Diary Biography

What elevates teaching my mother how to give birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times -...

Known for her sharp, witty and surreal view on everyday life, Lucy shares the unpredictable craziness of being a mum in this brilliant and laugh-out-loud 'mumoir'. Mums everywhere will recognise the madness of it all. Like when Lucy was hospitalised during her third trimester with chest pains but it turned out to be a burrito. Or when she was so tired at the park she forgot her own child's name.

Even as a kid, everyone thought Jeff Kinney was talented. People loved his drawings, and when he went to college, his comic strip Igdoof was so popular that it spread to other universities! Still, Jeff faced challenges. His cartoons were rejected by syndicates that claimed his art was...

In this fictionalized journal, Anastasia Romanov lives again. Through her eyes, we witness the day-to-day splendor the czar's family experienced before the onslaught of the Russian Revolution. However, one senses also that crowding the outskirts of Anastasia's ornate diary are hundreds of thousands of teeming serfs, just beginning to percolate.

The funniest, most popular kid in school, Charles Aubrey Rogers suffered from depression and later addiction, then ultimately died by suicide. Diary of a Broken Mind focuses on the relatable story of what led to his suicide at age 20 and answers the why behind his addiction and this cause of death, revealed through a mother's story and years of Charles' published and unpublished song lyrics. The closing sections focus on hope and healing - and how the author found her purpose and forgave herself.

The hilarious and pubescent debut book from your favourite British Muslim comedian (that's Tez Ilyas, by the way). You may know and love Tez from his stand-up comedy, his role as Eight in Man Like Mobeen, his Radio 4 series TEZ Talks, or panel shows such as Mock the Week and The Last Leg. Where you won't know him from is 1997, when he was 13¾. (But now you will—because that's what the book is about.) In this suitably dramatic rollercoaster of a teenage memoir, Tez takes us back to where it all began.

When I was eight, there were already seven of us children, and my mother was sick, all the work fell on my shoulders, cooking, washing, milking cows, looking after the children, mending clothes, and also working in the fields. Seeing how poor mother, although sick, was eager to work with all her remaining strength, although at the slightest bending a terrible cough choked her and blood rushed to her throat, I was overcome with despair when I thought that she might die. I begged her in everything not to do anything anymore, that I would replace her in everything.

President Barack Obama received ten thousand letters a day from his constituents. This is the story of the private and profound relationship with letter writers that shaped his presidency. Their voices combine to reveal a diary of a nation. Every evening for eight years, at his request...

Leslie Joy flew in World War II for the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a Lancaster Bomber Pilot. In November 2011, at the age of 88, he recorded this audiobook at his home in North Yorkshire, England. Hear Les tell his very own gripping story about life during and after World War II. Listen to Les recall how he was trained by the RAF as a pilot in Canada, experienced New York City and Chicago as a young man and then how he returned to England to become one of Britain's World War II heroes.

Tras la invasión de Holanda, los Frank, comerciantes judíos alemanes emigrados a Amsterdam en 1933, se ocultaron de la Gestapo en una buhardilla anexa al edificio donde el padre de Anne tenía sus oficinas. Eran ocho personas y permanecieron recluidas desde junio de 1942 hasta agosto de 1944, fecha en que fueron detenidas y enviadas a campos de concentración. En ese lugar y en las más precarias condiciones, Anne, a la sazón una niña de trece años, escribió su estremecedor Diario.

Digging into one's family history can reveal unusual surprises. In my case, I recently discovered my great grandfather, Jesse C. Davisson's first-hand account of his 25-year military experience during an epic period in American history. Jesse was no angel when he first joined the Army in 1893, as an ordinary young man in Philadelphia. His diary follows his subsequent adventures - from learning to ride a horse with the 7th Cavalry, and befriending Indian Scouts, to surviving ambushes, and water-boarding prisoners - all while serving in the American Indian Wars.

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina’s former lover, and Hans’s former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of. At the time of Sturgeon’s confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer’s block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed....

Exactly 100 years ago, a sensitive woman naturalist, nature lover, and accomplished artist began to chronicle all that she encountered while walking and cycling around the countryside of her native England and neighboring Scotland.

This collection of one girl's real, unflinching diary entries about slowly dying of a terminal illness is an unparalleled exploration of the human spirit and what it means to truly live. Many of the feelings I write about are too difficult to share while I'm alive, so I'm keeping everything in...

A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and...

This is the first full-length look at Zapple - The Beatles' label for experimental music and spoken word recordings, and the most ambitious expression of the group's determination to be leading members of the counterculture movement in the late 1960s. Barry Miles, the acclaimed author, was the Zapple label manager and has written an engaging and slightly gossipy you-are-there review of this fascinating period in Beatles history.

Considered one of the greatest—and most influential—writers of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust was also one of its most fascinating figures. A strange, reclusive genius who often lay in bed for days at a time obsessively rewriting his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, Proust was...

As the Uber phenomenon takes over London with its minicab booking app, destroying the trade of the world-famous black cab, trampling history under wheel and smashing prices, Charles Brickfield brings us the life of an Uber driver.

A broke and unemployed musician lands a gig driving a cab through the swamplands of South Louisiana while bobbing and weaving through a nighttime world ruled by drugs, guns, saints, and strippers. In this fuel-injected work of creative nonfiction, Grammy-nominated musician and award-winning writer Dege Legg - also known as Brother Dege - recounts five years behind the wheel while documenting the underworld of Lafayette and its Cajun and Creole hinterlands from the submarine bubble of his cab.