Category: Biography
A beautifully crafted memoir of a family coping with their mother's dementia, Song for Rosaleen is both a celebration of Rosaleen Desmond's life and an unflinching account of the practical and ethical dilemmas that faced her six children. Told with love, insight, humour and compassion, it raises importa ...Show more
Category: Biography
This vivid memoir by well-known New Zealand actor and novelist Barbara Ewing covers her tumultuous childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s - a very different time - and ends in 1962, when she boards a ship for London, to study at the Royal Acade ...Show more
Category: Biography | Reading Level: near fine
The story of a child refugee who faced her fears, found her home and accidentally made history When she was just nine, Golriz Ghahraman and her parents were forced to flee their home in Iran. After a terrifying and uncertain journey, they landed in Auckland where they were able to seek asylum and - ult ...Show more
Category: Biography
Who gave Jonathan Van Ness permission to be the radiant human he is today? No one, honey. The truth is, it hasn't always been gorgeous for this beacon of positivity and joy. Before he stole our hearts as the grooming and self-care expert on Netflix's hit show Queer Eye, Jonathan was growing up in a sm ...Show more
Category: Biography
Sir Lenny Henry is one of the UK's best-loved comedians with a career spanning over forty years. Here he writes about his youth for the first time. A child of the Jamaican diaspora, Lenny Henry was one of seven children in a boisterous, complicated family. With honesty, tenderness and a glorious sense ...Show more
Category: Biography
''This book has found a special place in my heart. It''s as strange, beautiful and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings, as bees in a hive. I loved it'' Helen Macdonald, author of H IS FOR HAWK ''Everyone should own A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, which moved ...Show more
Category: Biography
"Hidden Valley Road contains everything: scientific intrigue, meticulous reporting, startling revelations, and, most of all, a profound sense of humanity. It is that rare book that can be read again and again." -David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon One of the New York Times' "20 most antic ...Show more
Category: Biography
In the tradition of Mary Karr's The Liars' Club and Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shouting, Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric, and severely misguided family. Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn ...Show more
Category: Biography
'A lyrical, engrossing and essential read' - Sathnam Sanghera 'A superbly nuanced reclamation of history and family secrets' - Brian Van Reet, author of Spoils What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history? Svenja's beautiful, aloof grandmother Inge never spoke about the past. All her family k ...Show more
Category: Biography
A personal, powerful and resonant account of the Holocaust by one of the best-loved children's authors. By turns charming, shocking and heart-breaking, this is the true story of Michael Rosen's search for his relatives who "went missing" during the Second World War - told through prose, poetry, maps an ...Show more
Category: Biography
In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father's past: years spent hiding in plain sight in wartorn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew. In 1941, the first Neumann family member was ta ...Show more
Category: Biography
A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was em ...Show more
