Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Edmund Gordon

WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 
 
NBCC AWARD FINALIST 
 
WINNER OF THE 2017 SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, Spectator and Observer 
 
Angela Carter’s life was as unconventional as anything in her fiction. Through her fearlessly original and inventive books, including The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus, she became an icon to a generation and one of the most acclaimed English writers of the last hundred years. This is her first full and authorised biography. 
 
Edmund Gordon uncovers Carter’s life story – from a young woman trying to write in a tiny bedsit in Tokyo, to one of the most important and daring writers of her day. From a life full of adventure sprang work so fantastic, dazzling and seductive that it permanently changed and reinvigorated British literature. This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself. 
 
'An exemplary piece of work... Everyone should read it' Spectator

The Invention of Angela Carter

A Biography

Daniel Swift

‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de Waal 
 
In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade. 
 
 At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. 
 
 Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.

The Bughouse

The poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound

Emma Tennant

Based on fact, but told with the imagination of a novelist, STRANGERS is the story of the author's family, the Tennants. Margot Asquith and Pamela Tennant (nee Wyndham), warring sisters-in-law; Pamela's children, her 'jewels' - Clare the wilful beauty, Stephen Tennant the outrageous aesthete, David the nightclub king, and the steady, sensible Christopher who becomes head of the family when the eldest brother Bim dies on the Somme - these are some of the characters brought to sudden and not always respectable life in this funny, touching and sometimes shocking novel. Their antics, dreams and grief are witnessed by the maid Louisa, and played out chiefly at Glen, the castle in the border of Scotland, where the young narrator pulls from long-sealed cupboards the stories of her family's past. But as the secrets emerge the myth woven around the glamorous figures of the past is both enhanced and dispelled. Haunting and compelling, STRANGERS presents a family and its young detective in a startling light.

Strangers

Patrick Marnham

Mary Wesley published her first novel at seventy and went on to write a further nine bestsellers, including the legendary The Camomile Lawn, in a style best described as arsenic without the old lace. Many of her stories were inspired by her experiences during the Blitz, and by her marriages: the first to an aristocrat, a brief and conventional affair, and the second to a penniless writer she adored. 
 
A remarkable book about a remarkable woman, Patrick Marnham's brilliantly researched and wonderfully impartial book disentangles truth from rumour, highlighting the links between Wesley's real life and her fiction.

Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley

David Lodge

In 2004, Henry James featured as a character in no less than three novels - David Lodge's Author, Author was one of them. 
 
With insightful and amusing candour, here he traces the history of his book from conception to publication, pondering the mystery - and indeed the anguish - of so many novels about James appearing at the same time. 
 
Lodge's reflections on his own creative practice are accompanied by studies of the genesis, composition and reception of key works by James himself, as well as other novelists from George Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov, and J.M. Coetzee to Graham Greene.

The Year of Henry James

The story of a novel: With other essays on the genesis, composition and reception of literary fiction

Olivier Todd

Albert Camus is among the most significant French writers of the twentieth century. His novels, The Plague and The Outsider, have a timeless power and appeal and are studied all over the world, and his philosophical work has had an enduring influence. Oliver Todd has been authorised by Camus' family to write the definitive life. 
 
Opening with his impoverished childhood in Algiers, Todd brings the historical context to life, shedding light on Camus' later agonising conflict between sympathy for the working class Algerians and for the French colonials with a stake in their adopted land. His was a life of impossible choices and perpetual struggle, from his intimacy with the Gallimard family, despite their collaborationist activities, and his involvement in the conflict between Satre and de Beauvoir; to his own battles with debilitating bouts of tuberculosis and the passionate, restless nature that would never let him settle. 
 
With an extraordinary grasp of both his subject and his times, Todd brings to this rich, generous biography a rare immediacy and perception, evoking a great writer and his world with memorable force and engaging subtlety.

Albert Camus

A Life

Christopher Isherwood

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York, and the raw Australian outback. 
 
The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time - Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, W. Somerset Maugham and many others. They are most revealing about Isherwood himself - his fiction, his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. 
 
In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period such as the anxieties of the Cold War, the moon landing and the Vietnam war. In The Sixties Isherwood turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

The Sixties

Diaries Volume Two 1960-1969

Rachel Kushner

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000–2020

D J Taylor

Vanity Fair, published in serial parts in 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous 'all but at the top of the tree', he told his mother, 'and having a great fight up there with Dickens'. Behind him lay an extraordinary life - an intense, Anglo-Indian childhood, a fortune lost by his early twenties, a disastrous marriage to a wife who went mad and left him to bring up two small daughters in near penury. 
 
But his later life was no less troubled. As D.J. Taylor shows in this incisive biography, Thackeray was a complex, touchy man, acutely sensitive to criticism and fearful of the publicity that accompanied his passage through life.

Thackeray

Kate Chisholm

Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is best known as the author of EVELINA, one of the most engaging novels of the eighteenth century. But for much of her long life, she was also an incomparable diarist, witnessing both the madness of George III and the young Queen Victoria's coronation. To read the journals she kept from the age of sixteen is to step back into Georgian England, meeting Dr Johnson, Garrick and Reynolds, being chased round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King. . . She was lady-in-writing to Queen Charlotte; she married an aristocratic emigre from the French Revolution and had her first and only child when she was forty-two; she was in Paris as Napoleon's armies marshalled against England, and in Brussels she heard the muffled guns, and watched the wounded being carried back from Waterloo. Kate Chisholm's delightful biography, incorporating the latest research and illustrate with unusual portraits and drawings, is lively, funny, shocking, informative and deeply moving; it paints a vivid portrait of a woman of great talent, against the changing background of England and France, a culture and an age.

Fanny Burney

Her Life

Selina Hastings

The life of Rosamond Lehmann was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. Her first novel, the shocking Dusty Answer, became wildly successful launching her career as a novelist and, just as her novels depicted the tempestuous lives of her heroines, Rosamond's personal life would be full of heartbreaking affairs and lost loves. 
 
Escaping from a disastrous early marriage Rosamond moved right into the heart of Bloomsbury society with Wogan Philipps. Later on she would embark on the most important love affair of her life, with the poet Cecil Day Lewis; nine years later he abandoned her for a young actress - a betrayal from which she would never recover. 
 
Selina Hastings masterfully creates a portrait of a woman whose dramatic life, work and relationships criss-crossed the cultural, literary and political landscape of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

Rosamond Lehmann

In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare, luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwood's search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II and his friendships with such gifted artists and intellectuals as Garbo, Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Charles Laughton, Gielgud, Olivier, Richard Burton and Aldous Huxley. 
 
Throughout this period, Isherwood continued to write novels and sustain his literary friendships - with E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams and others. He turned to his diaries several times a week to record jokes and gossip, observations about his adopted country, philosophy and mystical insights. His devotion to his diary was a way of accounting for himself; he used it as both a discipline and a release.

Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

Belinda Jack

'George Sand' (Aurore Dupin, 1804-1876) was France's bestselling writer, rivalled in her time only by Victor Hugo. She was at the centre of French intellectual and artistic life: her circle included Liszt and Delacroiz, Blazac and Flaubert. Yet she was known as much for her excessive life as for her plays, stories and enduring novels like Indiana, Lelia and Mauprat. 
 
The daughter of a prostitute and an aristocrat, Sand grew up acutely aware of social injustice and prejudice. Convent-educated, she became a mischievous, flamboyant rebel: her long, troubled romance with Chopin was just one of many affairs with well-known figures, but her most desperate love was for a beautiful actress.

George Sand

Claire Harman

** The Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023** 
** A Waterstones Best Book of 2023** 
 
'All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work' A.L. KENNEDY 
 
Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield’s career was short but dazzling. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, 'Where is she – our missing contemporary?' 
 
In this inventive and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s life and achievements, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield’s desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small.’ 
 
‘What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity… Brilliant’ Sunday Times 
 
‘A searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand’ Sunjeev Sahota

All Sorts of Lives

Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me. 
 
Irreverent, witty and wise, But the Girl is a coming-of-age story about not wanting to leave your family behind 
 
Girl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence. 
 
When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity, but learning to understand the people who made you who you are?

But the Girl

Aidan Higgins

'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; the third son of four brothers is himself the father of three sons in a family also dispersed, and our author 'looking for the quietness that Julian Sorel found in prison. ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble. DOG DAYS is an account of those two years, with flashbacks to previous diaries that reveal a murky Dublin of whores and Provo killing, a raindrenched Connemara.

Dog Days

Selina Todd

'A sympathetic and perceptive account of a fine writer at a critical moment in our cultural life' KEN LOACH 
 
On 27 May 1958, A Taste of Honey opened in a small fringe theatre in London. Written by a nineteen-year-old bus driver's daughter from Salford, the play exposed a deeply polarised society in Britain, sparked press and political outrage and transformed its young author into an unexpected star. Shelagh Delaney's assertive female characters struck an immediate chord with working-class women who dreamed of more than just suburban housewifery, and her work and legacy would go on to inspire future generations of writers, musicians and artists. 
 
 This is the remarkable story of how a working-class teenager stormed theatreland, exploded old certainties about class, race, sex and taste, and blazed an incendiary new path in British culture. 
 
'A riveting book' DAVID HARE

Tastes of Honey

The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution

Penelope Hughes-Hallett

Between Christmas and new year of 1817 the eccentric painter, B.R. Haydon, gave a famous dinner party. His guests included three of the greatest literary stars of the age: the poets John Keats and William Wordsworth and the essayist and wit Charles Lamb. They recited poetry, took part in ridiculous antics, indulged in high-minded discussions - with such displays of brilliance that the party became known as the Immortal Dinner. 
 
Penelope Hughes-Hallett celebrates this famous evening, setting it against a backdrop of change, reflected in the preoccupations of the illustrious diners. A compelling and sympathetic picture emerges of these rare spirits and the age which created them.

The Immortal Dinner

A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London, 1817

Tom Hiney

Born in Nabraska of Irish Quaker parents, educated at Dulwich College, and in the `mean streets' of Los Angeles about which he wrote, Raymond Chandler-writer, oil executive, poet, recluse, charmer, gentlman, drunk-was full of contradictions as his origins. His seven Philip Marlowe stories had sold 5 million copies by the time of his death in1059. Since the first authorised biography 20 years ago, much new material can be revealed about the man and his life. For this major new biography, Tom Hiney has had some access to unseen personal papers, as well as previously unrecorded reminiscences by those who knew him well and he vividly evokes the strange early years, brings alive the danerous glamour of the Hollywood era, and puts Chandler`s writing in the context of the crime and corruption in Prohibition LA. He gives illuminating details of friendships with Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, the Spenders, Alfred Hitchcock and fully records for the first time his relationship with Cissy, his wife of 30 years, 17 years his senior, and his paradoxical relations with other women.

Raymond Chandler

Jenny Landreth

'With spot-on injections of humour and a frequently raised sardonic eyebrow, joy and warmth shine from this fascinating and funny book' Jo Brand 
 
A joyful celebration of amateur theatre 
 
From the Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages, via the Georgian aristocrats who built opulent private theatres in their own homes, to the radical lefties taking political theatre to the streets, this is the story of amateur dramatics in Britain. We meet a cast of characters who tell us about the joy amateur theatre brings them and we follow the full arc of a production, from first auditions to last night party, with all the mishaps and forgotten lines that come in between. In a triumphant mix of memoir, social history and manifesto, Jenny Landreth opens our eyes to am-dram and shows us a vibrant world that is a crucial part of our culture.

Break a Leg

A memoir, manifesto and celebration of amateur theatre

Lucy Mangan

'Beautiful and moving... It will kickstart a cascade of nostalgia for countless people' Marian Keyes 
 
When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up different worlds and cast new light on this one. 
 
She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library. 
 
In Bookworm, Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and disinters a few forgotten treasures poignantly, wittily using them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm. 
 
'Passionate, witty, informed, and gloriously opinionated' Jacqueline Wilson

Bookworm

A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Paul Hendrickson

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'She'd been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years - which were his final twenty-seven years. She'd lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He'd owned her, fished her, worked her and rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas to the north coast and archipelagos of Cuba.' 
 
Even in his most accomplished period, Hemingway carried within him the seeds of his tragic decline and throughout this period he had one constant - his beloved boat, Pilar. The boat represented and witnessed everything he loved in life - virility, deep-sea fishing, access to his beloved ocean, freedom, women and booze and the formative years of his children. 
 
Paul Hendrickson focuses on the period from 1934 to 1961, from the pinnacle of Hemingway's fame to his suicide. He has delved into the life of Hemingway and done the seemingly impossible: present him to us in a whole new light.

Hemingway's Boat

Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

Elizabeth Bowen

This selection of Bowen's non-fictional writings includes her wonderfully funny, precise recollections of schooldays and childhood experiences, her brilliant evocations of London in wartime and of the Irish 'big house', and penetrating accounts of some of her most famous contemporaries. It also contains her autobiography, posthumously published and left tantalising unfinished, a little known portrait of a beloved family servant, and unpublished letters to close friends as Virginia Woolf and William Plomer, written with as much elegance and energy as her 'public' writing. In her introduction, Hermoine Lee shows how these writings display the same interests as Elizabeth Bowen's fiction - in Anglo-Irish dispossession and ambivalence, in the persistence of chilhood feelings, in treachery, ghosts, and the mysterious power of place, the lure of nostalgia , and the clash between individual and society.

The Mulberry Tree

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

*THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* 
 
'A simply wonderful book' PHILIPPE SANDS 
 
'Begin Again is that rare thing: an instant classic' PANKAJ MISHRA 
 
'Incredibly moving and stirring' DIANA EVANS 
 
America is at a crossroads. 
 
Drawing insight and inspiration from Baldwin's writings, Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through an era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Seamlessly combining biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a more just future. 
 
'An essayistic marvel . . . deeply personal and yet immensely readable' SARA COLLINS, GUARDIAN 
 
'An urgent, deeply interesting book' RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER 
 
Winner of the Stowe Prize 2021 
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2021

Begin Again

James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today

Hermione Lee

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2014 
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography 
New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year 
 
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences – a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. 
 
Fitzgerald’s life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop’s Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism. 
 
Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady, but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant account – by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired – pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest.

Penelope Fitzgerald

Mark Doty

This is the story of a ten-year-old in top hat, cane and a red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's 'Get Happy' by an alarmed mother at the bedroom door exclaiming, in shame and exasperation: 'Son, you're a boy.'A self-confessed 'chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent', Mark Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America - from Memphis to Tucson to Titusville, Florida and Northern California. With his rebellious sister already heading for abortions, carnie jobs, credit-card fraud and prison, and his fragile, artistic mother slowly drinking herself to death, Mark has quite enough troubles without discovering that his dawning sexuality is The Wrong One. Attracted not to baseball gloves or space travel but to textiles and opera, theatre and free-form dance, his confusion and fear are shared by those around him, as he makes his way into the world to the sound of Petula Clark singing 'Downtown'. After experiments with drugs, psychedelia and heterosexuality he reaches the age of majority and finally acknowledges and accepts the ten-year-old Judy Garland in himself: that he is a gay man, emerging, radiant and new, from his own ashes. It is a triumphant transformation

Firebird

Margaret Forster

A brilliant follow-up to Hidden Lives, Margaret Forster's most personal book yet takes up the story of her gritty, northern father, Arthur, intertwined with that of her sister-in-law, Marion, who died of cancer at almost half the age of the 96 year-old Arthur. 
 
Margaret Forster's father was not a man to answer questions - least of all questions about life and death, so she attempts to answer them for herself. As Forster looks back at Arthur's life and indomitable character, she evokes incidents from her childhood, his working life and stubborn old age, trying to make sense of their largely unspoken relationship, and of his tenacious hold on life, and on his family. 
 
Arthur and Marion's lives were ordinary, and apparently unremarkable, but, when faced with death, lives like these become strangely precious.

Precious Lives

A.L. Kennedy

After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books – it’s just a wonder she’s found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line – urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian – and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors. 
 
Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice, writers’ workshops and writers’ health and the book ends with the transcript of Kennedy’s celebrated one-person show about writing and language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class imaginable from one of the finest – and most humane – writers in our language.

On Writing

Samantha Ellis

Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre? 
Petrova or Posy? 
Scarlett or Melanie? 
Lace or Valley of the Dolls? 
 
On a pilgrimage to Wuthering Heights, Samantha Ellis found herself arguing with her best friend about which heroine was best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, passionate Cathy; but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob, while courageous Jane makes her own way. 
 
And that’s when Samantha realised that all her life she’d been trying to be Cathy when she should have been trying to be Jane. 
 
So she decided to look again at her heroines – the girls, women, books that had shaped her ideas of the world and how to live. Some of them stood up to the scrutiny (she will always love Lizzy Bennet); some of them most decidedly did not (turns out Katy Carr from What Katy Did isn’t a carefree rebel, she’s a drip). There were revelations (the real heroine of Gone with the Wind? It's Melanie), joyous reunions (Anne of Green Gables), poignant memories (Sylvia Plath) and tearful goodbyes (Lucy Honeychurch). And then there was Jilly Cooper... 
 
How To Be A Heroine is Samantha’s funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives – and how they change over time, for better or worse, just as we do.

How To Be A Heroine

Or, what I’ve learned from reading too much

David Malouf

Each house, like each place, has its own topography, its own lore. A complex history comes down to us, through household jokes and anecdotes, odd family habits, and irrational superstitions, that forever shapes what we see and the way in which we see it. 
 
Beginning with his childhood home, David Malouf moves on to show other landmarks in his life, and the way places and things create our private worlds. Written with humour and uncompromising intelligence, 12 Edmondstone Street is an unforgettable portrait of one man's life.

12 Edmondstone Street

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