Showing titles in Women

At the point of her retirement from the Metropolitan Police Service in 2019, Parm Sandhu was the most senior BAME woman in the capital's police force. She was also the only non-white female to have been promoted through the ranks from constable to chief superintendent in the Met's history. In this enthralling memoir, Parm chronicles her journey from life in Birmingham as the fourth child of Punjab immigrants to the upper echelons of the Met.

Amy Tan has touched millions of people with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At 25, and living in her 17th home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home. Surrounded by an eclectic and itinerant community in the uncharted territory of the capital's urban wilderness, Danie becomes fully immersed in this hidden world. Each day on board her boat, Genesis, is an adventure full of disaster and magic.

Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn't have on cars, suits and shoes fit for a prince. Both of her parents were waiting for paradise. It never came.

Averil Mansfield established herself as a pioneer in every sense of the word when she qualified as a surgeon in the early 1970s. At the time just two per cent of her colleagues were female, and she was often met with surprise, bordering on disbelief and amusement, when telling people what she did. But time and again, Averil proved herself more than capable of the role which had been her greatest dream since the age of eight. After a formidable operating career in Liverpool and London, she went on to became the UK's first ever female professor of surgery.

Boldly original, dramatic story of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots – three queens exercising power in a world dominated by men – Young Queens weaves the personal stories of these three queens into one, revealing their hopes, dreams, desires and regrets in a time when even the most powerful women lived at the mercy of the state.

In her fearless memoir, My Story - the basis of the Lifetime Original movie I Am Elizabeth Smart - Elizabeth detailed, for the first time, the horror behind the headlines of her abduction by religious fanatic Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. Since then, she’s married, become a mother, and traveled the world as the president of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, sharing her story with the intent of helping others along the way.

On June 5, 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the middle of the night by religious fanatic, Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. She was kept chained, dressed in disguise, repeatedly raped, and told she and her family would be killed if she tried to escape. After her rescue on March 12, 2003, she rejoined her family and worked to pick up the pieces of her life.

This is an amazing true story of a female civilian employee of the Army Corps of Engineers in Basrah and Nasiriyah, Iraq. She was riding in a truck with men when a roadside bomb destroyed the vehicle. Her body was so severely damaged that there was no possible way she could live. She vividly recounts her near-death experience when she went out of her body, to the spirit world.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of three strong women: Barbara, who was given a blue plastic cow that would later change her life forever; Florrie, who adopted a baby to replace the child she had lost; Carole, forced to give up her daughter by an unforgiving society. Growing up in a loving northern working-class family based on the banks of the River Mersey, Barbara felt that she was different. After accidently discovering that she had been adopted, she was only given a part of the story.

From her childhood, where there was no blueprint for success, to building a career as a bestselling novelist against all odds, Amanda Prowse explores what it means to be a woman in a world where popularity, slimness, beauty and youth are currency—and how she overcame all of that to forge her own path to happiness.

In her 20s Rachel Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love - motorbikes - to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000. As fellow racers died on the roadside, bikes were stolen and friends abandoned one another in the heat of the chase, she crashed at 130mph and miraculously survived; soon after, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.

Not That I'm Bitter, her powerful, frank, moving, and characteristically funny memoir, reveals exactly how choppy the waters could be. Even in those ground-breaking, anti-Thatcher days, there was only room at top for so many women.

Edited by Toni Morrison and first published in 1974, An Autobiography is a classic of the Black Liberation era which resonates just as powerfully today. Long hard to find, it is reissued now with a new introduction by Davis, for a new audience inspired and galvanised by her ongoing activism and her extraordinary example. In the book, she describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century.

From age 11, in 1974, until she left the show, in 1981, Melissa Anderson literally grew up before the viewers of Little House on the Prairie. Melissa, as Mary, is remembered by many as the blind sister - and she was the only actor in the series to be nominated for an Emmy. In The Way I See It, she takes listeners onto the set and inside the world of the iconic series created by Michael Landon, who, Melissa discovered, was not perfect, as much as he tried to be. In this memoir she also shares her memories of working with guest stars like Todd Bridges, Mariette Hartley, Sean Penn, Patricia Neal, and Johnny Cash.

1963, North London. Nan fosters one-year-old Florence Olajide and calls her "Ann". Florence adores her foster mother more than anything but Nan, and the children around her, all have white skin, and she can’t help but feel different. Then, four years later, after a weekend visit to her birth parents, Florence never returns to Nan. Two months after, sandwiched between her mother and father plus her three siblings, six-year-old Florence steps off a ship in Lagos to the fierce heat of the African sun.

In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon.com, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that would come with it. In no time she found the challenge and excitement she'd been craving—along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed—until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.

Little Girl Blue is an intimate profile of Karen Carpenter, a girl from a modest Connecticut upbringing who became a Southern California superstar. Karen was the instantly recognizable lead singer of the Carpenters. The top-selling American musical act of the 1970's, they delivered the love songs that defined a generation. Little Girl Blue reveals Karen's heartbreaking struggles with her mother, brother, and husband; the intimate disclosures she made to her closest friends; and much more.

Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours. Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. But the story of Jackie’s reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together.

Hayley Mills's teenage decade in Hollywood produced some of the era's greatest family movies: classics like Pollyanna, The Parent Trap and In Search of the Castaways, and in Britain the acclaimed Whistle Down the Wind. Overnight, Hayley became a teen idol and a household name. In Forever Young Hayley takes us back to a bygone era, charting a journey from her carefree childhood in post-war Britain, growing up in the shadow of her famous theatrical family, to being propelled into the Technicolor boomtown of 1960s Hollywood.