Notable Memoirs and Biographies

A journey from child bride to global changemaker.

At just 10 years old, Sonita Alizada was nearly sold into marriage. By the time she turned 16, her price was set at $9,000—a sum meant to buy her future for someone else’s benefit. In a world where nearly 15 million girls are forced into marriage each year, Sonita’s story is a heartbreaking but all-too-common reality. Yet, she refused to let her fate be sealed.

In her eponymous memoir, Sonita shares her powerful journey from the streets of Afghanistan to international stages as a rap artist and activist. Breaking through oppressive traditions and laws, she escaped her destiny as a child bride and transformed her pain into music that resonated across the globe. Her viral music video ‘Daughters for Sale’ captured the world’s attention, earning her a scholarship to the U.S. and igniting a movement against child marriage.

This book is not just her story—it’s a call to action. Through personal reflections, poems, and music, Sonita’s message is clear: Dreams have the power to change lives. Weaving together her family’s harrowing escape from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, her rise as a human rights advocate, and her belief in the transformative power of hope, Sonita’s story will leave readers inspired to fight for a world where every girl’s voice is heard.

Complete with QR codes to experience her music firsthand, Sonita is a love letter to dreamers and a battle cry for justice. It’s for anyone who has ever dared to believe they are more than their circumstances and wanted to make a difference.

Prepare to be moved, enraged, and empowered. Sonita Alizada’s voice will stay with you long after the final page.

The first joint biography of the Duke and Duchess of York and the first full biography of either of them, by renowned royal biographer and literary agent, Andrew Lownie.

Drawing on four years of research, numerous FOI requests and interviews with over a hundred people who have never spoken before, the book traces the lives of the late Queen’s second son and his ex-wife through their childhoods, courtship, marriage, divorce, careers, and royal and charitable activities.

Still living in the same house, they claim to be “the happiest divorced couple in the world”. The book investigates the reality of their relationship and their love lives. It charts Andrew’s record in the Falklands, his business activities and reveals details of how the couple have been able financially to sustain their extravagant lifestyles. It also recounts the full story of the Yorks’ links with Jeffrey Epstein.

Chronicling their lives in parallel, the picture that emerges is of a spoilt prince unable to connect and a duchess pushed by her insecurities into a desperate need to maintain the attention her ‘royal’ status brought. Rigorously researched and packed full of revelations, this is eye-watering biography at its best.

The New York Times bestselling author and human performance expert tests his knowledge and theories on his own aging body in a quest to become an expert skier at age fifty-three.

Gnar: adjective, short for “gnarly,” def: any environment or situation that is high in perceived risk and high in actual risk.

Country: noun, def: any defined territory, landscape or terrain, fictitious or real.

Cutting-edge discoveries in embodied cognition, flow science, and network neuroscience have revolutionized how we think about peak performance aging. On paper, these discoveries should allow older athletes to progress in supposedly “impossible” activities like park skiing (think: jumps and tricks.) To see if theory worked in practice, Kotler conducted his own ass-on-the-line experiment in applied neuroscience and later-in-life skill acquisition: He tried to teach an old dog some new tricks.

Recently, top pros have been performing well past a previously considered prime: World-class athletes such as Kelly Slater, the greatest surfer of all time, is winning competitions in his fifties; Tom Brady can beat players half his age. But what about the rest of us?

Steven Kotler has been studying human performance for thirty years, and taught hundreds of thousands of people at all skill levels, age groups, and walks of life, how to achieve peak performance. Could his own advice work for him?

Gnar Country is the chronicle of his experience pushing his own aging body past preconceived limits. It’s a book about goals and grit and progression. It’s an antidote for weariness that is inspiring, practical, and, often hilarious. It is about growing old and staying rad. It’s a feverish reading experience that makes you put down the book, get out there, and move. Whether hurtling down a mountain side, running your first 10K race, or taking your career to new heights, Kotler challenges us to test ourselves, surpass our limits, and achieve our own impossible, whatever it might be. Part personal journey, part science experiment, part how-to guide, Kotler takes us on his punk rock, high-velocity joy-ride for a better life in spite—and often in defiance of—the perceived limitations of the aging human body.

Someone once asked me how I’d want to be remembered.
I said, ‘As the boy who grew.’

Diagnosed with ADHD as a child, Jordan Stephens found his teens and twenties to be a whirl of career success and nurturing friendships but also a brutal pattern of self-harm, hedonism, destructive coping mechanisms and heartbreak. When he tried to live up to his own damaged expectations and his world exploded, he allowed himself to explore the pain he’d repressed his entire life.

Unsparingly digging into the fear, tenderness and trauma, Jordan Stephens discovers what it means to be a modern man and how the price we pay for love, in all its forms, is worth it.

The profound and life-affirming memoir about finding our way in a chaotic world

As the daughter of a scientist, Lulu Miller was taught that chaos will come for us all. There is no cosmic destiny, no grand plan. But years later, reeling from heartbreak, she stumbles upon the story of David Starr Jordan – a fearless taxonomist devoted to order.

Looking to cure her crisis of confidence, Lulu is intrigued by the hubris of this mighty biologist, who refused to admit defeat when lightning struck his laboratory and earthquakes shattered his collection. Until, digging deeper, she makes a startling discovery. One that will upend her wish for a neatly catalogued existence and reveal the profound beauty of embracing chaos.

“In the city where I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. Seam ripping and taking off lace, uprooting stitches and unstringing beads—one by one by hand in their spare time.”A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. “Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won’t know about them until there is a need to know,” writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself—made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.

Coming Soon!

The inspirational story of an amazing group of soccer-playing South African “grannies” and their journey to the U.S. These women play together despite resistance from their communities in order to improve their health and socialize—and for a brief respite from the injustices and struggles they face on a daily basis.

A touching, humorous account of the author’s cultural reckoning with his Korean heritage and hidden family secrets.

A surprising diagnosis of PTSD led Dave Gibbons to look to his past for clues to explain the unexpected result.

Born to an American soldier and a Korean mother in the wake of the Korean War, Dave has spent his life struggling to blend his Korean roots and his very American upbringing. The family joins a conservative church that embraces a strict, rule-based faith, and they try to navigate life as one of the few mixed-raced families in their community. But when tragedy strikes, tearing the family apart, Dave is forced to face long- buried secrets that he can no longer ignore.

As he explores his family’s difficult past, he confronts his own pain and the persistent feelings of not quite fitting in either in America or his mother’s home country. And when a DNA test ultimately reveals a truth that shatters everything he understood about his history, he begins the journey to reconcile his American upbringing with his deep Korean roots, and he is forced to confront the traumas he unknowingly carried.

The Shape of My Eyes beautifully weaves historic reference points of the oppression and discrimination against Asian Americans with Dave’s own personal story. Dave’s wrestling with belonging in his family, in America, and in the church creates a raw, thought-provoking memoir about race, religion and finding home.

Coming Soon!

Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies.

7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne. Franklin Avenue was also the breaking and then the remaking – and thus the true making – of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity.

With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters – letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don’t read them so much as breathe them – as the key to unlocking Didion.

In the small town of Steventon, Hampshire, one of the world’s most important authors was born…

Jane Austen holds a firm place in the global literary cannon and is adored for her wit, social observation and insight into the lives of women.

But behind the books is a life largely unknown, with an idyllic childhood, a busy social life and an affectionate family circle.

Elizabeth Jenkins’ account of Austen’s story not only brings to life the country gentry of Regency England, but also illuminates the character and mind of one of the most unusually perceptive and gifted writers the world has ever known.

Richly drawn and in picturesque detail, Jenkins pulls together fact and fiction to show how Jane Austen’s life, lived with quiet passion, inspired some of the most beloved novels to date.

1950s France. A British establishment figure. A shocking crime. A miscarriage of justice. The search for truth.

In 1952, in a peaceful corner of Provence, a farmer’s son stumbled upon a terrible scene. Three bodies: a husband and wife shot dead, their ten-year-old daughter savagely beaten to death. They were all British. So begins one of the most notorious murder cases in French history.

Sir Jack Drummond was a senior advisor to the British government, a household name who was respected and admired. His fame made the case a cause célèbre in France and resulted in the swift conviction of a local farmer, but questions about Drummond’s life and death remain unanswered.

In this bold new investigation, Stephanie Matthews and Daniel Smith strip away the prejudice and propaganda to reveal a grave miscarriage of justice. A light is shone on Drummond’s secret life in the shadows of the Cold War, painting a portrait of an enigmatic man who may not have been the innocent holidaymaker he appeared to be, and recasting one of the twentieth century’s most notorious murders in a fascinating and important new light.

‘In Liverpool everybody wanted to be in a band. On every street corner and in every cellar there were young fellas practising with guitars. But it was rare to see any girls on the new Merseybeat scene. It was inevitable that we would find each other . . .’

In the early ’60s, four friends from Liverpool formed a band. But this is not the ‘fab four’ story we know.

Mary, Sylvia, Valerie and Pamela – also known as The Liverbirds – were one of the world’s first all-female rock’n’roll bands. At an early gig, backstage at the Cavern Club, a young John Lennon told them that ‘girls don’t play guitars’. But they took that as a challenge. Despite the early scepticism, they won over tough crowds, toured stadiums, recorded two hit albums, and played with the Kinks, Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry – all in the space of just five years.

Now, the two surviving members of the band tell their incredible story in full for the first time – capturing a lost era of liberation and rock’n’roll, as they thrived in the vibrant Merseybeat music scene and formed a friendship that has endured through the decades.