Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave by Mark Mordue

$45.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

 The first volume of the long-awaited, near-mythical biography of Nick Cave, by award-winning writer, Mark Mordue. A deeply beautiful, profound, profane and poetic biography of the early formative years of the dark prince of Australian rock 'n' roll, Boy on Fire is Nick Cave's creation story. This is th e story of the artist first as a boy, then as a young man. A deeply insightful work which charts his family, friends, influences, milieu and, most of all, his music, it reveals how Nick Cave shaped himself into the extraordinary artist he would become. As well as a powerfully compelling biography of a singular, uncompromising artist, Boy on Fire is also a fascinating social and cultural biography, a vivid and evocative rendering of a time and place, from the fast-running dark river and ghost gums of Wangaratta, to the nascent punk scene which hit staid 1970s Melbourne like an atom bomb, right through to the torn wallpaper, sticky carpet and the manic, wild energy of nights at the Crystal Ballroom.  Boy on Fire is a stunning biographical achievement. ...Show more

Loss Adjustment by Linda Collins

$40.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

Linda Collins gets up on a Monday morning, dresses for work, makes coffee and goes into her daughter Victoria’s bedroom. Why hasn’t Vicky got up yet? It’s an important day: the start of the second term of her final year at school. Today she will hear her latest exam results. The bedroom is empty. So be gins every parent’s worst nightmare. Collins, a New Zealand journalist based in Singapore, writes with startling candour about her daughter’s suicide: the secrets she kept from her parents, the revelations in the personal journals she left behind, and the struggle of Collins and Malcolm McLeod, Victoria’s father, to find answers in the midst of enormous grief. How, they ask themselves, could they have missed the signs? What did the counsellors at Victoria’s school know about her state of mind? Did her school friends have any idea how desperate she was? And above all, why would a beautiful, talented, much loved young woman take her own life? Loss Adjustment is a wake-up call. New Zealand has the highest suicide rate for teenagers among the world’s wealthy developed countries. Most of those who kill themselves are, like Victoria McLeod, aged 15 to 19. Linda Collins examines the tragedy of teenage suicide from her profoundly personal viewpoint, while Victoria’s journals, uncovered after her death, give an incredibly valuable insight into the unseen stresses and anxieties suffered by many teenagers.  ...Show more

Impossible: My Story by Stan Walker

$40.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

An extraordinary memoir about family, love, belief, redemption and the power of forgiveness. Everything has a reason. Everything has a purpose. Stan Walker is one of the finest singers to emerge from Australia and New Zealand Aotearoa in a generation. When Stan won Australian Idol in 2009, he was thrown head-first into the deep end of the music industry. What followed were some of the highest highs, and the lowest of lows. Few knew about the darkness in Stan's past - the violent upbringing, the sexual abuse and the struggle to be more than just a survivor. Stan Walker: My Story is a personal reflection on life growing up in a family where love and violence were horribly entwined. It's a story about forgiveness and a journey to redemption. It's a tale of a young Maori boy from Tauranga finding his place on the world stage while never forgetting who he is and where he came from. Stan's is a story of survival against impossible odds. Abuse and addiction, poverty and excess, cancer and discrimination - Stan tells it all with startling honesty and insight, and with a wonderful sense of warmth and hope. It's an important and un-putdownable read. ...Show more

Joe Biden - American Dreamer by Evan Osnos

$43.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

A concise, brilliant and trenchant examination of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his lifelong quest for the presidency Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest - fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White H ouse, but also marked by deep personal losses that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden's life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors and reversals of fortune. His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship - an essential quality as he addresses a nation at its most dire hour in decades.Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos illuminates Biden's life and captures the characters and meaning of an extraordinary presidential election. He draws on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of progressive activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy - a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history. ...Show more

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

$70.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of th e first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.  ...Show more

Sontag - Her Life by Benjamin Moser

$26.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the SPECTATOR, TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN and FINANCIAL TIMES 'Definitive and delightful' Stephen Fry 'There can be no doubting the brilliance - the sheer explanatory vigour - of Moser's biography... a triumph of the vi rtues of seriousness and truth-telling that Susan Sontag espoused' New Stateman The definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most towering figures: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her private face Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant mind, political activism and striking image made her an emblem of the seductions - and the dangers - of the twentieth-century world. Her writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, Fascism and Freudianism, Communism and Americanism, reflected the conflicted meanings of a most conflicted word: modernity. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began and the Berlin Wall came down, in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based, exploring the private woman hidden behind the formidable public face. Drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from Manhattan to Sarajevo - and featuring nearly one hundred images, many never seen before - Sontag is the first book based on the writer's restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about her, including Annie Leibovitz. It is an indelible portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, who lived one of that century's most romantic - and most anguished - lives. ...Show more

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

$25.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

The New York Times bestselling author hailed as "the UK's answer to Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham all rolled into one" (Marie Claire) makes her fiction debut with a hilarious yet deeply moving coming of age novel. What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taugh t you wasn't enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes--and build yourself. It's 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there's no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde--fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer--like Jo in Little Women, or the Br ntes--but without the dying young bit. By sixteen, she's smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She's writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less. But what happens when Johanna realizes she's built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all? Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease. How to Build a Girl is a funny, poignant, and heartbreakingly evocative story of self-discovery and invention, as only Caitlin Moran could tell it. ...Show more

Closing the Sale

$30.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

Notes From An Apocalypse - A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

$33.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

From the prize-winning author of To Be a Machine - meet the men and women preparing for the end of the world In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota and in the lush valleys of New Zealand, small groups of determined men and women are getting ready. They are environment alists who fear the ravages of climate change; billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars; and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilization as we know it. Not unconcerned himself by the possibility of the end of days, Mark O'Connell set out to meet them.     ...Show more

Woman in the Wilderness: A Story of Survival, Love and Self-Discovery in New Zealand by Miriam Lancewood

$25.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

An inspirational story of adventure and bravery, from a young woman living a primitive, nomadic life in the wilds of the South Island of New Zealand.

The Dreamer: An Autobiography by Cliff Richard

$40.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

Published to coincide with his 80th birthday, a tour and another new album, national treasure Sir Cliff Richard has emerged stronger than ever after devastating false accusations threatened to ruin his life. As he celebrates 60 years in music, he tells his incredible story in his first, full autobiograp hy. A living history of pop.'Before Cliff Richard and The Shadows there was nothing worth listening to in British music.' John LennonCelebrating sixty years in music, with a hit in every decade since the 1950s, Sir Cliff Richard surely has a story to tell: coming of age in 1950s London, playing at the 2is Cafe where it all began, and now approaching is 80th birthday with record sales of 250m and counting.Cliff Richard was a pioneer - an original, with a new sound style, exploding out of London's post-war skiffle scene. His debut single 'Move It' is widely credited as the record that kick started British rock 'n' roll. Pre-Beatles, Cliff was the teen idol. His story takes us in front of screaming fans across the UK and beyond, onto TV's first pop show Oh Boy!, then through 40 years of Top of the Pops, first with the Kinks and latterly the likes of McFly. He's seen era-defining pop groups and iconic TV shows come and go. He's still making new music, and this summer he's playing to sell-out arenas.His recent struggles have only intensified the devotion of his fans, and spurred him on to a new phase of creativity. He feels the time is right to tell his own story and cement his legacy in the history of pop culture. ...Show more

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

$37.00 NZD

Category: Nature Writing

Winner of the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing.   Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of 15-year-old Dara McAnulty's world. From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries abo ut his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are raw in their telling. Diary of a Young Naturalist portrays Dara's intense connection to the natural world, and his perspective as a teenager juggling exams and friendships alongside a life of campaigning. 'In writing this book,' Dara explains, 'I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child's eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.'   Dara lives with his mum, dad, brother Lorcan, sister Bláthnaid and rescue greyhound Rosie in County Down, Northern Ireland. Dara's love for nature, his activism and his honesty about autism, has earned him a huge social media following from across the world and many accolades: in 2017 he was awarded BBC Springwatch 'Unsprung Hero' Award and Birdwatch magazine 'Local Hero'; in 2018 he was awarded 'Animal Hero' of the year by the Daily Mirrorand became ambassador for RSPCA and the iWill campaign; in 2019 he became a Young Ambassador for the Jane Goodall Institute and became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for conservation. 'We share a mind, a fascination with nature and a forthright desire to make the world a better place for it. I can't wait to read Dara's book.' Chris Packham 'Dara's is an extraordinary voice and vision: brave, poetic, ethical, lyrical, strong enough to have made him heard and admired from a young age.' Robert Macfarlane 'Our planet and its wildlife are in a dire state, but if anyone can help save them, Dara can - and he's bringing our generation along with him.' Bella Lack ...Show more