Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

Born in the fifties to a Sierra Leoneon mother battling mental health problems, Ronnie Archer-Morgan spent his childhood in and out of care. After difficult beginnings, marked by abuse, racism and brushes with both criminals and the police, he got into music, managing to get DJ gigs and, later, a...

A warm, witty and uplifting book about how our families make us who we are... When satirist John Clarke died in April 2017, many people mourned his passing as if they had lost a friend or a member of the family. Many of us felt we grew up with him. After all, for the best part of half a century, ...

With entertaining anecdotes, insider accounts, and expert analysis, Ivereigh's journey through the key episodes of Francis's reform in Rome and the wider Church brings into sharp focus the frustrations and fury, as well as the joys and successes, of one of the most remarkable pontificates of the ...

'My first tenet is write about what is urgent. Good literature, I believe, arises out of a pressing need to express something. Isn't creative writing all about being possessed, seized, obsessed? It's like sexual desire: you cannot sensibly choose what to be attracted to. Urgent subjects reside in...

John Berger is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art through Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political act...

A former CIA officer and curator of the CIA Museum reveals the untold story of Ernest Hemingway's secret life as a spy for both the Americans and Soviets before and during World War II, and explores how his espionage activities influenced his literary work.

Helen Garner is one of Australia's most important and most admired writers. She is revered for her fearless honesty in the pursuit of her craft. But Garner also courts controversy, not least because she refuses to be constrained by the rules of literary form. She has never been afraid to write he...

"In 1939, as Hitler's troops march on Prague, a Jewish couple makes a heartbreaking decision that will save their eight-year-old son's life but change their family forever. Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s always sensing that her family was different in ...

During WW2, a group of Jewish refugees (intellectuals, writers, artists and athletes - most from Germany and Austria) escaped to Britain and were interned as 'enemy aliens'. In 1942, they were selected and trained to form a special unit of commandoes who would be sent back into Europe to play a s...

If China seems unstoppable, so too does its leader Xi Jinping. As General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China, he commands over 1.4 billion people, in a vast country that spans the prosperous megacities of Beijing and Shanghai and desperately poor rural regions where f...