A searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which David Baddiel exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life, and his father’s dementia, to the same affectionate scrutiny.

On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. David’s detailing of the affair – including a hilarious focus on how his mother turned their household over to golf memorabilia, and an eye-popping cache of her erotic writings – leads to the inescapable conclusion that Sarah Baddiel was a cross between Jack Niklaus and Erica Jong.

Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family’s past, his father’s memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother’s affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.

My Family: The Memoir is David Baddiel’s candid examination of his childhood, family and memory offering a twisted love letter to his parents.

This is a story of a simple idea that turned into a global movement. This is the story of parkrun, told for the very first time from the man who started it all.

Growing up in the brutal care system of South Africa, Paul Sinton-Hewitt had a lonely, difficult childhood. Yet he found solace in running – a simple pleasure that taught him resilience and offered a young boy a sense of self-worth.

With dogged determination, Paul built a stable family life for himself and eventually settled in the UK. But by 2004 he was struggling to hold it all together. He’d lost the successful career he’d worked so hard for, his marriage had broken down, and now a devastating injury threatened to cut him off from the running club which had been a lifeline.

In search of connection and purpose, Paul came up with a simple idea. He would start a weekly time trial run every Saturday morning in his local park. There would be no winners or losers, it would always be free and Paul would be there every week – even on Christmas Day – whether or not anyone else came. Little did he know that from just thirteen runners on that first Saturday, parkrun would grow into a 10 million strong community across five continents. Twenty years on parkrun continues to grow, bringing together people from all walks of life in search of health, happiness and community.

Filled with hope and optimism, One Small Step is a powerful affirmation of how coming together in simple ways can change our own lives and might even change the world.

The Tenth Edition introduces diverse, compelling, relevant texts-from Civil War songs and stories to The Turn of the Screw to The Great Gatsby to poems by Juan Felipe Herrera and Claudia Rankine to a science fiction cluster featuring Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin. And continuing its course of innovative and market-responsive changes, the anthology now offers resources to help instructors meet today's teaching challenges. Chief among these resources is InQuizitive, Norton's award-winning learning tool, which includes interactive questions on the period introductions and often-taught works in the anthology. In addition, the Tenth Edition maintains the anthology's exceptional editorial apparatus and generous and diverse slate of texts overall. Available in print and as an annotatable ebook, the Shorter Tenth Edition is ideal for online, hybrid or in-person teaching.

With exclusive band interviews and over a decade of deep research, in The Book of ABBA, renowned music journalist Jan Gradvall explores the secret to ABBA's success.

Over half a century after their songs were recorded, ABBA’s songs still make people the world over dance and sing every day, and their ability to evoke every emotion has made them the ultimate soundtrack to major life events, from birthday parties and weddings to heartbreaks and memorials. Since interviewing the four members of ABBA for an article in 2013 – at which time the band had not been interviewed for 30 years – a relationship was sparked between writer Jan Gradvall and the band, and he was granted unique access for the next decade. He has interviewed each of them exclusively, and they share their thoughts and opinions with him here more openly than ever before.

Gradvall places ABBA at the centre of the musical universe, and alongside his fascinating interviews, he gives readers the socio-cultural context of how the band’s sound was formed – including the melancholic hints of Swedish folk music and the dansband culture of their formative years – and shows how the story of ABBA is also the story of Sweden and the internationalisation of pop culture.

This remarkably intimate, approved biography brings readers a few steps closer to one of the world’s most famously private bands.

The Tenth Edition introduces diverse, compelling, relevant texts-from Civil War songs and stories to The Turn of the Screw to The Great Gatsby to poems by Juan Felipe Herrera and Claudia Rankine to a science fiction cluster featuring Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin. And continuing its course of innovative and market-responsive changes, the anthology now offers resources to help instructors meet today's teaching challenges. Chief among these resources is InQuizitive, Norton's award-winning learning tool, which includes interactive questions on the period introductions and often-taught works in the anthology. In addition, the Tenth Edition maintains the anthology's exceptional editorial apparatus and generous and diverse slate of texts overall. Available in print and as an annotatable ebook, the Shorter Tenth Edition is ideal for online, hybrid or in-person teaching.

With a racing career spanning more than four decades, coming second is never an option for Peter Lindenberg. Troubled by a lack of self-confidence, Peter’s ‘average’ childhood saw a bitter parent who doubted his abilities, a demanding school system that forced him to fit the mould, a younger brother who was better at everything, and brutal, undeserved beatings with a sjambok. But when Peter tasted the buzz of barefoot water-skiing he found it impossible to resist, and went on to break records, earn numerous Springbok Colours, and win many world championships. This, however, was just the start.

Little did Peter know the sporting magic that would follow in his life – first as a powerboat racer and then as a race car driver. Despite counting on pins and metal to hold his battered body intact, being arrested unjustly, a serious motor racing accident with his car going up in flames, and a brain haemorrhage, Peter keeps going flat out and quickly ranks on the international championship charts, cheats death twice, and presses the reset button to positively influence a failed marriage.

Flat Out and Fearless is Peter’s cut-to-the-chase life journey that has rendered him one bionic man who is proud of his blatant honesty and his courageous quest to uplift and transform the lives of the downtrodden.

“the bird is freed”
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, commentators were rooting for the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX to succeed. Here was a tough leader who could grab back power from Twitter’s entitled workforce, motivate them to get “extremely hardcore,” and supercharge Twitter’s profit and potential. And it was all out of the goodness of his own heart, rooted in his fervent belief in the necessity of making Twitter friendlier to free speech. "I didn’t do it to make more money,” Musk said. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.” 

Once Musk charged into the Twitter headquarters, the command-and-control playbook Musk honed at Tesla and SpaceX went off the rails immediately. Distilling hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal documents, Slack messages, presentations, as well as court filings and congressional testimony, Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world’s online public square into his own personal megaphone. 

You’ll hear from employees who witnessed the destruction of their workplace in real-time, seeing years of progress to fight disinformation and hate speech wiped out within a matter of months. There’s the machine-learning savant who went all-in on Twitter 2.0 before getting betrayed by his new CEO, the father whose need for healthcare swept him into Musk’s inner circle, the trust and safety expert who became the subject of a harassment campaign his former boss incited, and the many other employees who tried to save the company from their new boss’s worst instincts. This is the story of Twitter, but it’s also a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs.

Riveting, character-driven, and filled with jaw-dropping revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. It’s the next best thing to being there, and you won’t have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop.

Norman McFarlane was just out of high school when he was conscripted for national service and sent to Angola.

Like so many other ordinary troopies, he was thrown into the horror, deprivation and banality of war. He recounts his loss of innocence in Angola, the subsequent ‘camps’ and his journey towards confronting his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Told with disarming honesty and humour, he gives voice to a generation of white South African men forced into a grisly, life-defining experience.

One of the most celebrated political leaders of our time, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealised version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband’s politics. Behind his back, she was trying to orchestrate an armed seizure of power, a path he feared would lead to an endless war.

Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage – its longings, its obsessions, its deceits – making South African history a page-turning political biography. Winnie and Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn’t affect just the couple at its centre, but an entire nation.

It is also a Shakespearean drama in which bonds of love and commitment mingle with timeless questions of revolution, such as whether to seek retribution or a negotiated peace. Steinberg reveals, with power and tender emotional insight, how far these forever-entwined leaders would go for each other and where they drew the line. For in the end, both knew theirs was not simply a marriage, but a struggle to define anti-apartheid policy itself.

An inspirational new collection on turning tragedy into triumph by Holocaust survivor and multi-million copy bestselling author of Man's Search for Meaning.

During his lifetime, world renowned psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl had an unshakably optimistic outlook on life. He believed that regardless of circumstance, we can all find meaning and fulfilment in our lives, even in the face of great adversity.

But how much influence do we have on shaping our own lives? How do we seize opportunities and create a meaningful life? And in doing so, can we still respect the dignity of others and tolerate all views?

Published in English for the first time, Embracing Hope shows that by exercising our freedoms, we have a duty and responsibility to ourselves, to others and to the world around us. This collection of timeless lessons offers hope and consolation, admonition and warning, and reveals how to turn tragedy into triumph and lead a fulfilled, purposeful life.

The groundbreaking, intimate and inspiring memoir from Pope Francis.

Pope Francis originally intended this exceptional book to appear only after his death, but the needs of our times and the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope have moved him to make this precious legacy available now.

HOPE is the first autobiography in history ever to be published by a Pope. Written over six years, this complete autobiography starts in the early years of the twentieth century, with Pope Francis’s Italian roots and his ancestors’ courageous migration to Latin America, continuing through his childhood, the enthusiasms and preoccupations of his youth, his vocation, adult life, and the whole of his papacy up to the present day.

In recounting his memories with intimate narrative force (not forgetting his own personal passions), Pope Francis deals unsparingly with some of the crucial moments of his papacy and writes candidly, fearlessly and prophetically about some of the most important and controversial questions of our present times: war and peace (including the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East), migration, environmental crisis, social policy, the position of women, sexuality, technological developments, the future of the Church and of religion in general.

HOPE includes a wealth of revelations, anecdotes and illuminating thoughts. It is a thrilling and very human memoir, moving and sometimes funny, which represents the ‘story of a life’ and, at the same time, a touching moral and spiritual testament that will fascinate readers throughout the world and will be Pope Francis’s legacy of hope for future generations.

As a child I would often lie awake at night, praying that through some miracle I would be woken up by people who had come to take me back to my rightful family, and that those I had come to know as my parents would tell me the truth: that I was, in fact, adopted and had been born a girl and they had had a doctor operate on me.’

Growing up as Kgositsile, meaning ‘king’,  Tshiamo Modisane  always knew that she was a girl despite her assigned birth gender. This talented child of a pastor from KwaThema and Daveyton townships near Johannesburg was expected to conform to conservative black culture’s expectations for a male, and would endure censure and even abuse from family, friends, peers and strangers into adulthood. Yet Tshiamo began making courageous choices at the age of five, a journey of both self-doubt and self-belief that culminated in gender-affirmation surgery in her thirties. With sass, faith and baked-in confidence from her family ties to the entertainment world, she successfully transitioned from male to female while navigating a career as an actress, celebrity stylist and Lux’s first gender-non-conforming brand ambassador.

As admirable as it is affirming, this poignant memoir examines past hurts and present truths, and opens up a sorely needed discussion about unconditional acceptance.

Nadia Kamies has written a profound and moving meditation on what it meant to grow up ‘coloured’ in South Africa under apartheid. The photographs from family albums that gave rise to this project not only represent the aspirations of the families and community about whom Kamies is writing, but are also repositories of memories weighted equally with joy and sorrow. Kamies mines these images for their secrets, showing them to be a record of the past and a promise of what the future might be.

Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Shakespeare is a fascinating collection of surprising revelations, quirky characters and other fascinating pieces of trivia from the world of the great English bard. From the stories behind his well-known plays and poems, through the actors and theatres that have entertained his works, to his legacy in popular culture and beyond, an intriguing and unusual history of his life and times is revealed. Drawing back the curtains on this iconic English character, there is something here for every enthusiast to relish. This authoritative and absorbing book is published to coincide with the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's death on 23rd April 2016.

The Tenth Edition introduces diverse, compelling, relevant texts-from Civil War songs and stories to The Turn of the Screw to The Great Gatsby to poems by Juan Felipe Herrera and Claudia Rankine to a science fiction cluster featuring Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin. And continuing its course of innovative and market-responsive changes, the anthology now offers resources to help instructors meet today's teaching challenges. Chief among these resources is InQuizitive, Norton's award-winning learning tool, which includes interactive questions on the period introductions and often-taught works in the anthology. In addition, the Tenth Edition maintains the anthology's exceptional editorial apparatus and generous and diverse slate of texts overall. Available in print and as an annotatable ebook, the anthology is ideal for online, hybrid or in-person teaching.

Sue Barker first walked through those famous wrought-iron gates aged 13 in 1969 to play in the National Schools event. What Sue didn't know then, was that every year for the next half century, she would be back in some capacity. As a junior, aged 15, as a semi-finalist and Grand-Slam winner ranked No.3 in the world, as a broadcaster leading the BBC coverage for thirty years and for the first time, as a fan in 2023.

And now she returns as a storyteller.

The magic has stayed the same,but times have changed. With her first-hand insight and perspective, Sue paints an intimate portrait of the place, past and present, full of behind-the-scenes details drawn from her own experiences as well as personal conversations with her former mentors, contemporary players, friends and colleagues - giants of the game such as Rod Laver, Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Roger Federer, Venus Williams and many others. They share poignant memories with her and some startling revelations, from Sampas's deep regret that he didn't involve his parents more in his Centre Court triumphs to Borg divulging that McEnroe was always the quietest presence in the locker room ... You cannot be serious!

From the most talked-about matches and famous rivalries to the fashions and trends, from the stunning breakthroughs, to the near wins and gut-wrenching disappointments, Sue's personal history of Wimbledon is touched throughout by Championship stardust and is as tightly packed with stories as the courts are with blades of grass.

The Patient, known as Mrs. Wingfield, has been horribly injured in a fall from her balcony. Unable to communicate, it could have been an accident, attempted suicide or worse still a coldblooded killer bent on murder. While relatives gather around her hospital bed the tension builds as an ingenious device helps Mrs. Wingfield convey a message that could solve the mystery.

South African playwright Hannah Meade arrives in London for the opening night of her new play. She has arranged to meet Pierre, the student she was in love with when she taught English in Paris. During their time together, they lied their way towards truths they were too young and inexperienced to endure. Perhaps this time they will have a second chance.

As the reader is drawn from contemporary London back to Paris on the eve of the war in Iraq, the mystery of past events is brought to vivid life in a series of dramatic, intriguing and deeply moving encounters. Written in layered, stark prose, The White Room lays bare many of our assumptions about language, identity, memory, loss and love.

‘Craig Higginson is at the vanguard of the latest and most exciting novelists in South Africa, both robust and sensitive, offering a barometer of the best to be expected from the newest wave of writing in the country.’ – André Brink

‘In its conception and execution, The White Room is remarkable ... Evocative and dreamlike, yet all too nightmarishly real, this is a story so moving that it leaves a powerful afterimage on the reader’s imagination.’ – Craig Mackenzie

Janet Hodgson traces the life of Xhosa prophet Ntsikana (1780–1821) from his birth through his years as a Christian convert, evangelist, and composer of enduring hymns.

Ntsikana is known as one of the first Christians to adapt Christian ideas to African culture, writing hymns in isiXhosa and translating concepts into terms that resonated with his Xhosa community.

Even today, his hymns are among the most important in the amaXhosa churches, and he is regarded as an important symbol of both African unity and Black Consciousness.