Literary Figures

Will Shakespeare dreamed of becoming an actor and a playwright. At nineteen he left his home town of Stratford and headed for London, following his dream. He became an actor, part owner of the Globe theatre - and the greatest playwright of all time. 400...

Anthony Trollope is most famous for his portrait of the professional and landed classes of Victorian England, especially in his Palliser and Barsetshire novels. But he was also the author of one of the most fascinating autobiographies of the nineteenth...

A charming, funny, poignant collection of twenty-three letters from Marcel Proust to his upstairs neighbour 102 Boulevard Haussmann, an elegant address in Paris's eighth arrondissement. Upstairs lives Madame Williams, with her second husband and her harp...

An entertaining biography of Charles Dickens by one of our finest actors Acclaimed actor and writer Simon Callow captures the essence of Charles Dickens in a sparkling biography that explores the central importance of the theatre to the life of the...

A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062191250Author Agatha ChristieFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint William Morrow & CompanyPublisher William Morrow & CompanyWeight(grams) 962g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375702976Author Andrew DelbancoFormat PaperbackPage Count 415Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 408g

WINNER OF THE WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/ACKERLY PRIZE. Several months after the death of poet Dannie Abse's wife, Joan, in a car accident, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of a...

This is an introduction to the life and work of one of the greatest Welsh dramatists of this century. John Gwilym Jones (1904-1988) was also a short-story writer, novelist and literary critic whose work was almost exclusively in the Welsh language. The...

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The original will - one of the National Archives' most prized treasures - is reproduced in full, with a transcript for modern readers. Individual phrases are probed with a light, entertaining touch to reveal what we can piece together about Shakespeare...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781904915096Author Jeffrey MeyersFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Southbank PublishingPublisher Southbank PublishingWeight(grams) 321g

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Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810345553Author Thomas F. StaleyFormat HardbackPage Count 414Imprint Cengage GalePublisher Cengage GaleWeight(grams) 1503g

Bestselling novelist with an enormous critical reputation takes on one of the most popular and enduring English novelists of all. The prizewinning novelist Carol Shields, whose novels have themselves been compared to the works of Jane Austen, gives us a...

"McCourt has created an unsparing portrait of a man, and a time, that's richer and more devastating than his earlier work. 'Tis is a better book than Angela's Ashes" (Esquire). Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's poignant memoir of his Irish...

Frederick Forsyth has seen it all. And lived to tell the tale. 'We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I'm getting ahead of myself. During...

In the Blood is Andrew Motion's beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England - an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life. It also tells the story of how these worlds are shattered, when his mother suffers a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780395736555Author Mary V. DearbornFormat HardbackPage Count 478Imprint Houghton Mifflin (Trade)Publisher Houghton MifflinWeight(grams) 903g

BOOK OF THE WEEK on BBC Radio 4, a GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES and FINANCIAL TIMES Book of the Year and a Waterstones.com Best Biography of 2016 'A brisk, lively and wonderfully entertaining account of the life of a strange, tormented, unique creature' JOHN...

Five years after his death, Stieg Larsson is best known as the author of the Millennium Trilogy, but during his career as a journalist he was a crucial protagonist in the battle against racism and for democracy in Sweden, and one of the founders of the...

Besides being one of America's most celebrated living authors, George Saunders (b. 1958) is also an excellent interview subject. In the fourteen interviews included in Conversations with George Saunders, covering nearly twenty years of his career, the...

A study of the strange life and pathetic death of T.J. Llewelyn Prichard, the author of "Twm Sion Catti", the first Welsh novel in English which was popular enough to have been pirated in the mid-19th century.About the AuthorSam Adams has written widely...

Maeve Binchy's heart-warming tales of love, life and loss made her one of Ireland's most celebrated writers. Seared with a truth and honesty that leapt from the page, her books captured the imagination and loyalty of millions of readers, for whom there...

Maeve Binchy's novels sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, and when she died on 30th July 2012, she did so as Ireland's best-loved writer. In books such as Circle of Friends, Tara Road and Scarlet Feather, no one else told stories like Maeve...

In the Middle Ages, mules were used to transport goods across Britain. Strong, sturdy and able to carry a good 160 lbs of weight, they made ideal walking companions (as long as you didn't ask them to do anything they disapproved of). Now Hugh Thomson has...

What is it like to be old? Diana Athill made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs - her commitment, in her words, 'to understand, to be aware, to touch the truth'. Now in her nineties, and freed from any inhibitions that even she...

Yudit Kiss has grown up a Communist, sponged up her father's ideology unquestioningly. So as a child she is puzzled when others refer to her as Jewish, all she knows is that her family don't believe in a God. How can they? As her father lies dying, Yudit...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781854115010Author Anne Price-OwenFormat PaperbackImprint SerenPublisher Poetry Wales PressWeight(grams) 585g

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'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs . . .'So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding-school...

Leslie Garis' grandparents, Howard and Lillian Garis, were, from the turn of the century to the 1950s, phenomenally productive (and incredibly popular) authors of books for children. Every American child grew up reading the Uncle Wiggily stories, "The...

'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ("Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?"), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' Graham Greene When the first...

Over half a century since The Spy Who came in from the Cold made John le Carre a worldwide, bestselling sensation, David Cornwell, the man behind the pseudonym, remains an enigma. He has consistently quarried his life for his writing, and his novels seem...

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 and essays; outrage at her omission from any Booker Prize shortlists led to the foundation...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780997137828Author K LeeFormat PaperbackPage Count 144Imprint Krystal Lee Enterprises LLCPublisher Krystal Lee Enterprises LLCWeight(grams) 150g

On 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fiancée and...