From one of China's most highly regarded writers, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice finalist for the International Booker Prize, Three Brothers is a beautiful and heartwrenching memoir of the author's childhood and family life during the Cultural Revolution In this heartfelt, intimate memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, painting a vivid portrait of rural China in the 1960s and '70s. Three Brothers is a literary testament to the great humanity and small joys that exist even in times of darkness. With lyricism and deep emotion, Yan chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own. Living in a remote village, Yan's parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and while Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and even steals from his father to buy sesame seed cakes. He yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty. A philosophical portrait of grief, death, home, and fate that gleams with Yan's quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances.

On childhood holidays to the western coast, Tim Winton's days followed a joyous rhythm. In the mornings, the sun and surf kept him outside, in the water. In the afternoons, as the horizon wobbled with mirages and the wind came in from the ocean, he was driven inside, to books. In the 'simple, peculiar shack' that his family borrowed each year there was a small library: a room with four walls of books, a world unto itself. Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir is a beautiful delicate memoir in which Winton writes about his obsession with what happens where the water meets the shore - about diving, dunes, beachcombing - and the sense of being on the precarious, wondrous edge of things that haunts his novels. It is a book about the ebb and flow that became a way of life, and that shaped one of our finest writers. 'Both a serial romantic and a truly gifted novelist' - Mariella Frostrup, Mail on Sunday.

In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness-diagnosed only years later as epilepsy-marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase" is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey.

With a new introduction by JESMYN WARD 'Zora Neale Hurston was a knockout in her life, a wonderful writer and a fabulous person. Devilishly funny and academically solid: delicious mixture' MAYA ANGELOU First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston's literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life - public and private - of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler and champion of the black experience in America. Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed high: 'I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and a sword in my hands.' 'One of the greatest writers of our time' TONI MORRISON

INTRODUCED BY LISSA EVANS 'I envy anyone yet to discover the joy of Monica Dickens. She's beady eyed, big hearted and blissfully funny' Nina Stibbe 'One Pair of Feet is not just a spirited and entertaining account of the training of a hospital nurse in wartime but a fascinating glimpse into a time and a culture so recent and yet so utterly changed' Marina Lewycka As the effects of the war raging in Europe begins to be felt at home in London, Monica Dickens decides to do her bit and to pursue a new career, and so enrols as a student nurse at a hospital in rural Hertfordshire. By nature clever and spirited, she struggles to submit to the iron rule of the Matron and Sisters, and is alternately infuriated and charmed by her patients. That's not to mention the mountains of menial work that are a trainee's lot. But there are friends among the staff and patients, night-time escapades to dances with dashing army men, and her secret writing project to keep her going. 'Monica's naked curiosity and general bolshiness are easy to identify with, and as a narrator she always tells us what we're longing to know - it's like listening to a friend's anecdote, and egging them on' LISSA EVANS If you enjoyed One Pair of Feet, you will love the novel that followed it. My Turn to Make the Tea, Monica Dickens's lively and entertaining novel about life as a cub reporter on a regional newspaper, is also published as a Virago Modern Classic.

'n Biografie van die bekroonde skrywer Jeanne Goosen, met foto's, briewe en bydraes van vriende wat vertel hoe hulle dié ikoniese figuur ken. Die skrywer, Petrovna Metelerkamp, is die 2019-wenner van die ATKV-Veertjie vir nie-fiksie vir Ingrid Jonker - 'n Biografie. Die boek bevat materiaal wat voorheen ontoeganklik was en beloof om ure se leesgenot te verskaf aan die duisende aanhangers van die digter-dramaturg en skrywer van Ons is nie almal so nie.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time-Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez-remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss. "I find myself remembering that my father used to say that everyone has three lives: the public, the private, and the secret." On a weekday morning in March 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. In this intimate and honest account on grief and death, Rodrigo Garcia not only contemplates his father's mortality and remarkable humanity, but also his mother's tremendous charm and tenderness. Mercedes Barcha, Gabo's constant companion and creative muse, was one of the foremost influences on his life and art. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes is a revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss and a rich depiction of a son's love.

A genius of literary suspense, known to millions as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of interviews, Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author, firmly placing Jackson within the American Gothic tradition.

'We feasted on love, every mode of it - solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers.' C. S. Lewis The celebrated scholar and writer C. S. Lewis achieved great success in his life - yet to many he remained an engima. Although he had many friends, few if any ever saw the real, private Lewis and for six decades of his life he remained a confirmed bachelor. Then, at the age of sixty, Lewis met Joy Davidman. Davidman, an unconventional American divorcee, turned his world upside down. It was with her that Lewis truly found love and was drawn out of his shell. This is the story of their brief but incandescent love, its tragic end and a faith that endures beyond even the deepest grief. This updated edition contains a new Introduction by author Brian Sibley and a Preface by the UK's leading Lewis scholar, Alister McGrath.

Award-winning poet David Mura's critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb, where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE THE STARS? 'Look at a satellite image of the Earth. Where it was once as dark as night, it is now lit up like a Christmas tree. If you zoom in on a city, you'll see floodlights, neon lights, car lights, and streetlamps. If you zoom in even further, to your own bedroom, you might see lamps and TV, tablet, and phone screens. Humans have always struggled with the dark, but isn't it light enough now? What is all this artificial light doing to us and everything else that lives? What is it doing to our sleep patterns and rhythms and bodies? AN ODE TO DARKNESS explores our intimate relationship with the dark: why we are scared of it, why we need it and why the ever-encroaching light is damaging our well-being. Under the dark polar night of northern Norway, journalist Sigri Sandberg meditates on the cultural, historical, psychological and scientific meaning of darkness, all the while testing the limits of her own fear.

Praise for UPTON SINCLAIR and the other American Century
""I look forward to all of Kevin Mattson's works of history and I've notbeen disappointed yet. Upton Sinclair is a thoughtful, well-researched, and extremely eloquently told excavation of the history of theAmerican left and, indeed, the American nation, as well as a testamentto the power of one man to influence his times. Well done.""
--Eric Alterman, author of When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences
""A splendid read. It reminds you that real heroes once dwelt among us. Mattson not only captures Sinclair's character, but the world he inhabited, with deft strokes whose energy and passion easily match his subject's.""
--Richard Parker, author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
""From the meat-packing houses of Chicago to the automobile factories of Detroit to the voting booths of California, Upton Sinclair cut a wide swath as a muckraking writer who exposed the injustices rendered by American industrial capitalism. Now Kevin Mattson presents a much-needed exploration of this complex crusader. This is a thoughtful, provocative, and gripping account of an important figure who appeared equal parts intellectual, propagandist, and political combatant as he struggled to illuminate the 'other American century' inhabited by the poor and powerless.""
--Steven Watts, author of The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

At Close of Day is the author's thoughts and meditations about old-age, aging and the end of a life, together with memories of a general nature to give a stirring depiction of the author’s life of almost eighty years. The series of autobiographical books that started with ’n Duitser aan die Kaap, Merksteen and Die laaste Afrikaanse boek is concluded with this work.

It is a highly personal book about old-age, the process of writing and self-determination with commentary about aging and being old in a modern society, and was updated for the last time on 26 April 2017, a few days before his death. He gives practical hints and information about the possible and probable end of his life. The element of farewell and acceptance are obvious throughout the text. He realizes that old age becomes the main theme of his thoughts and his daily life.

The references and quotations are poignant and speak of someone who made his reading world his living word. In the end he explains his liberating decision about his planned suicide.

This edition, expanded to include the text of letters unavailable at the time of the volume's first publication in 1969, records James Boswell's quest over a period of more than twenty years to amplify his knowledge of his major biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, through a detailed correspondence with a wide network of friends, informants, and other authorities. The volume, with revised and updated annotation, shows not just Boswell's struggles through his personal distresses to gather material for his Life of Johnson, but notes many of his revisions of his sources, changes made in manuscript and proof, and revisions of the first and second editions. It presents letters that illuminate the contemporary reception of his powerfully innovative, controversial, and influential biography (which appeared first in 1791), taking the story as far as exchanges in 1808 between Boswell's friend and editor, Edmond Malone, and his son, James Boswell the younger, about corrections for the sixth edition of 1811. Throughout, the annotation brings to life an extensive range of eighteenth-century figures, issues and topics.The Times Literary Supplement (23 July 1970) found the interest of this 'fascinating' volume threefold: 'It gives fresh evidence of Boswell's scrupulousness, ability and tact; it leads us to a fuller understanding of what people expected from biography, and what were eighteenth-century notions of propriety and accuracy; and it enables us perhaps to define more clearly the achievement of Boswell's masterpiece. ' This corrected and enlarged version (the first edition has been out of print for two decades) will serve as a valuable supplement and companion to the Yale manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, upon which all future editions of Boswell's biography will need to draw.

For many, Ernest Hemingway remains more a compilation of myths than a person: soldier, sportsman, lover, expat and, of course, writer. But the actual life beneath these various legends remains elusive; what did he look like as a laughing child or young soldier? What was his handwriting like and what did he say in his most personal letters? How did the train tickets he held on his way from France to Spain or across the American Midwest feel, and what kind of notes did he take on his journeys? This remarkable book answers these questions. Featuring a foreword by Hemingway's son Patrick and an afterword by his grandson Sean, the book has the intimate feel of being a member of the family. It tells the story of a major American icon through the objects he touched, the moments he saw, the thoughts he had every day. Beautifully designed, including over 400 dazzling images of him at every stage of his life along with the letters, notes and miscellany that made his life so rich, it is an intimate, illuminating portrait like no other. It is a one-of-a-kind, stunning tribute to one of the most titanic figures in literature.

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival. This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true. 'Unforgettable... It's the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up' Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**