Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

What happens when you take your 85-year-old mother to live with you on a Greek island? In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old ...

Apollo and Thelma is the astonishing true story of Thelma and her brother Paul, 'The Mighty Apollo'. Their twisting tales take author and broadcaster Jon Faine from Melbourne's depression-era slums to the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the Australian outback. Jon revisits the feats of Apollo, a ...

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscrete and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti a...

This book is about the day-to-day struggle to face down the brutality of growing loneliness, to accept the limitations of friendship and intimacy, to honor the process of becoming oneself. Vivian Gornick's strength lies in her refusal to give up. Gornick brings us out on the striving, bustling st...

In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working al...

When Jackson died in 1933, at the tender age of 23, Australian cricket descended into a period of grief not experienced again until the tragic death of Phillip Hughes some 81 years later. Like Hughes, Jackson was a NSW batting prodigy revered by teammates and cricket lovers alike. Crestfallen fan...

When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a ...