore the fascinating contents of her 73 notebooks. This includes illustrations, deleted extracts, unused ideas,...

'A MARVEL' PHILIP PULLMAN Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book? The stories we read as children matter. The best ones are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest...

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford PrizeThe Top Ten BestsellerA The Times Book of the YearWaterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month'If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the...

The Works contains 120 of Pam Ayres' best-known poems, including 'The Battery Hen', 'Please Will You Take Your Children Home Before I Do Them In?', 'Sling Another Chair Leg on the Fire, Mother' and, of course, 'Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth'.This...

The classic evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside ...

Joan Didion's hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in...

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and...

'A smart and highly entertaining portrait of a literary powerhouse'- THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR'A riveting portrait'- GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR***'Worsley's sparkling biography brings a fresh eye to Christie's life and work, firmly busting the myth...

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed... In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; he gives us Colonel Fred Burnaby, reluctant adorer of the...

Take an intimate tour through the life and works of Stephen King, made vivid with rare photos and ephemera from King's personal collection.Even if you are a die-hard fan, you will find something new in this beautifully packaged Stephen King reference...

A collection of insightful and uproariously funny non-fiction by the bestselling author of INFINITE JEST - one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time. A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING... brings together Wallace's musings on a wide range of...

An autobiographical work that describes firsthand the great tectonic shifts in English society following the First World War, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That is a matchless evocation of the Great War's haunting legacy, published in Penguin Modern...

'A first-rate biography of the man, the writer and the lover' DAVID HOCKNEY'Bucknell's research is impressive and her judgements astute' GUARDIANAn engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of...

** Shortlisted for the @CrimeFest H.R.F. Keating Award **'A smart and highly entertaining portrait of a literary powerhouse'- THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR'A riveting portrait' - GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR***'Christie lovers should read this biography...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BENJAMIN MARKOVITSIn 1845 Thoreau, a Harvard-educated 28-year-old, went to live by himself in the woods in Massachusetts. He stayed for over two years, living self-sufficiently in a small cabin built with his own hands. Walden is...

The original authorised biography, and the only one written by an author who actually met J.R.R. Tolkien, reissued to mark Tolkien's 125th Anniversary. In more than 40 years since Tolkien's death in September 1973, millions have read The...