Biographies & Memoirs

TV stars Noel and Sue beat all the odds to stay together and become Britain’s biggest family with 22 children. Meeting as youngsters, Sue first fell pregnant at a young age and the teenage lovebirds, both adopted as babies, were determined to bring up their first baby and build a family together. Their love story continued to blossom—and their children kept on coming! The couple confess to having had an addiction with a difference—a positive addiction motivated by love.

Saraya-Jade Bevis, formerly WWE’s Paige, is one of the biggest names in the wrestling world. She is the youngest two-time WWE Divas Champion and was inaugural NXT’s Women Champion. She ranked first in Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s Female 50 and was named Diva of the Year by Rolling Stone in 2014. She was also the subject of the critically and commercially successful 2019 film Fighting with My Family, produced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and starring Florence Pugh. But before ascending to wrestling superstardom, she was just Saraya. Hell in Boots is Saraya’s real, uncensored, story.

Replete with all the high-octane tales and behind the scenes details you'd expect from a life lived next to the fast lane, Life in the Pitlane will detail the realities of life off the track; the good and the bad, with a particular spotlight on diversity and inclusion within the sport, and all the entertaining stories and behind the scenes details fans of F1 will be looking for. Life in the Pitlane brings a brand-new perspective to the sport.

In this wild, genre-bending audio documentary, New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow dives deep into the strange and storied life of high-society socialite and former Miss Arizona Celia (Cece) Doane.

On 2 August 2015, Irishman Jason Corbett was killed in his North Carolina home by his American wife Molly Martens and her father Tom. Sarah, Jason's eight-year-old daughter, and her brother Jack were also in the house that fateful night, asleep upstairs. Now eighteen years old, Sarah Corbett Lynch tells her story for the first time. She shares her earliest memories of her beloved dad and her life with him, Jack and Molly Martens in their home in North Carolina, and gives her account of the events leading up to the night that changed everything.

Nova Reid, author of The Good Ally, delves into the untold stories of extraordinary, unsung Black women who created and shaped pivotal moments in world history, British culture and society. Through powerful storytelling, personal insights and new research, Nova delves into the lives of pioneers, journalists and rule-breakers who made vital contributions to civil rights, yet have been mythologised, are unknown or erased from history.

You’re falling through time so all I can do is fall with you. The numbness had set in long before I sat at your bedside. But even with senses impaired as the flight touches down at Belfast City I can somehow still feel the screeching of wheels on tarmac scorching something deep into me. So begins Gary Lightbody's phenomenal companion book to the latest, Snow Patrol’s number one album of the same name. While you don’t have to read it to understand the album, you may want to give the album a wee listen for some parts of the book to make sense.

Teenage Sammy has been in care from the age of nine. His mother has tragically spent much of his young life in and out of prison. Sammy has never found a safe haven and has been passed from pillar to post. When he arrives with Casey Watson, he is a closed book, but he slowly begins to open up. Casey realises that he has nobody in his life who he counts as family apart from a neighbour, ‘Uncle Kenny’. Sammy dotes on Kenny, even running away to be with him but having come across similar relationships before, alarm bells star to ring for Casey.

At ten years old, Chelsea opened a lemonade stand and realized she’d make more money if the drinks were spiked. So she added vodka to her recipe and used her earnings to upgrade herself to first-class on a family vacation—leaving her parents and siblings in coach. She moved to Los Angeles and got fired from her temp job when she admitted she didn’t know how to transfer calls. She’s played pickleball with the scions of an American dynasty. She’s sexted a governor. She shared psychedelics with strangers in Spain.

On 11 February 2023, 16-year-old Brianna Ghey left home to meet her friend in a park local to her home in Warrington, Cheshire. Her mother, Esther, was relieved to see her go – a positive step after a difficult and increasingly isolated few years. What Esther didn’t know that day was that Brianna was being lured to the park where she would be tragically murdered. This is the story of Brianna’s death, but it is also the story of her life and of a mother who had to find a way to survive without her.

Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin’s childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor. There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK’s last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid.

In the early 2000s, Dave Gunn and his brother Colin built the Bestwood Cartel, a multi-million-pound empire based on drugs, extortion and violent crime during a time when Nottingham was labelled Britain's gun crime capital. Much has been written about the Gunn Brothers in the media and books such as Hoods, but no gang leader has ever detailed the real-life warfare in Nottingham in the early 2000s. In Bestwood Boss, Dave Gunn sets the record straight with the first ever insider’s account of what led to the blood-soaked ganglands.

In his memoir Barry Silkman tells the incredible story of his career from player to agent with colourful anecdotes of all the characters he encountered along the way, along with some touching, personal recollections of his life so far. Silkman boasts an impressive playing career which lasted 16 years, playing for 11 different clubs including Manchester City. A gifted and skillful player, he was your archetypal Cockney, with Romany gypsy appearance with a shock of black curly hair, tan and socks rolled around his ankles.

Donald McRae has followed boxing all his life. In recent years his love has waned, as criminality, doping and dirty money gnaw away at the soul of boxing. In 2018, grieving the death of his sister and with his parents seriously ill, he sought refuge in boxing again. At just this moment, Tyson Fury completed one of the most shocking comebacks in the history of the sport, proving that it still had the ability to offer thrills and redemption.

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body.

Brooklyn North is the true story of how four Black men were wrongfully convicted of murder—nearly all connected to a once-legendary NYPD homicide detective, Louis Scarcella. Jonathan Fleming, Sundhe Moses, Jabbar Washington, and John Bunn were among dozens of innocent New Yorkers who spent decades in prison—guilty until proven innocent. This Original documentary follows their relentless fight to unveil an insidious pattern of police and prosecutorial corruption in Brooklyn at the height of the war on drugs and a historic peak in violent crime in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Alice Litman died by suicide in May 2022, aged just twenty years old, having already waited almost three years for her first appointment at a gender identity clinic. In stunningly beautiful prose, Caroline Litman captures the realities of an often-messy journey navigating both her daughter’s transition and the days, weeks and months after Alice’s death.

Sue Campbell has been creating change all her life. Starting as a young PE teacher on Manchester's Moss side, she saw first-hand the transformative power of sport. Once hard-to-reach kids started taking initiative, developing discipline and realising their full potential—all they needed was the opportunity to flourish. It was here that sparked the beginning of her mission—to empower, inspire and motivate others through sport—and she hasn't looked back since. In The Game Changer, Sue shares the story of her extraordinary life and career for the very first time.

In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time.

Aged 15, Lorna was living on the streets of Soho, trying to avoid abuse and rape whilst battling an addiction to heroin. She worked as an escort and a stripper, lost custody of her daughter, and relapsed multiple times. But, somehow, and unlike most of the people imprisoned by the streets, Lorna didn't just survive but she flew.

When it comes to the challenge of being a man, Adam Farrer always seems to find a way to fall short. In his second collection of candid personal essays, he vividly recounts his struggles to live up to masculine expectations. This is a book about growing up, trying to define yourself as a man but somehow always missing the mark.

Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867–1934) was the first woman scientist to win worldwide acclaim and was, indeed, one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. Written by Curie’s daughter, the renowned international activist Eve Curie, this biography chronicles Curie’s legendary achievements in science, including her pioneering efforts in the study of radioactivity and her two Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry.

In Breaking Bread, third generation baker, food writer and presenter David Wright examines the universal questions about bread and baking. About the people who make and shape the bread we buy and the difficulties that social and cultural change, food fads and health directives have had, and are having, on the baking industry. After his family bakery sadly closed its doors after seventy-five years, Wright asks if the the closure of the bakery underlines the very idea that bread is a dying foodstuff. Is bread good or bad? And what does the future hold for bread?

He Leadeth Me is a deeply personal story of one man’s spiritual odyssey and the unflagging faith which enabled him to survive the ordeal that wrenched his body and spirit to near collapse. Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some twenty-three agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. In He Leadeth Me, he relates how it was only through an utter reliance on God’s will that he managed to endure.

Hannah Selinger chronicles her rise and fall in the restaurant business, beginning with the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry and ending with her final post serving celebrities at the Hamptons classic Nick & Toni’s. In between, listeners will join Selinger on her emotional journey as she learns the joys of fine fine dining, the allure and danger of power, and what it takes to walk away from a career you love when it no longer serves you.