Beloved wit and raconteur, star of stage and screen, multitalented writer, director and humanitarian – few stars of the twentieth century were as highly regarded as Sir Peter Ustinov.

From his birth in April 1921, this highly acclaimed autobiography spans Ustinov’s extraordinary career as the star of Spartacus, Quo Vadis, Death on the Nile and many other classics. Eccentric relatives, school masters and manic Hollywood moguls are all brought unforgettably to life alongside encounters with the great and the good, from Sir Laurence Olivier to J. B. Priestley.

This warm and revealing book gives an enthralling portrait of a man whose unique gift of laughter made him one of the most popular and respected entertainers in the world.

Petrovna Metelerkamp het geen bekendstelling nodig nie. Sy het jare lank vir tydskrifte soos Huisgenoot en Insig geskryf en in 2000 die uitgewery Hemel & See Boeke gestig. Sy het bekendheid verwerf vir haar biografieë van Ingrid Jonker en Jeanne Goosen.

Petrovna was ook verantwoordelik vir die publikasie van die brieweboeke van onder andere Audrey Blignault, Uys Krige en Hennie Aucamp, asook die memoires van Wilna Snyman, Fanus Rautenbach en Ollie Viljoen.

Met hierdie langverwagte boek deel Petrovna haar herinneringe, wat die geskiedenis van haar herkoms en haar persoonlike ervarings oor baie dekades insluit.

On a defining evening of the 1980s, Donald Trump hosted celebrities and high rollers in a Jersey Shore town to witness 21-year-old Mike Tyson knock out Michael Spinks in just 91 seconds, earning more than the annual payrolls of the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics combined.

Only eight years earlier, Tyson, a troubled child from Brooklyn, was taken under the wing of boxing legend Cus D’Amato in upstate New York. Their story of mutual redemption captivated novelists, screenwriters, and the emerging cable TV industry. Tyson became HBO’s leading man long before Tony Soprano.

Despite the immense success, Tyson's story was more complex and darker than it appeared. Over the decades, he has been villainized, lionized, and fetishized―but never fully humanized until now. Acclaimed biographer Mark Kriegel, who first encountered Tyson as a young reporter, explores Tyson's life through what he survived rather than whom he knocked out.

Tyson, often compared to Jack Dempsey, was more akin to Sonny Liston―Black, feared, and expected to die young. What made Liston a pariah made Tyson a touchstone for a generation influenced by hip hop and gunfire. Kriegel captures not just Tyson’s rise but his profound impact on the American psyche.

An esthetician and single mother with no connections, Anastasia Soare risked her life escaping communist Romania to come to America. Raising Brows tells the remarkable story of how she built a billion-dollar beauty brand and went from watching Oprah's TV show to learn English, to shaping Oprah's eyebrows on the very same show years later.

Anastasia disrupted the beauty industry by applying her art school training on the 'golden ratio' of beauty to eyebrows. Helping women find harmony with their face, Anastasia put eyebrows on the map. She pioneered new makeup products and built a glittering roster of clients like Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Cindy Crawford. But beneath the glossy exterior, Anastasia's path wasn't easy.

In this powerful memoir, she shares her extraordinary journey, putting her Romanian values of hard work, persistence, and optimism to the test in Los Angeles, ignoring the landlords and bank managers who laughed w hen she tried to open a salon focusing on eyebrows.

Anastasia's story serves as a powerful reminder that you can do anything you put your mind to so long as you are passionate and determined. As she says, 'it's the love and effort we put into our pursuits and relationships that truly define our success.'

"I am writing this story without knowing its end: it begins long before I was born and will continue long after I die. I am writing this story to help myself heal and to make you understand."

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules decided it was finally time to tell her story.

Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It takes us from years of Russification, to Olia's grandmother's deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her Aunt Zhenia's school protest, to her own parents' flight from Ukraine when their town was occupied in 2022.

This is an ode to the land, to ideas of home and belonging, and to family stories and recipes passed down the generations - the tang of sour cherries, the best way to make borsch. It is an account of resilience in the hardest of circumstances.

Strong Roots brims with hope and grief. It lays bare the compromises and betrayals of generations struggling and surviving through war, peace, invasion and exile. It is an uplifting reminder of how much the human spirit can endure when born from a land rich with strong roots.

For over three decades, the remarkable story of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Special Operations Unit has remained largely untold. Formed under the direct command of ANC president Oliver Tambo and senior ANC and SACP leader Joe Slovo, this elite unit executed some of the most daring and high-profile attacks against the apartheid state in the 1980s. From the spectacular 1980 Sasol bombings to the 1987 attack at the Wits Command, Special Ops was at the forefront of the armed struggle, targeting strategic economic and military sites with precision and determination.

In this groundbreaking book, the history of Special Ops is brought to life through the voices of its surviving participants. Based on interviews with 48 individuals, this oral history offers an intimate and comprehensive look at the unit's operations, challenges, and achievements. Also drawing from press reports, TRC records and official documents, the narrative provides a balanced assessment of the political context, role, and significance of Special Ops within the broader ANC-led national liberation struggle. Attacking the Heart of Apartheid is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle, the dynamics of armed resistance, and the power of collective action in the pursuit of justice and equality.

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin's Lament, a memoir of the author's attempt to escape the biblical story he'd been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family.

Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily escape: a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."

Yiddish for "Yuck."

FEH follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.

Can he move from feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with-before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him-isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

Op 13 Oktober 2021 is Suid-Afrika tot stilstand geruk deur die nuus oor dominee Liezel de Jager, geliefde leraar van die NG Kerk Suidkus in Amanzimtoti, KwaZulu-Natal, wat in die oprit van die pastorie vermoor is toe sy terugkeer van haar daaglikse oggenddraf saam met vriende. Dit was ondenkbaar dat ’n geestelike leier soos sy, wat ’n enorme impak op haar gemeenskap gehad het, so wreed weggeruk kon word.

Maar nog vreemder gebeure volg in die dae en jare na haar moord. Haar man, Werner, verdwyn skielik spoorloos en word later in ’n bedenklike toestand in ’n suikerrietplantasie gevind. Hy vermoed dat hy moontlik deur Liezel se moordenaars aangeval is. Benewens
verskeie ander amper-noodlottige gebeure rondom Werner, is hy later ook in ’n ongeluk betrokke waar nog twee vroue dood is. Om alles te kroon, sloer die polisie twee jaar lank voordat hulle met die moordondersoek begin.

Intussen voer Liezel se ouers ’n volgehoue stryd om geregtigheid vir hul dogter te kry.

Dit loop uit op ’n suksesvolle hofsaak teen die minister van polisie en die Suid-Afrikaanse Polisiediens, met die gevolg dat Werner weens die moord op sy vrou in hegtenis geneem word, maar later onder misterieuse omstandighede in die hospitaal sterf. Die moord bly
onopgelos.