Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.

Alejo Carpentier

Dr Aleks Krotoski is an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She has topped the ratings for the BBC and Channel 4, winning Emmy, BAFTA, Radio Academy and Royal Society awards, and has written and presented landmark technology and social science series for both radio (with BBC Radio 4’s The Artificial Human and The Digital Human) and international television (with BBC World’s The Virtual Revolution). Krotoski has held fellowships at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University. She currently teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Aleks Krotoski

Aleksandar Ciric

Aleksandar Sotirovski

Aleksandar Zolotic

Aleksandr Orlov

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied Literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksei Bitskoff

Aleksei Evdokimo

Aleksi Hoffman

Alena Tkach is an award-winning Ukrainian freelance illustrator who studied Graphic Arts at Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. She works mostly as children’s book illustrator and 2D artist. Alena loves llamas because they are cute and sweet, and when they jump it's really funny. Follow Alena on Instagram @alena.tkach.

Alena Tkach

Alessandra Peters

Alessandro Manzoni

Alex Bellos is a journalist, broadcaster and puzzle master. He read Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford University before becoming a journalist and writer. Alex was born in Oxford and grew up in Edinburgh and Southampton and lived in Brazil for five years as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian before returning to the UK He is the author of 8 books about puzzles and mathematics and currently writes weekly puzzle column for the Guardian.

Alex Bellos

Alex Berenson

Alex Boardman

Alex Brummer

Alex Bulmer

Alex Butterworth

Alex Caine

Alex Carter

Alex Chance

Alex Cliff

Alex Danchev

Alex Dekker served as a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces 'Green Berets' for nearly 20 years, first with 5th Special Forces Group and then as a special operations team member assigned to the United States Army Special Operations Command. He has deployed multiple times to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations worldwide, and has attended multiple advanced tactical and technical schools within the U.S. Special Operations community and interagency. Alex has traveled to dozens of countries for work and personal adventures and has spent years living abroad. He is an avid student of history who has participated as a volunteer in numerous archaeological digs, is an Arabic speaker, and holds a Masters in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. When not traveling, Alex lives in Northern Virginia with his wife Savannah, a former CIA Operations Officer, their children, and their German Shepherd Donovan.

Alex Dekker

Alex Dimitrov is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize and is the author of Begging For It (2013), Together And By Yourselves (2017), and Love and Other Poems (2021). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, and more. Formerly, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edited the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. From 2009-2013, he founded and ran Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York. Currently, he teaches creative writing at NYU where he is Writer in Residence.

Alex Dimitrov

Alex Dingwall-Main

Alex Duval

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Spike Milligan

'Back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, "I think we've got grounds for a rent rebate."' 
 
The fifth volume of Spike Milligan's unsurpassed account of life as a Bombardier in World War Two sees our hero dispatched from the front line to psychiatric hospital and from there to a rehabilitation camp. Considered loony (and 'unfit to be killed in combat by either side'), he becomes embroiled in his own private battle with melancholy. But it is music, wit and a little help from his friends - including one Gunner Harry Secombe - that help carry him through to his first stage appearances ...

Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

Sophie Morgan

Sophie Morgan is an independent woman in her thirties with a successful journalism career. Intelligent, witty and sarcastic, she could be the girl next door. Except that Sophie is a submissive; in the bedroom she likes to relinquish her power and personal freedom to a dominant man for their mutual pleasure. 
 
In the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey, here is a memoir that offers the real story of what it means to be a submissive. From the endorphin rush of her first encounter right through to punishments the likes of which she couldn't begin to imagine, she explains in frank and explicit fashion the road she travels. But it isn't until she meets James that her boundaries are really pushed. As her relationship with him travels into darker and darker places the question becomes: where will it end? Can she reconcile her sexuality with the rest of her life and is it possible for the perfect man to also be perfectly cruel? 
 
Racy, controversial, but always warm, fun and astoundingly honest this is a fascinating and thought provoking look at a seemingly paradoxical side to human nature and sexuality that no man or woman will be able to put down.

The Diary of a Submissive

A True Story

Sue Townsend

Enter the world of Susan Lilian Townsend - sun-worshippers, work-shy writers, garden centre lovers and those in search of a good time are all welcome ... 
 
This sparkling collection of Sue Townsend's hilarious non-fiction covers everything from hosepipe bans to Spanish restaurants, from writer's block to slug warfare, from slob holidays to the banning of beige. 
 
These funny, perceptive and touching pieces reveal Sue, ourselves and the nation in an extraordinary new light. Sit back and chortle away as one of Britain's most popular and acclaimed writers takes a feather to your funny bone.

The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman

Scarlett O'Kelly

Facing financial meltdown, mother of three Scarlett O'Kelly did what the average woman would find unthinkable: she became an escort and this is the explicit, astonishing and compulsive story of her year living a double life. 
 
There was the sex, which, surprisingly for Scarlett, could have unexpected pleasures. Then the clients - ordinary men who worried that they had to hide their sexual needs, desires and fantasies from their wives or girlfriends. Not to mention her realisation that women just like her could build stronger relationships if they could let go their hang-ups in and out of bed. And there's the high price Scarlett paid for her double life - one she is still coming to terms with. 
 
Paying For It is a raw, intimate and powerful story of one brave woman's sacrifice in a time of hardship.

Paying for It

How Turning Tricks Paid the Mortgage, Kept the Kids in Trainers and Gave Me Back My Life

Gerald Durrell

'For many years I had wanted to start a zoo . . . any reasonable person smitten with an ambition of this sort would have secured the zoo first and obtained the animals afterwards. but throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion.' 
 
A Zoo in My Luggage is Gerald Durrell's account of his attempt to set up his own zoo, after years spent gathering animals for other zoos. Journeying to Cameroon, he and his wife collected numerous mammals, birds and reptiles, including Cholmondely the chimpanzee and Bug-eye the bush-baby. 
 
But their problems really began when they attempted to return with their exotic menagerie. Not only had they to get them safely home to Britain but they also had to find somewhere able and - most of all - willing to house them. 
 
Told with wit and a zest for all things furry and feathered, Gerald Durrell's A Zoo in My Luggage is a brilliant account of how a pioneer of wildlife preservation came to found a new type of zoo.

A Zoo in My Luggage

Iris Jones Simantel

From the dirty streets of the East End to the Welsh countryside, will little evacuee Iris ever find somewhere to belong? 
 
Born in 1938 under threat of looming war, Iris spent her early years playing in the rubble of bombed buildings in Dagenham by day and cowering in a dusty shelter at night. But the hardships of poverty and the dreaded Blitz could not match the pain she felt at her parents' indifference. She prayed that just once her mother would hold her when the bombs rained down. But loneliness only intensified when she was evacuated. 
 
Finding the nurturing home she had always dreamt of in her adopted Welsh parents, she wonders what, when she returns to London after the war, will be waiting for her. Will she ever be able to love her philandering father, depressive mother and an angry, bullying brother? Will her family even survive? Or will she have to look farther afield for the affection she so longs for?

Far from the East End

The moving story of an evacuee's survival and search for home

'At Victoria station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked "This is your enemy". I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train . . .' 
 
In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway'). 
 
Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.

Adolf Hitler

My Part in his Downfall

Tom Daley

Enter the enthralling world of Tom Daley, medallist in the 2012 London Olympic Games. 
 
Tom had the whole country behind him when he won bronze at the Olympics this year. A double Commonwealth gold medal winner, he is one of the sport's most exciting athletes. But there is also a heartbreaking and inspiring story of a young man coping with the death of his father whilst under the glare of the world's media spotlight. 
 
In this, Tom's first official memoir, he offers unprecedented access to the pressures, challenges and fascinating experiences of a world-class Olympian. From his day-to-day schedule, to his hobbies and family life, to sharing his hopes and dreams in the build up to the London Olympics, this book offers a unique chance to get close to Tom. Featuring exclusive photography, both personal and newly commissioned, this is the ultimate book for the 2012 Olympics.

My Story

The official story of inspirational Olympic legend Tom Daley

Rodney Foster

"Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?" Not Colonel Rodney Foster, a platoon commander of the Kent Home Guard. 
 
Dad's Army, the iconic comedy series is as well-known today as it was forty years ago. But the reality of life in the Home Guard was often very different. Living directly beneath the Battle of Britain on the Kent coast, Colonel Rodney Foster, who illegally kept a diary every day of the War, commanded a company of men in the face of constant aerial bombardment and the ever-present threat of death from above - the Home Guard were the first barrier to Hitler's crack parachutists. Writing from the village hall, abandoned barns, churches and makeshift officers' messes, he records with a unique wit and wisdom the everyday details of family life during the war: the domestic routine dogged by air raid warnings, the antics of soldiers stationed nearby taking every chance to improve their lot, the quiet strength of a small community faced with great adversity.

The Real 'Dad's Army'

The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster

Matthew Parris

'Stands apart... This Englishman's castle might have started as a dream, but it has ended up being an extraordinary reality' Sunday Times 
 
Walking in the Pyrenees one spring morning Matthew Parris stumbled upon a magnificent ruined mansion standing on the edge of a line of huge cliffs. Later he was to discover that parts of the house dated back to the 14th century though it had not been completed until 1559; and that it had survived two massive earthquakes before falling into disrepair in the early 1960s. 
A few years later, seduced by 'one of those foolish challenges that grip us in middle life', Parris bought the house, L'Avenc, and set about restoring it to its full glory. This delightful book chronicles it all: the original discovery, the attempts to discover its history, and then the long effortful years trying to bring it back to life in the face of scepticism from family, friends and Spanish neighbours. The original edition of A Castle in Spain was published in 2005 when the renovations were a work in progress; this new edition triumphantly records all that has happened since.

A Castle in Spain

Des Bishop

For years acclaimed comedian Des Bishop wanted to write a show about his father. Mike Bishop was a model and actor who gave up that life to become a hard-working man of the suburbs - a good husband, a caring father, a responsible citizen. Still, he sometimes talked wistfully about the glamourous life he might have had. But after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in late 2009, Mike's regrets about his fantasy other life crumbled. He cherished his family and they came together to surround him with love, laughter, tears and talk. Lots of talk. 
 
The insights that emerged during Mike Bishop's illness became the show his son always wanted to stage. He and his father collaborated on My Dad Was Nearly James Bond - a hilarious, outrageous and moving celebration of what Des calls 'the heroics of fatherhood'. The show has attracted rave reviews and sell-out audiences around the world. 
 
Mike Bishop died in February 2011. Now Des has written a memoir inspired by the stage show, by the startling discoveries he made about his father's background before he died, and by his own realization of what it means to finally grow up. The book is a funny, wise and unforgettable story of a father, a son and what really matters.

My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

Rob Brydon

Rob Brydon - star of Gavin and Stacey, Steve Coogan's partner in The Trip, and one of Britain's favourite comedians - tells the funny and frank story of his slow ascent to fame and fortune in Small Man in a Book. 
 
A multi-award-winning actor, writer, comedian and presenter known for his warmth, humour and inspired impressions, Rob Brydon has quickly become one of our very favourite entertainers. But there was a time when it looked like all we'd hear of Rob was his gifted voice. 
 
Growing up in South Wales, Rob had a passion for radio and soon the Welsh airwaves resounded to his hearty burr. However, these were followed by years of misadventure and struggle, before, in the TV series Marion and Geoff and Gavin and Stacey, Rob at last tickled the nation's funny bone. The rest, as they say, is history. Or in his case autobiography. 
 
Small Man in a Book is a funny, heartfelt, honest, sometimes sad, but mainly funny, memoir of how a young man from Wales very, very slowly became an overnight success.

Small Man in a Book

Primo Levi

'So it happens, therefore, that every element says something to someone' 
 
Inspired by the rhythms of the Periodic Table, Primo Levi assesses his life in terms of the chemical elements he associates with his past. From his birth into an Italian Jewish family through his training as a chemist, to the pain and darkness of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Levi reflects on the difficult course of his life in this heartfelt and deeply moving book.

The Periodic Table

Molly Weir

'Poverty is a very exacting teacher and I had been taught well' 
 
The post-war urban jungle of the Glasgow tenements was the setting for Molly Weir's childhood. From sharing a pull-out bed in her mother's tiny kitchen to running in terror from the fever van, it was an upbringing that was cemented in hardship. Hunger, cold and sickness was an everyday reality and complaining was not an option. 
 
Despite the crippling poverty, there was a vivacity to the tenements that kept spirits high. Whether Molly was brushing the hair of her wizened neighbour Mrs MacKay, running to Jimmy's chip shop for a ha'penny of crimps or dancing at the annual fair, there wasn't a moment to spare for self-pity. Molly never let it get her down as she and the other urchins knew how to make do with nothing. 
 
And at the centre of her world was her fearsome but loving Grannie, whose tough, independent spirit taught Molly to rise above her pitiful surroundings and achieve her dreams.

Shoes Were For Sunday

Charlotte Moore

A new updated edition of the classic book 
 
Charlotte Moore has three children: the two oldest, George and Sam, are autistic; the youngest Jake is not. In this extraordinary book, which combines personal memoir with the most recent known information on this most fascinating and elusive of conditions, she describes the circumstances of their birth, behaviour, diagnosis, treatment - and brilliantly conveys what daily life is like for a family with autism. It's an invaluable book for anyone with an interest in childhood and child development. 
 
George and Sam was published to huge acclaim by Viking Penguin in 2004 - it was immediately regarded as one of the key books on autism. In this new edition Charlotte Moore brings the story up to date by describing the boys' passage through adolescence and its impact on her family.

George and Sam

St John Greene

'Kiss boys two times after I have gone' 
'Please teach the boys to say what they mean' 
'Mummy loved orange Club biscuits, jam and jelly and lemon curd' 
 
On her deathbed, Kate Greene's only concern was for her two little boys, Reef and Finn, and her loving husband, Singe. She knew she'd be leaving them behind very soon. 
 
Over her last few days, Kate created Mum's List. The couple talked and cried together as she wrote her thoughts and wishes down, trying to help the man she loved create the best life for their boys after she was gone. 
 
It wasn't the first time Singe and Kate had faced the spectre of death. Four years earlier, doctors discovered a large lump in baby Reef 's abdomen. Kate, pregnant with Finn, was so distressed that she gave birth dangerously early. Both boys pulled through, but afterwards Kate received the diagnosis that every woman dreads . . .

Mum's List

Molly McCloskey

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. 
 
When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly - having moved from the US to Ireland - hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike's, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck - the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered him unrecognizable. 
 
Now, in Circles around the Sun, she tells that story - which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family slowly fell apart and, in the end, regrouped. It is a work of extraordinary intensity and drama from a wonderfully gifted writer.

Circles around the Sun

In Search of a Lost Brother

Roald Dahl

'They didn't think for one moment that they would find anything but a burnt-out fuselage and a charred skeleton; and they were apparently astounded whn they came upon my still-breathing body, lying in the sand near by' 
 
In 1938 Roald Dahl was fresh out of school and bound for his first job in Africa, hoping to find adventure far from home. However, he got far more excitement than he bargained for when the outbreak of the Second World War led him to join the RAF. His account of his experiences in Africa, crashing a plane in the Western Desert, rescue and recovery from his horrific injuries in Alexandria, and many other daring deeds, recreates a world as bizarre and unnerving as any he wrote about in his fiction.

Going Solo

Colm Tóibín

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Colm Tóibín's touching memoir. 
 
A Guest at the Feast moves from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family. Tóibín's captivating memoir is the story of a writer coming of age and his connections between home, work and love. It is a perfect gem of a book.

A Guest at the Feast

A Memoir

Stacey Solomon

Stacey shares her bestselling story of her rise to the top 
 
Just an ordinary girl from Essex with an amazing talent, Stacey was catapulted to fame when she wowed Simon Cowell at the X Factor audition that changed her life forever. 
 
As a kid, Stacey dreamed of becoming a star. But at 17, it looked like her dream was shattered when she got pregnant by mistake. Always the fighter, new single mum Stacey rallied, found a college with a crèche for her son Zachery and waitressed at night, determined that he should have the opportunities she didn't. And then the X Factor came along, where she stunned Britain with her astonishing voice. Her music career launched, Stacey has been a national treasure ever since, culminating in her victory on I'm a Celebrity.

Stacey: My Story So Far

'An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten . . .' 
 
Boy is a funny, insightful and at times grotesque glimpse into the early life of Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors. We discover his experiences of the English public school system, the idyllic paradise of summer holidays in Norway, the pleasures (and pains) of the sweetshop, and how it is that he avoided being a Boazer. 
 
This is the unadulterated childhood - sad and funny, macabre and delightful - that inspired Britain's favourite storyteller and also speaks of an age which vanished with the coming of the Second World War.

Tales of Childhood

Ali Soufan

'If you see the Black Banners coming from Khurasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice; no power will be able to stop them' 
Hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad 
 
The Black Banners is the ultimate insider's account of the realities of counter-terrorism. During a decade on the front lines, as the FBI's lead investigator into Al Qaeda, Ali Soufan thwarted plots around the world and won some of the most important confessions from terrorists - without laying so much as a hand on them. Most of these stories have never been reported before, and never by anyone with such intimate firsthand knowledge. Soufan takes us into the interrogation rooms, into the hideouts. He even gives us a ringside seat at bin Laden's personal celebration of the 9/11 bombings. This is a gripping blow-by-blow account of the ten-year hunt for the most dangerous and well-connected Islamist terrorists - some of whom are still at large. 
 
In The Black Banners Soufan also explains why the pervasive use of torture is not helping in the 'War on Terror', and how a more enlightened approach to intelligence is not only possible, but essential. This is a story not just of intrigue and bravery, but of empathy. He shows us how terrorists think and operate. And he shows that through this understanding, they can be stopped and finally brought to justice. 
 
Ali Soufan knows the truth about the successes and failures of countering terrorism. His knowledge is essential to us all.

The Black Banners

Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda

Noel 'Razor' Smith

As a gun-wielding bank robber, Noel 'Razor' Smith was top of the criminal tree, enjoying the excitement and benefits of a dangerous and adrenalin-filled career. But he'd also spent the greater part of his adult life in prison, an environment where respect and basic survival were guaranteed only to those prepared to use the most brutal violence. In his new book, Smith takes the story on from his highly acclaimed memoir A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, and describes how he came to realize that the game wasn't worth the candle. In his mid-forties he applied to enter Grendon, then the only prison in Britain offering intense therapeutic treatment to hardened criminals. He went from a brutal high-security prison, HMP Whitemoor, to an institution where he was encouraged to investigate just why his life had been given over to violence and crime. Smith paints an unforgettable portrait of the hardened and severely damaged inmates of Grendon, many of them guilty of famous crimes, and their attempts to turn round their lives. And in particular his own arduous five-year journey to re-enter society as a straight citizen.

A Rusty Gun

Paul Theroux

'Both unputdownable and utterly engaging' Jonathan Raban, The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'I started reading Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the story of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul over thirty years and five continents - its origins, development, and sad, enigmatic termination. I couldn't, as they say, put it down. I don't know of a more revealing study of the peculiar nature of friendship between professional writers, an unstable compound of empathy, solidarity and rivalry. Theroux's portrait of Naipaul . . . may be [his] finest literary creation' David Lodge, Guardian Books of the Year 
 
'Thoroughly compelling. We can call it a memoir, or a biographical sketch, but it has more in it - more candour, more intensity, more angry puzzlement - than we would normally expect from either of these genres. I can think of no other book that renders in such merciless detail a still-living public figure' Sunday Telegraph

Sir Vidia's Shadow

A Friendship Across Five Continents

Douglas Edwards

Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander's account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, takes readers inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving readers a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world. Edwards, Google's first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. From the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's young, idiosyncratic partners to the evolution of the company's famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently), through the physical endurance feats of the company's engineers (both on and off the roller-hockey field) to its ethos to always hire someone smarter than yourself, I'm Feeling Lucky captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, culture of the world's most transformative corporation. Welcome to the "Google Experience".

I'm Feeling Lucky

The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

Rachel Johnson

'The whole place seemed completely bonkers: dusty, tatty, disorganized and impossibly old-fashioned, set in an age of doilies and flag-waving patriotism and jam still for tea, some sunny day.' 
 
Appointed editor of The Lady - the oldest women's weekly in the world - Rachel Johnson faced the challenge of a lifetime. For a start, how do you become an editor when you've never, well, edited? How do you turn around a venerable title, full of ads for walk-in baths, during the worst recession EVER? And forget doubling the circulation in a year - what on earth do you wear to work when you've spent the last fifteen years at home in sweatpants? 
 
Will Rachel save The Lady - or sink it?

A Diary of The Lady

My First Year As Editor

Toni Maguire

Jackie was an unwanted child. So unwanted that her mother regularly left Jackie at her uncle's house. Which was when the nightmare started. For when his wife went out, her uncle's friends came round. He had a Special Room. In it Jackie was tied up and molested, beaten, burnt by cigarettes and urinated on. Sometimes other children were brought along. Jackie got to know the Special Room intimately. 
 
Jackie could never bring herself to tell her mother. She ended up in a home for disturbed children. She ran away, and a life of homelessness, drugs, prostitution and psychiatric wards followed. 
 
Eventually, Jackie sought help. But could she turn her life around? Would her evil uncle and his Special Room haunt her forever? 
 
Can't Anyone Help Me? is the inspirational story of struggle and survival against all odds as one young woman attempts to put her torturous past behind her and make a future for herself.

Can't Anyone Help Me?

Greg Baxter

'Traditional autobiography is composed after the experience has passed. I wrote this book in the very panic of the experiences that inspired it ... ' 
 
In his early thirties, Greg Baxter found himself in a strange place. He hated his job, he was drinking excessively, he was sabotaging his most important relationships, and he was no longer doing the thing he cared about most: writing. Strangest of all, at this time he started teaching evening classes in creative writing - and his life changed utterly. 
 
A Preparation for Death is a document of the chaos and discovery of that time and of the experiences that led Greg Baxter to that strange place - an extraordinarily intimate account of literary failure (and its consequences), personal decay, and redemption through reading, writing, and truth-telling. Studded with vivid, loving portraits of the people closest to him - his Austrian grandmother, who narrowly survived the Second World War; his mother and father, both described with heartbreakingly close attention; and his cousin Walter, whose own demons provide a striking counterpoint to the author's - it is above all a stunningly vivid and searching self-portrait: possibly the most honest book you'll ever read.

A Preparation for Death

Alice B. Toklas

In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day. 
 
With dry wit and characteristic understatement Toklas ponders the ethics of killing a carp in her kitchen before stuffing it with chestnuts; decorating a fish to amuse Picasso at lunch; and travelling across France during the First World War in an old delivery truck, gathering local recipes along the way. She includes a friend's playful recipe for 'Haschiche Fudge', which promises 'brilliant storms of laughter and ecstatic reveries', much like her book.

Murder in the Kitchen

Neil McCormick

'Squirm-inducing, excruciatingly honest and painfully funny' Joseph O'Connor 
 
We all went to school with friends who've turned out more successful than ourselves. But they don't all phone from improbably glamorous places and drive us mad by telling us about it. And they're not all Bono. 
 
Neil McCormick always dreamed of life as a rock star. Instead, he had to watch while his friend became one of the most famous men on the planet. Killing Bono tells the story of the less-than-successful rival band which he set up with his brother Ivan in the late 1970s. 
 
While the young brothers struggled to find success Bono and his friends went on to achieve superstar status. A heartwarming story of friendship, loyalty, rivalry and ambition, read it and weep - with sympathy and laughter.

Killing Bono

Intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, music and cuisine. And a pure sociopath. This is the series that launched the world’s number one villain – Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal Lecter

Happy Families

Harlem Renaissance Series

Harold Fry

Harry Hole

Harry and the Dinosaurs

Hatchimals

Hattie B, Magical Vet

Hawk series

Hawthorne

He Who Fights With Monsters

Heart Hassle

Heartland Trilogy

Heaven Official's Blessing

Heavenly Bodies

Henry Pratt is the epitomy of the great British underdog. Nothing is ever simple in his world, just when it seems things are going right, life throws him another unwanted curve-ball. Join Pratt as he traverses the highs and lows of everyday life in this comic masterpiece.

Henry Pratt

Her Hidden Fire

To some a brilliant warrior, to others a devil in human form; Hereward is as adept in the art of slaughter as the enemies that gather to claim England's throne. With King Edward heirless and ailing, Hereward has been declared an outlaw. What is he willing to risk in order to save the land he loves? 
 
Hereward's tales are of heroism, treachery, rebellion and bloody battles, with William the Bastard never too far away.

Hereward

Heroes of Olympus

Heroes of Olympus Graphic Novels

Hetty Feather was left at a foundling hospital when she was a tiny baby. Having grown up in a loving foster family until she was five, and then finding herself returned to the hospital, she begins to question who her actual family are, and is determined to stop at nothing to find out where she came from. Jacqueline Wilson’s acclaimed series follows Hetty and her friend Diamond as they work their way up from their lowly backgrounds to become stars, overcoming loss, unkind bosses and flirtatious boys.

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