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 recognisable lead singer of the Carpenters. For more options...

'Often, at the hour of day when the savannah grass is streaked with silver, and pale gold rims the silhouettes of the hills, I drive with my dogs up to the Mukutan, to watch the sun setting behind the lake, and the evening shadows settle over the valleys and plains of the Laikipia plateau.' Kuki Gallmann's haunting memoir of bringing up a family in Kenya in the 1970s first with her husband Paulo, and then alone, is part elegaic celebration, part tragedy, and part love letter to the magical spirit of Africa. . For more options...

In this dazzling conjunction of subject and author, the great English novelist Aldous Huxley, the “wholly civilized man,” is brought wholly alive in a magnificent full-scale biography by the brilliant English novelist Sybille Bedford, an intimate friend of the Huxleys through four decades. With a pointillistic richness of moment, place, and talk, she re-creates not only the private Huxley and the literary Huxley but the entire intellectual and social era to which he was central. For more options...

'June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support'. In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For more options...

Brendan Behan was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1923. He came from a family of rebels. For more options...

From early childhood, when her eccentric mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of travelling at a horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door. Framed by a recent 150-mile journey through Yorkshire and Northumberland, "Over the Hills and Far Away" also dips back into the journeys by horse Candida has taken at the turning points in her life. For more options...

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. "The Orwell Diaries" presents eleven of them, covering the period 1931-1949, and follows Orwell from his early years as a writer to his last literary notebook. For more options...

After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland began to crave silence. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Australian bush, and the Isle of Skye. For more options...

Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. For more options...

Determined to tread her own path, Austrian film sensation, Romy Schneider was talented, honest, prickly, loving and ultimately tragic. The star of over sixty movies including the cult, "What's New Pussycat? "Bloodline", "The Assassination of Trotsky", "The Cardinal" and "The Victors", at the height of her fame she ranked alongside Bardot, Loren and Cardinale. For more options...

When Richard Benson was growing up he felt like the village idiot with O'levels' glowing. School reports aren't much help when you're trying to help a sow give birth, or drive a power harrow in a straight line without getting half the hedgerow stuck in the tines. For more options...

The 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature--the first African to be awarded the prize--writes a highly incisive and deeply affecting re-creation of colonial Nigeria based on a cache of letters he discovered after his father's death. For more options...

In this astounding book (winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 2005) Hilary Spurling's fascinating exploration of Matisse's world uncovers the secret life of the artist, whose paintings shocked and infuriated his contemporaries while paving the way for modern art. This beautifully presented second volume tells the story of Matisse's growing artistic maturity and the relationship between his life and art from 1909 to 1954, his glory years.. For more options...

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. For more options...

A lot has changed since Kitchen Confidential - for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business-and for Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. For more options...

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined...The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. For more options...