Author Memoirs

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez is the exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts. Drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, it is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.

After years of adventuring around the globe – running, kayaking, hitchhiking, exploring – Beau Miles came back to his block in country Victoria. Staying put for the first time in years, Beau developed a new kind of lifestyle as the Backyard Adventurer. Whether it was walking 90km to work with no provisions, building a canoe paddle out of scavenged scrap, or running a disused railway line through properties, blackberry thickets, and past inquiring police officers, Beau has been finding ways to satisfy his adventurous spirit close to home.

When Ann Woodward shot her husband, banking heir Billy Woodward, in the middle of the night in 1955, her life changed forever. Though she claimed she thought he was a prowler, few believed the woman who had risen from charismatic showgirl to popular socialite. Everyone had something to say about the scorching scandal afflicting one of the most rich and famous families of New York City, but no one was more obsessed with the tale than Truman Capote.

Let me take you on a journey - a journey where you can hear my pain. Learn about all the techniques I've tried when dealing with my bouts of depression and self-hatred. Some techniques are actively encouraged by professionals across the world; other techniques (prostitutes, drugs, self-harm) are pretty much frowned upon. The spoilsports. What worked for me and what most certainly didn't! Told with the blackest of humor to keep things fun!

Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age twenty-seven. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all. Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.

C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the 20th century. Many know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker?

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

In this dazzling memoir, the acclaimed writer behind Babylon 5, Sense8, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, and Marvel’s Thor reveals how the power of creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and a dysfunctional family haunted by madness, murder, and a terrible secret.

Ronald Blythe (1922-2023), author of the inimitable Akenfield, was a prolific and poetic chronicler of rural and spiritual life, nature and literature. He spent a joyful century close to his Suffolk roots, time travelling in his imagination and publishing forty books and thousands of essays. His wide creative network included John and Christine Nash, Cedric Morris, Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, Patricia Highsmith and Richard Mabey.

"Bunny told me there were secrets about me that she would take to the grave, secrets that no one would ever hear, including me...." Tom Wilson always felt something wasn't quite right. His parents, Bunny and George, were much older than other kids' parents. There were no baby photos of him in the house. At school, classmates called him Indian, despite his parents' Irish-Quebecois background. And as he got older, friends, lovers and even family members remarked on his uncanny resemblance to Bunny's closest relative, her niece Janie Lazare....

With an entirely fresh take on presidential history, James Swanson, author of the New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, shares the story of his lifelong obsession with the murder of America’s most revered president and the frantic hunt for his assassin. The renowned Lincoln scholar treats listeners to an audible “walking tour” of the people, places, events, and artifacts that tell the story of those horrible days in April 1865.

Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer—but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match.

The First World War laid waste to a continent and brought about the end of innocence — and the end of faith. Unlike a generation of young writers who lost faith in the God of the Bible, however, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis found that the Great War deepened their spiritual quest. Both men served as soldiers on the Western Front, survived the trenches, and used the experience of that conflict to ignite their Christian imagination.

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of all George Orwell's greatest non-fiction: three full-length books, a collection of his most well-renowned essays and the complete collection of his poetry.

Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings raised by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age 24, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman. Until: a statue of an Arab raising a cup of coffee awakens something in him. He sets out to learn the rich history of coffee in Yemen and the complex art of tasting and identifying varietals. He travels to Yemen, collects samples of beans, eager to bring improved cultivation methods to the farmers. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015 and he is trapped in Sana'a.

Three years before she began writing her New York Times best-selling book I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying, Bassey Ikpi returned to her native Nigeria to try to piece together a life that had fallen apart. Her career had been cut short by a bipolar II diagnosis and hospitalization, and she longed to find her way back to it. Nigeria welcomed her with promise. That fall, she created BasseyWorld presents Naija Poetry Slam, Nigeria's first National Poetry Slam competition, and she started getting hopeful.

A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.

In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life's adversities.