Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why--despite all the evidence to the...

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's -- Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that, by...

Six glamorous women: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Born into privilege, the Mitford sisters were the "bright young things" of high society London in the 1920s and 1930s. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as "bright young things" in the high society of interwar London. But as the shadow of Fascism crept over Europe, the stark--and very public--differences in their outlooks...

Traces the arc of Lively's life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain's twentieth century.

The children's author recounts his adventures as a young man working in East Africa for the Shell Company, living in the jungle, and later flying a fighter plane in World War II.

"In 1995, on a four-hour-delayed train from Manchester to London, J. K. Rowling conceived of the idea of a boy wizard named Harry Potter. Upon arriving in London, she began immediately writing the first book in the saga. Rowling's true-life, rags-to-riches story is as compelling as the world of Hogwarts that she created. This biography details not only Rowling's life and her love of literature but the story behind the creation of a modern classic"--...

An esteemed memoirist and one of the great editors in British publishing examines aging with the grace of Elegy for Iris and the wry irreverence of I Feel Bad About My Neck.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Sense of an Ending, “an elegant memoir and meditation” (The New York Times Book Review) that grapples with the most natural thing in the world: the fear of death.

A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries...

"What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own...

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the clever child from the 'Little End Room' of his Ulster childhood and adult life, exploring Lewis's unwilling conversion to Christianity, the genesis of his writing, and the web of his relationships.