A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ''Irreverently funny ... kept me giggling all week.'' Scotland on Sunday "Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?" Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don''t understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.
There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene of the late 1980s and early 90s. This was the New York of Palladium, of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo, an era when dance music was still a largely underground phenomenon, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby-not just a poor, skinny white kid from deepest Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan, and a teetotaler, in a scene that was known for its unchecked drug-fueled hedonism. He would learn what it was to be spat on, literally and figuratively. And to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City ... And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated the end of things, in his career and elsewhere in his life, and he put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would be in fact the beginning of an astonishing new phase in his life, the multimillion-selling Play . Porcelain is about making it, losing it, loving it, and hating it. It's about finding your people, and your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, finally, somehow, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, Porcelain is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians' memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.
The life story of an extraordinary mathematical genius - John Nash - who became schizophrenic, entered remission, and won the Nobel Prize. Nash was only 21 years old and at Princeton University when he invented game theory, the most influential theory of rational human behaviour of our time.
' In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . . ' Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal , internationally best-selling novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world, as well as through a selection of the revealing letters he sent to his first wife, acclaimed author Lydia Davis. An impressionistic portrait of a writer coming of age, Report from the Interior moves from Auster's baby's-eye view of the man in the moon to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life. Report from the Interior charts Auster's moral, political and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the post-war fifties and into the turbulent 1960s. Paul Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life - and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: the final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures. At once a story of the times and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.
WINNER OF THE GOOD READS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES #1 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018 The masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer - the serial rapist turned murderer who terrorised California for over a decade - from the late Michelle McNamara. I'll Be Gone in the Dark offers a unique snapshot of suburban West Coast America in the 1980s, and a chilling account of the wreckage left behind by a criminal mastermind. It is also a portrait of one woman's obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth, three decades later, in spite of the personal cost. Updated with material which takes in the extraordinary events that followed its initial publication, Michelle McNamara's first and last book is a contemporary classic - humane, haunting and heroic.
On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, the author sat down and wrote the first entry of "Winter Journal", his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body.
In 1797, Lucia, a beautiful statesman's daughter was married off to a powerful Venetian, only to be caught up in the turbulence of Napoleon's march. This biography tells her story, from a hostess in Habsburg Vienna, lady-in-waiting at the court of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais in Milan to single mother in Paris during the fall of Napoleon's Empire.
Hanif Kureishi offers an insight into the birth of a writer - himself - through this memoir that conjures up a family story of how he found his own literary calling from the ashes of his father's failed attempts in the past even as the world turned upside down and India split in two along religious lines.
Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Tom Waits is a chameleonic survivor who's achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous 'jazzbo' years in '70s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner, this biography charts Waits' life step-by-step and album-by-album.
A memoir that offers a portrait of the author's parents' marriage and recalling his Leeds childhood, Christmases with Grandma Peel, and the lives, loves and deaths of his unforgettable aunties Kathleen and Myra.
A family story, told with restraint and tenderness. This book is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life.
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bicycle as his principal means of transportation in New York City. From music and the visual arts, to globalisation, politics, the nature of creative work, fashion and art, this book gives readers an insight into what Byrne is seeing and thinking as he pedals around these cities.
Andrew Beatty lived with his family for two and a half years in a village in East Java. When he arrived, he was entranced by a strange and sensual way of life, an unusual tolerance of diversity. Mysticism, Islamic piety and animism coexisted peacefully. But a harsh and puritanical Islamism, was driving young women to wear the veil.
Presents ten key Anglo-German encounters from the last 200 years: an encounter between Joe Strummer and the Baader Meinhof gang, Helmut Kohl trying to explain the virtues of German cuisine to a sceptical Margaret Thatcher and philosophers Theodor Adorno and A J Ayer clashing over jazz.
Judith Tebbutt tells the moving true story of her kidnap ordeal and the murder of her husband, David, by Somali pirates. In September 2011, Judith and her husband set out on an adventurous holiday to Kenya. After a joyous week on safari in the Masai Mara, they flew on to a beach resort forty kilometres south of Somalia. And there, in the early hours of September 11th, tragedy struck them. Judith was torn away from David by a band of armed pirates, dragged over sea and land to a village in the arid heart of lawless Somalia, and there held hostage in a squalid room, a ransom on her head. Responsibility of securing her release now rested with her son Ollie.
Orphaned by war, saved by ballet. Growing up in war-torn Sierra Leone, Michaela DePrince witnesses atrocities that no child ever should. Her father is killed by rebels and her mother dies of famine. Sent to an orphanage, Michaela is mistreated and she sees the brutal murder of her favourite teacher. But there is hope: the Harmattan wind blows a magazine through the orphanage gates. Michaela picks it up and sees a beautiful image of a young woman dancing. One day, she thinks, I want to be this happy. And then Michaela and her best friend are adopted by an American couple and Michaela can take the dance lessons she's dreamed of since finding her picture. Life in the States isn't without difficulties. Unfortunately, tragedy can find its way to Michaela in America, too, and her past can feel like it's haunting her. The world of ballet is a racist one, and Michaela has to fight for a place amongst the ballet elite, hearing the words "America's not ready for a black girl ballerina". And yet... Today, Michaela is an international ballet star, dancing for The Dutch National Ballet at the age of 19. A heart-breaking, inspiring autobiography by a teenager who shows us that, beyond everything, there is always hope for a better future.
Non arrendersi mai, guardare al futuro con speranza, forza d'animo, tanta tenacia, operosità e un pizzico di ironia.
Questo è il messaggio che ci vuole trasmettere l'autrice di "Stefano Reviglio: in capo al mondo per sperimentare" attraverso la storia della vita di suo padre: un uomo che ha sperimentato innanzi tutto se stesso, con scelte molto coraggiose, realizzate sempre con lo sguardo rivolto in avanti.
Un uomo che ha saputo costruire il proprio destino, la vita propria e della sua famiglia, trasmettendo un grande esempio ed un magnifico ricordo che l'autrice ha deciso di condividere come messaggio di speranza in questi tempi, resi cosi difficili da tanti individui senza principi, senza rispetto, senza scrupoli.
Questa biografia inizia con l'infanzia del protagonista, attraverso momenti dolorosi e tenere emozioni e prosegue con i sacrifici degli anni di studio e di lavoro, per terminare con la brillante carriera professionale e l'esperienza imprenditoriale.
Il racconto si intreccia con le complesse esperienze del periodo della guerra, qualche ritaglio di una scanzonata giovinezza, viaggi avventurosi e una storia d'amore durata 56 anni, attraverso lettere, ricordi, poesie e fotografie d'archivio in un magnifico affresco dell'epoca tra gli anni '40 e il 2000.
Questo libro è l'omaggio ad un uomo straordinario e alla donna che è stata sempre al suo fianco.
Features the biography of a great British traveller - the tall, headstrong, and charismatic Lady Hester Stanhope, who defied social convention to become a powerful figure in the Middle East.
Why do explorers put themselves in dangerous situations? And, once the worst possible situation occurs, how do they find the resources to survive? The author presents a series of tales from his own experience as well as that of other explorers including Columbus, Cortez, Scott, Shackleton, Stanley, Livingstone.
