Showing titles in Authors

When Jeanette Winterson left home at 16 because she was in love with a woman, Mrs. Winterson asked her: "Why be happy when you could be normal?" This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is the story of how the painful past returned to haunt Jeanette's later life, and send her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft which supports us when we are sinking.

In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted PhD. Samuel Beckett agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. This biography led to Bair's next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

Hisham Matar was 19 when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Gaddafi, Hisham was finally able to return to his homeland for the first time. In this heartbreaking, illuminating memoir, he describes his return to a country and a family he thought he would never see again. The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale of loss. It is an exquisite meditation on history, politics and art.

Joining us for a chat is the people's poet laureate, the punk performance poet, John Cooper Clarke, who is releasing his memoir I Wanna Be Yours. Clarke, born in Salford, is well known for his classic look of drainpipe jeans, wild black hair and sunglasses, whatever the weather, something which hasn't changed since the 1970s. Being inspired and encouraged by an English teacher at school, Clarke decided that he would make a living from poetry. He performed with many hugely successful bands, such as The Sex Pistols, Joy Division and New Order.

The hypnotist, magician and illusionist Derren Brown tours the UK every year with a sell-out stage show, hosts must-see television specials and is the author of several books on magic and mind power. He joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to discuss his latest book, Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine.

This is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called “Demon Dog of Crime Fiction,” Ellroy enjoys a celebrity status and notoriety that few authors can match. However, traumas from the past have shadowed his literary success. Informed by interviews with friends, family, peers, and literary and Hollywood collaborators, as well as extensive conversations with Ellroy himself, Love Me Fierce in Danger pulls back the curtain on an enigmatic figure who has courted acclaim and controversy with equal zealotry.

Best-selling author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne, is back with his most ambitious novel for adults yet. He joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to tell us more.

In one of the most famous portraits in the world, a pretty girl walks through the grounds of Kenwood House, a vision of aristocratic refinement. But the eye is drawn to the beautiful woman on her right. Pointing at her own cheek, she playfully acknowledges her remarkable position in 18th-century society. For Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the notorious Zong case - the drowning of 142 slaves by an unscrupulous shipping company.

Tutto quello con cui Chiara era abituata a identificare la sua vita non esiste più. Perché, a volte, capita. Capita che il tuo compagno di sempre ti abbandoni. Che tu debba lasciare la casa in cui sei cresciuto. Che il tuo lavoro venga affidato a un altro. Che cosa si fa, allora? Rudolf Steiner non ha dubbi: si gioca. Chiara non ha niente da perdere, e ci prova. Per un mese intero, ogni giorno, per almeno dieci minuti, decide di fare una cosa nuova, mai fatta prima.

This narrative charts Annie Ernaux's teenage awakening and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, a mother of two infant sons.

During the course of his life, Malachy McCourt practically invented the singles bar and was a pioneer in talk radio, a soap opera star, a best-selling author, a gold smuggler, a political activist, and a candidate for governor of the state of New York. It seems that the only two things he hasn't done are stick his head into a lion's mouth and die. Since he is allergic to cats, he decided to write about the great hereafter and answer the question on most minds: What's so great about it anyhow?

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930s - Orwell shot in the neck in the Spanish Civil War and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century, they would be considered two of the most important people in British history....

Joining us at Audible Studios is British advertising executive Rory Sutherland, whose TED talks have been viewed nearly seven million times. He has recently released his book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. In many areas of our lives, reason plays an infinitesimal part. We are driven by unconscious desires. We are drawn to the beautiful, the extravagant and the absurd, such as tiny bottles of fragrance. If you want to influence people's choices, you have to bypass reason.

When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie--Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith - often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Newstead Abbey was one of the most prosperous and fashionable aristocratic homes in England. It was the abode of William the 4th Baron Byron - a popular and successful composer and artist - and his teenage wife, Frances. But only a few decades later, at the end of the century, the building had become a crumbling and ill-cared-for ruin.

In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within this audiobook, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance.

Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she once said.

Introduced at a workshop in Boston University led by the acclaimed and famous poet Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, colored by jealousy and respect in equal terms.

Abandoned on the steps of Guy’s Hospital and placed in a housing estate in East London, Andy McNab tells of a troubled upbringing. Now a successful author and former Special Air Service sergeant, he joins us to discuss the success of Bravo Two Zero and the release of his latest audiobook, Street Soldier. Street Soldier is aimed at young adults and introduces the unique character of Sean Harker. Much like his author, Sean seeks to escape the confines of his upbringing by enrolling in the British Army, but unlike Andy, he focuses his attention on the competing gangs of London.

Tourists have sought out the landmarks, streets, and alleys of Charles Dickens's London ever since the death of the world-renowned author. Late Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with tracking down the locations—dubbed "Dickensland"—that famously featured in his novels. But his fans were faced with a city that was undergoing rapid redevelopment, where literary shrines were far from sacred. Over the following century, sites connected with Dickens were demolished, relocated, and reimagined.