Biographies & True Stories

'This is a way of putting my life out there, because if I were to write a memoir, there'd be five volumes before I got to The Beatles. So I'm going at it this way, through photographs and quotes. And this is, I feel, a better way for me to do it.' -...

To delegitimize the Messenger is to call into questionthe entire message. During his time, the Makkans called hima poet, a magician, and a madman, among other names. Today,he is insulted with other labels.The question of whether or not he sacrificed his...

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized...

The official retrospective book for Daniel Craig's 5 James Bond 007 films, Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre, No Time To Die.Daniel Craig started his tenure as James Bond with Casino Royale, the long-awaited film adaptation of Ian...

In the famous photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, one man kneels beside him, trying to staunch the blood: an undercover Memphis police officer embedded with the Invaders, a militant Black group in talks with King. This spy, the kneeling...

A fascinating, forgotten story of the six brilliant women who launched modern computing.As the Cold War began, America's race for tech supremacy was taking off. Experts rushed to complete the top-secret computing research started during World War II,...

They're not like us, the royal family. Or are they? We simply don't know and we're all desperate to find out.This A-Z of royalty is the practical miscellany of the royal family that everyone's been waiting for. Did the Queen Mum really give all her...

To build up a future, you have to know the past.' Otto Frank, 1967 In late 1940s Amsterdam, when Otto Frank unwrapped his daughter Anne's diary with trembling hands and began to read the first pages, he discovered a side to his daughter...

How does the machinery of government respond when a King steps out of line?The relationship between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson created a constitutional crisis that has fascinated the public for decades. Unwilling to accept the idea of the...

Where are the women philosophers? The answer is right here.The history of philosophy has not done women justice: you've probably heard the names Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and Locke - but what about Hypatia, Arendt, Oluwole and Young?The Philosopher...

His style was iconic, and vintage '80s: aviator goggles, Jheri curls, neck roll, boxy pads.For the first time, Dickerson is telling his story. And he's not holding anything back.Eric Dickerson is the greatest player in Los Angeles Rams history and the...

Over the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota has spent his life traveling extensively and documenting the world around him. From his coverage of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s to his incomparable...

How Robespierre's career and legacy embody the dangerous contradictions of democracy.Maximilien Robespierre (17581794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other...

'I'm leaving Europe! The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. To swim, to trample the grass, to hunt, and of course to smoke; to drink liquor as strong as molten metal. I will come back with limbs of iron, a dark skin, a burning eye. I...

If you want to know about writing, about how to make others share the horror and intensity of an experience, try the first piece in this collection, Justice at Night. Martha Gellhorn wrote it as a 28-year-old, having just returned home to the States...

A gripping true story of wartime espionage.Dundee, 1937. When housewife Mary Curran became suspicious of hairdresser Jessie Jordan's frequent trips to Nazi Germany, she had no idea that she was about to be drawn into an international web of...

Discover one of the Scottish Enlightenment's brightest stars.Among the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, the name of James Hutton is overlooked. Yet his Theory of the Earth revolutionised the way we think about how our planet was formed and...

In 1944, Glasgow received one of the greatest gifts ever made to any city in the world: a collection of over 6,000 artworks of many types spanning centuries and civilisations. The benefactors were Glasgow-born shipping magnate Sir William Burrell and...

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two...

This is the story of how one man, with a bit of help from his friends, created a revolution in the hitherto staid world of Scotch Whisky. But by creating the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, he gave whisky drinkers access to the finest distilled liquor on the...

All over the world traditional tales were told at the fireside until their place came to be taken by books, newspapers, radio and television. A.J. Bruford and D.A. MacDonald present an entertaining collection of the oral tales that have been passed down...

In August 1956 a young shepherd, his wife, two-year-old daughter and ten-day-old son sat huddled in a small boat on Loch Monar in Ross-shire as a storm raged around them. They were bound for a tiny, remote cottage at the western end of the loch which was...

At various stages of his life, the celebrated American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962) presented himself as a literary dandy, a shabby bohemian, a wounded war veteran, a humble farmer, a courtly lover, and a genteel but aloof Southerner. In private...

Before he had turned 21, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) upended the house of French poetry and left it in shambles. What makes Rimbaud's poetry important, argues Seth Whidden, is part of what makes his life so compelling: rebellion, audacity, creativity and...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born on 30 November 1835 in Monroe County, Missouri, was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Twain freely adapted the incidents of his life and the stories he heard as a...

Leonard Bernstein (19181990) was one of twentieth-century music's most successful and recognisable figures. In a career spanning five decades he conducted many of the world's leading orchestras, and composed scores for landmark musicals such as Candide...

Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 - 2 July 1961) enjoyed a life of literary triumph set against a backdrop of some of the grandest landscapes in the world. Verna Kale's new, narrative portrait of Hemingway challenges some of the long-held assumptions...

Few artists have exerted such an influence on modern art as Paul Cezanne (19 January 1839 - 22 October 1906). Picasso, Braque and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting. This reassessment of Cezanne's life and art discusses the key...

In this biography of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers, David A. Shafer takes readers on a chronological voyage through Artaud's life. Yet, as Artaud navigated through the...

Traditional biographies of Watt have concentrated on the steam engine, but in this book Ben Russell tells a richer story, exploring the processes by which ephemeral ideas were transformed into tangible artefacts and the multifaceted world of production...

Yukio Mishima was the most internationally acclaimed Japanese author of the twentieth century: prodigiously talented, dazzlingly prolific and a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize. Yet in 1970 Mishima shocked the world with a bizarre attempt at a coup...

A guide to the music and multifaceted career of Canadian artists and songwriters Tegan and Sara.Through interviews with Tegan and Sara, their collaborators, journalists, and fans, this book explores the multifaceted career of one of music's most...

Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing meets Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep in this fascinating deep-dive into the science and history of sleep.In Search of Sleep is both a self-help manual for insomniacs, and a sweeping critique of the hustle culture that...

While exploring in the forbidden area near Old Mill Road, Bizzee Bear and Rascal and Rowdy Raccoon discover a worried Nester, after a fall maroons him in the woods. Nester is different from the other woodland animals. He has feathers but can't fly and he...

Indigenous Voices Award winner Cole Pauls returns with a robust collection of stories that celebrate the cultural practices and experiences of Dene and Arctic peoplesGathering Pauls's comics from magazines, comic festivals and zine making workshops,...

Weegee was a street photographer for New York's popular press in the 1940s. He was infamous for adjusting the position of dead bodies at crime scenes to make his photographs more pleasing to the eye. Wauter Mannaert and Max de Radigus have succeeded...

**One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2023****Esquire's August 2023 Book Club Pick** 'If books are important to you because you're a reader or a writer, then how books are sold should be important to you as well...

Contemporary themes: the search for meaning and for spirituality in a secular world; the art of attention; reconciliation with the Catholic Church; the meaning and value of art (and the humanities) in the 21st century, especially art from cultures and...

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it.Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to...

Selected by editor Mireille Silcoff, the 2023 edition ofBest Canadian Essaysshowcases the best Canadian nonfiction writing published in 2021."Our current, tumultuous age" writes editor Mireille Silcoff, "is an important time for essayists, because in...

Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award Finalist for the 2023 Ottawa Book Award in English Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2023 National Business Book Award The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most...

The bookshop is, and will always be, the soul of the trade. What happens there does not happen elsewhere. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show there than anywhere else, and I think it's because of books, what they are, what they release...

Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby...

Reaching Mithymna describes the Syrian refugee crisis from a Canadian volunteer's perspective. Secondary theme of the search for identity, familial and ethnic or cultural: Heighton's mother emigrated from Greece.Will appeal to politically-minded readers...

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas...

Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction It's a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. Boy wants girl. Girl says no. Boy takes what he wants anyway. After a violent sexual assault, Eden Boudreau was faced with a choice: call...

The experience of motherhood is monumental, yet rarely discussed in connection with literary or creative life. How do we navigate the twin devotions of love and art? How does motherhood disrupt the creative process? How does it enhance it?Good Mom on...

A radiant, unforgettable memoir of one woman's 450 days spent in captivity, and her defiant refusal to have her humanity stripped away.When Edith meets Luca in a small Northern town, the two connect instantly. Under the Northern Lights, they develop a...