Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Gerald Durrell

‘Another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never really existed’ 
 
The Durrell clan’s escapades on their Greek island home resume with the second volume of the Corfu Trilogy. Budding zoologist Gerald continues to explore the natural wonders around him, enjoying a night fishing trip, receiving a donkey as a birthday present and accidentally bringing a bear home for tea. Here too are more stories of the eccentric creatures he calls his family, including Margo’s ill-advised foray into spiritualism and what becomes known as ‘Mother’s Great Romance’. Ending as the Second World War is declared, Birds, Beasts and Relatives is an enchanting return to a magical place.

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Shirley Jackson

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Shirley Jackson skewered the trials of domestic life in 1950s America with wry wit and uncanny precision. In this sequel to Life Among the Savages, her four offspring have now grown into fully-fledged demons. As their house starts to burst at the seams, the Jackson clan somehow manage (without really planning it) to move into a larger home, only to take the chaos - absent furniture, vanishing children, misbehaving refrigerators, an avalanche of books - right along with them.

Raising Demons

Penguin Modern Classics

Stendhal

The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers. In this book, written with such frankness that it remained unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, the author of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black tells the story of his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and uncovers the roots of his rebellious and skeptical temperament. Stendhal conjures up the elusive presence of his beloved mother, who died when he was only seven, while castigating the smug complacency and social climbing of his father, and the cruelty of the aunt whose care blighted his early years. At the same time he recalls the sights, sounds, places, and people of his youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with an almost preternatural clarity and immediacy. A book of brilliant images and burning emotions, The Life of Henry Brulard, like Nabokov's Speak, Memory, is not only a vivid literary memoir but an extraordinary work of the imagination.

The Life of Henry Brulard

Edmund Gosse

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.

Father and Son

Boswell James

Edinburgh-born James Boswell, at twenty-two, kept a daily diary of his eventful second stay in London from 1762 to 1763. This journal, not discovered for more than 150 years, is a deft, frank and artful record of adventures ranging from his vividly recounted love affair with a Covent Garden actress to his first amusingly bruising meeting with Samuel Johnson, to whom Boswell would later become both friend and biographer. The London Journal 1762-63 is a witty, incisive and compellingly candid testament to Boswell's prolific talents.

London Journal 1762-1763

Tennessee Williams

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called &quot;a raw display of private life&quot; by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a &quot;starving artist,&quot; the &quot;overnight&quot; success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

Memoirs

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‘Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas’ 
 
It is 1935 and the Durrells have escaped the leaden summer skies of Bournemouth to arrive ‘like a troupe of medieval tumblers’ on the sun-drenched island of Corfu for a new life. Gerald Durrell’s beloved portrayal of his chaotic family – beatific Mother, Roger the dog, diet-obsessed Margo, book-loving Lawrence and gun-wielding Leslie – as well as his own adventures with a burgeoning menagerie of beasts, birds and insects (including an owl called Ulysses), is a timeless account of an idyllic childhood and an uproarious portrait of the English abroad.

My Family and Other Animals

Ved Mehta

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Translating individual experience into the universal, Mehta recounts the story of his mother's arranged marriage to a British-trained doctor and, by extension, of an ancient Indian family's struggle to find its place in a modern, rapidly changing world.

Mamaji

Continents of Exile: 2

Tim Lott

Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.

The Scent of Dried Roses

One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy

Book 8 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Veritas continues Mehta's journey through education: this time as a Ph.D. student and Residential Fellow at Harvard. His experience illustrates the dramatic changes in institutional habits and behaviour that were to take places in the late 1960s, as well as how dramatically out-of-touch many senior lecturers were to the societal mood around them.

Haunted by Harvard

Continents of Exile: 8

Book 10 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In lucid, sparse prose Mehta documents the twists and turns of a romantic history peppered with disappointment and anguish - that is until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way toward new insights about himself and those he has loved.

All for Love

Continents of Exile: 10

The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.

The Red Letters

Continents of Exile: 12

Book 11 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
This chapter of Mehta's remarkable memoirs details the many dilemmas he encounters during the building of a new home on a strange, irresistible island: from ever-climbing costs to a frequent infestations of potato bugs in the basement. Underlying the travails of construction lies a richly allegorical tale about Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man in love.

Dark Harbor

Continents of Exile: 11

Harry Crews

1935, Bacon County, Georgia. The bite of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt in the rest of America, but its teeth had been in Bacon County for years. Here one of America's most original storytellers, Harry Crews, was born in a sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road. A Childhood is his memoir of that time - his first years of life - and that place: the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues. 
 
A profound vision of the rural South that resounds with the violence of poverty and the tenderness of kinship, A Childhood is a true American classic.

A Childhood

The Biography of a Place

Patrick Kavanagh

My part of Ireland had a poet at one time, a poor ragged fellow whom no respectable person whom no respectable person would be seen talking to, but he left doors open as he passed. 
 
A delightful autobiographical novel from one of Ireland's best-loved writers 
 
Time hardly mattered in the village of Mucker, the birthplace of poet and writer Patrick Kavanagh. Full of wry humour, Kavanagh's unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish rural upbringing describes a patriarchal society surviving on the edge of poverty, sustained by the land and an insatiable love of gossip. There are tales of schoolboy skirmishes, blackberrying and night-time salmon-poaching; of country-weddings and fairs, of political banditry and religious pilgrimages; and of farm-work in the fields and kicking mares. 
 
Kavanagh's experiences inspired him to write poetry which immortalized a fast-disappearing way of life and brought him recognition as one of Ireland's great poets.

The Green Fool

Evelyn Waugh

'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves, contributed to his genius. Save for a few pale shadows, his childhood was warm, bright and serene. The Hampstead and Lancing schooldays which followed were sometimes agreeable, but often not. His life at Oxford - which he evokes in Brideshead Revisited - was essentially a catalogue of friendship. His cool recollection of those hedonistic days is a portrait of the generation of Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell. That exclusive world he recalls with elegant wit and precision. He closes with his experiences as a master at a preparatory school in North Wales which inspired Decline and Fall.

A Little Learning

The First Volume of an Autobiography

Book 6 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
The Stolen Light engages with the particular difficulties of Mehta's experience: he was blind in a college made for the seeing, he was an Indian in the United States, a Hindu in a Christian environment, a dark-skinned man surrounded by white people. With compelling honesty and humour, Mehta describes his struggles to live an ordinary university life - dating, riding a bicycle, keeping up with his studies - while dealing with incredible obstacles.

The Stolen Light

Continents of Exile: 6

Book 1 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
On its surface, Daddyji serves as a lucid biographical portrait of Amolak Ram Mehta, an esteemed Indian public servant, written by his son. But as Ved Mehta's story unwinds, it becomes apparent that something else is being recreated - the intricacies and intimacies of a lost world, of pre-Partition Lahore.

Daddyji

Continents of Exile: 1

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was one of the world's greatest historians and a towering figure of his age. When he died in 1794 he left behind the unfinished drafts of his Memoirs, which were posthumously edited by his friend Lord Sheffield, and remain an astonishing portrait of a rich, full life. Recounting Gibbon's sickly childhood in London, his disappointment with an Oxford 'steeped in port and prejudice', his successful years in Lausanne, his first and only love affair and the monolithic achievement of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he distils his genius for history into a remarkable gift for autobiography. Candid and detailed, these writings are filled with warmth and intellectual passion.

Memoirs of My Life

Book 4 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Set against the distant storm of the Second World War and the waning light of British Raj, Ved Mehta's brilliant memoir Ledge Between the Streams tells of an Indian childhood and the coming to terms with growing blindness: how, despite his disability, he learned English, Braille, horseback riding, bicycling, touch typing, and roller skating.

Ledge Between the Streams

Continents of Exile: 4

Book 5 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In 1949, fifteen-year-old Ved Mehta -- blind since the age of four -- left his native India and travelled alone to a school for the blind in Arkansas, USA. For the next three years he studied with over a hundred blind or partially sighted children at the school. Here, he would learn how to deal with Western teachers, date girls, and begin to perceive objects by means of 'sound-shadows'. Sound-Shadows of the New World brilliantly traces the emigrant experience amid the difficult transition from adolescence into adulthood.

Sound-Shadows of the New World

Continents of Exile: 5

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
After studying in the United States, Mehta - blind since childhood - achieves his dream of enrolling at the University of Oxford: a place that has consumed his imagination ever since he was a small boy growing up under the British Raj. In Up at Oxford, Mehta recalls the nuances of his conversations, the range of his youthful emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of university life. Along the way he draws memorable portraits of, among others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers.

Up at Oxford

Continents of Exile: 7

Ronald Knox - priest, classicist and brilliant, prolific writer - was one of the outstanding men of letters of his time. The renowned Oxford chaplain was a friend of figures such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and was known for his caustic wit and spiritual wisdom. Evelyn Waugh, his devoted friend and admirer, was asked by Knox to write his biography just before his death in 1957. The result, published after two years of research and writing, is a tribute to a uniquely gifted man: 'the wit and scholar marked out for popularity and fame; the boon companion of a generation of legendary heroes; the writer of effortless felicity and versatility ... who never lost a friend or made an enemy'.

The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox

‘My collection of animals swelled to a point where even Mother occasionally grew alarmed’ 
 
The island of Corfu, where the Durrell family live in agreeable chaos, is paradise for aspiring naturalist Gerald. His battalion of creatures has grown to include eleven puppies, a toad named Dierdre and an unwelcome infestation of scorpions. Yet the human visitors to their sun-drenched villa are even more curious, whether it is an innocent pair of American painters ripe for practical jokes, or a supercilious Count who barely survives an outing on Gerald’s home-made boat, the Bootle-bumtrinket. The third volume in the Corfu Trilogy brings this glorious tale of halcyon days to a close.

The Garden of the Gods

Franz Kafka

Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications — notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. 
 
By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive — and often surprisingly unpolished — writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Anton Chekhov

From the teenager in provincial Russia in 1875 to his premature death in Germany in 1904, Chekhov wrote over 4,500 letters to a range of correspondents, including family and friends, his publisher and fellow writers - not to mention actresses.  These letters tell the story of Chekhov's life as a man and a writer and he emerges from them as a tough, generous, life-enhancing, and enigmatic character.

A Life in Letters

Book 9 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Ved Mehta provides an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of the one of world's most famous magazines. He portrays in detail the strange, nurturing atmosphere at the New Yorker, and he recounts the earthquakes that shook the magazine as it moved into the hands of more commercial ownership. At once a tribute to William Shawn - one of the longest serving editors in the New Yorker's history - Mehta's memoir is also a joyful tribute to the intricately linked arts of editing, writing, and reading.

Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker

Continents of Exile: 9

Book 3 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Ved continues the story of Ved Mehta's two earlier memoirs, Daddyji, a biographical portrait of his father, and Mamaji, an exploration of his mother and her history. The focus here turns toward Mehta's childhood, his education in an Indian orphanage for the blind, and the general experience of blind people in India.

Vedi

Continents of Exile: 3

Wallace Stegner

'Enchanting, heartrending and eminently enviable' Vladimir Nabokov 
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner's boyhood was spent on the beautiful and remote frontier of the Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded fro 1914 to 1920. In a recollection of his years there, Stegner applies childhood remembrances and adult reflection to the history of the region to create this wise and enduring portrait of pioneer community existing in the verge of a modern world. 
 
'Stegner has summarized the frontier story and interpreted it as only one who was part of it could' The New York Times Book Review

Wolf Willow

George Orwell

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 have reached them.' 
 
Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.

Down and Out in Paris and London

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