Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Discover the revelatory royal autobiography of the year, with stories featuring Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III and many more. From an early age, Grant Harrold was always obsessed with the royal family. Glued to the television screen watching countless documentaries on Her Majesty the Queen...

Brought to you by Penguin. My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress... So take me for a man or a woman as you wish. By the age of thirty, the novelist who had been born Aurore Dupin in 1804 had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English...

Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with their show Nanette. Now they take us through the defining moments in their life and their powerful decision to tell the truth—no matter the cost. Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby’s growth as a queer person, to their ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and their struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing to date—a brutally honest and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance and self-acceptance. A profound...

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

When Jan Morris joined the 1953 Everest expedition and was first to get news of the ascent back to London, she became the most famous journalist in the world. So began a glittering career covering the Eichmann trial, interviewing Che Guevara and scooping the story of Suez collusion. Morris transitioned in the early seventies and documented the experience in Conundrum. She was a pioneer and her books, including Venice and the Pax Britannica trilogy, have inspired readers across the globe.

Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for their bookselling apprenticeship, a decision which has bedevilled him ever since. He'd intended to stay for a year before launching into some less dusty, better remunerated career. Unfortunately for him, the alluring smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap proved irresistible. Soon he was balancing stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows with and trying not to upset the store's resident ghost.

Richard Coles narrates this witty account of life as a parish priest and Radio 4 broadcaster. After a life of sex and drugs and the Communards - brilliantly recounted in the highly acclaimed first volume of his memoirs Fathomless Riches - the Reverend Richard Coles went on to devote his life to God and Christianity. He is also a much-loved broadcaster, presenting Saturday Live on Radio 4 and giving us regular reason to Pause for Thought on Radio 2.

The extraordinary life of history's first modern lesbian who inspired the television series Gentleman Jack. Anne Lister's journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was a Regency landowner, an intrepid world traveller...and an unabashed lover of other women. In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne Lister as we've never seen her before: a woman in some ways very much of her time and in others far ahead of it.

Pop-culture phenomenon, social rights advocate, and the most prominent LGBTQ+ voice on YouTube, Tyler Oakley brings you Binge, his New York Times bestselling collection of witty, personal, and hilarious essays. For someone who made a career out of over-sharing on the Internet, Tyler has a...

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate. Queer Heroes of Myth & Legend brings to life characters who are romantic, brave, mysterious, and always fantastical. It is a magnificent celebration of queerness through the ages in all its legendary glory.

Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary. Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed-race, non-binary person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society.

Bloomsbury presents The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale, read by Lissa Berry. 'Jaw-droppingly amazing' DAILY MAIL WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Born in 1900 to a promiscuous American oil heiress and a British army captain, Marion Barbara Carstairs...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING LUCAS HEDGES, RUSSELL CROWE AND NICOLE KIDMAN, AND WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY JOEL EDGERTON ‘A necessary, beautiful book’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You ‘A brilliant memoir’ Guardian The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in...

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a 19th-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

'Fluent and witty . . . confident . . . highly readable' Kathryn Hughes, GUARDIAN 'Brilliant - so vivid and so sharp, fantastically clever and consistently fascinating' KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite Was Shakespeare gay? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might...

'Vera Gedroits was a true medical heroine: outrageous, intrepid and devoted to saving lives. Miranda Seymour’s genius as a story teller brings this astonishing woman blazing back to life. I shall never forget her' LADY ANTONIA FRASER 'Miranda Seymour has written a wonderful and unputdownable...

'This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves' DAILY TELEGRAPH The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the...

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2025 A Sunday Times Best Book of 2025 A Guardian Best Sports Book 2025 A unique memoir from British cycling’s most fascinating competitor. In the summer of 2020, sportswriter David Walsh invited Pippa York began a series of journeys...

Brought to you by Penguin. An inspiring and intimate self-portrait of the champion of equality that encompasses her brilliant tennis career, unwavering activism, and an ongoing commitment to fairness and social justice. In this spirited account, Billie Jean King details her life's journey to...