Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

With humour, honesty and self-deprecating charm, one of Australia's best known TV actresses lifts the lid on life - both on-screen and off. 'From a young age, I could lie like a chop in gravy. I loved the thrill of crafting a story. It wasn't until my twenties that I made the connection that lyin...

Adelaide Perry was part of the Modernist art movement in Australia and one of the innovative women printmakers between the wars. This biography explores her life and work over a period when the lives of women changed radically. Adelaide studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne and won ...

Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical frontline. There have been exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but his love for the practice of neurosurgery has never wavered. Prompted by his retirement from his full-time job in the NHS, and through his continuing work in Nepal an...

A revelatory and redemptive memoir from the lead guitarist of the legendary band Def Leppard - the first book ever written by one of its members. Chronicling the band's extraordinary rise to superstardom and how they've maintained their success for three decades, this is Phil Collen's amazing sto...

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having starting sleuthing on behalf of societys finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive...

Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer - one ...

At 83 years old, Valerie Taylor has lived a big, bold adventurous life. Born in Australia, Valerie spent a great deal of her childhood in New Zealand. A talented artist, she dropped out of school when she contracted polio and was saved by Sister Elizabeth Kenny's treatment plan; it was two years ...

The reputations of artists are curious things, influenced by factors beyond the quality of the work. Affairs of the Art explores the role loved ones play in burnishing an artist's reputation after he or she dies.

In her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad studied life in Afghanistan before and after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. Now twenty years later, the Taliban is back in power, and Seierstad returns with The Afghans, a book to help us und...

Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At twenty-five, and living in her seventeenth home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life, and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home.Surr...