The poignant, life-affirming story of a determined boy, a visionary coach, and how the dream of a record-breaking Channel swim became reality

Eltham, South London. 1984: the hot fug of the swimming pool and the slow splashing of a boy learning to swim but not yet wanting to take his foot off the bottom. Fast-forward four years. Photographers and family wait...

From the outside, Vanya’s childhood looked idyllic: she rode horses with her father in the solitude of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and attended flamboyant operas with her mother in the city. But life for Vanya and her family turned dark when ghosts from her father’s service on a Pacific destroyer in World War II tore her family apart.

Set in postwar...

Fifteen-year-old Hannah was a privileged young girl with a promising future, but that didn’t stop her from sliding into an abyss of sex, drugs, alcohol, and other high-risk behaviors. Off the Rails narrates Hannah’s sudden decline and subsequent treatment through the raw, honest, compelling voices of Hannah and her shocked and desperate mother—each one...

Racism is a strange organism. A living thing. You can trim the branch, you can try to cut it out by the root, you can bury it deep in the ground and deprive it of light. But when the conditions are right, it blooms.

Until the afternoon of March 1, 1996, not many people beyond the Upstate had heard of Laurens. Certainly the residents could not have...

Formed in London in 1976 by Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Paul Simonon at the outset of that city’s punk rock boom, The Clash went on to outlast their peers and create some of the most influential albums in rock ’n’ roll—not just punk—even breaching the mainstream in 1982 and earning the title “The Only Band That Matters” along the way. In their eight-year...

Alfred the Great’s daughter defied all expectations of a well-bred Saxon princess. The first Saxon woman ever to rule a kingdom, Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, led her army in battle against Viking invaders. She further broke with convention by arranging for her daughter to succeed her on the throne of Mercia.

To protect her people and enable her kingdom...

Country music singer Julie Roberts is no stranger to overcoming hard times through determination, hard work, and strength. Having escaped the emotional residue of her alcoholic father’s actions and insults, Julie moved from South Carolina to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Belmont University and work as a receptionist at Mercury Records—all while secretly...

Star Trek legend and veteran author William Shatner discusses the meaning of life, finding value in work, and living well whatever your age.

"I have always felt," William Shatner says early in his newest memoir, that "like the great comedian George Burns, who lived to 100, I couldn’t die as long as I was booked." And Shatner is always booked.

Still, a brief...

A compelling portrait of rock's greatest guitarist at the moment of his ascendance, Stone Free is the first book to focus exclusively on the happiest and most productive period of Jimi Hendrix's life. As it begins in the fall of 1966, he's an under-sung, under-accomplished sideman struggling to survive in New York City. Nine months later, he's the toast of...

Having endured- as a young teenager- fear, hunger and humiliation and having witnessed extreme torture and men in their death-throes, three-and-a-half years of POW imprisonment is sufficient to become unforgiving of the enemy.

However, the abrupt ending of WWII by the dropping of 2 atom bombs, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, though saving...

You can learn what you don't know about Appalachian mountain life. You may have visited Boone, Blowing Rock, Todd or Valle Crucis when visiting Western North Carolina without knowing about a hidden paradise, Beaver Dams.

It is a pastoral land of cattle, horses, goats, and families with ante-bellum histories. Have you had a chance to see their wagon trains...

America’s Greatest Love Story . . . based on real events. Irene, a shy, high school teenager, has found love with an older man—a brilliant San Francisco lawyer. Soon she is catapulted into a world of private jets and five-star hotels. While she struggles to create a lasting love, her world comes crashing down. Her jet-set life is put on hold while...

From a darkened world, bound by four walls, a young woman called Jessica tells the tale of her battle against the M.E Monster. The severest form of a neuro immune disease called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis went to war with her at just 15 years old. From beneath her dark glasses, Jessica glimpses a world far different from the one she remembers as a teenage...

Marines love to get mail. Good old U.S...

For the first time ever, a Metropolitan Police undercover detective has broken ranks to reveal the stark reality of life in the police force today.

Duncan MacLaughlin was one of New Scotland Yard's elite. In a career spanning more than two decades he served in both the Central Drug Squad and the Regional Crime Squad - Britain's equivalent of the FBI...

One of the earliest performers on WSM in Nashville, Uncle Dave Macon became the Grand Ole Opry's first superstar. His old-time music and energetic stage shows made him a national sensation and fueled a thirty-year run as one of America's most beloved entertainers.

Michael D. Doubler tells the amazing story of the Dixie Dewdrop, a country music icon. Born in...

The Father of Bluegrass Music, Bill Monroe was a major star of the Grand Ole Opry for over fifty years; a member of the Country Music, Songwriters, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame; and a legendary figure in American music. This authoritative biography sets out to examine his life in careful detail--to move beyond hearsay and sensationalism to explain how...

You Go Nowhere by Accident

Then Ed asked me, “So, David, what happens if the new heart doesn’t start?”

Well, the new heart started, and the story goes on. Ed is eternally grateful to his donor and the family of his donor. But the best part of the story is the story itself. Ed and Paige’s journey together, their courage and love for each other, the...

Would You Like to Know Jesus as Those Closest to Him Did?

Son of Man is an honest-to-Bible account of Jesus and the world he lived in. Two things make this biography unique: 

A new biography of Queen Elizabeth II, focusing on her early life, with new research and insights.

As a 13-year-old girl, Princess Elizabeth fell in love with Prince Philip of Greece, an ambitious naval cadet, and they married when she was 21. When Elizabeth suddenly became Queen at 25, their lives changed forever. With previously unpublished material...

We only have one go at life. There is no second chance - this is all we get.

Tell Me Why is an exciting journey from the Second World War to the 21st century. It links a personal and private story to everyone’s public history, it is about living through a post war childhood, adolescent angst, commitment, families, children, love and loss. 

Read the...

Jojo Godinez grew up in L.A. County surrounded by gangs. The night he joined one, he swore to represent his gang until death. Fights, shootings, and arrests followed, but his love of violence waned through the years as more and more of his friends died around him.

Amid the bloodshed, he met a homegirl, Dalia. At just 18 years old, they married in...

Christine O'Brien remembers growing up in NYC's famous Dakota apartment with her powerful father, her beautiful mother, and a food obsession that consumed her.

Hunger comes in many forms. A person can crave a steak in the same way that she can crave a perfect family life. In her memoir, Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing, Christine O’Brien tells the story...

Eva Mozes Kor was just 10 years old when she arrived in Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele. Subjected to sadistic medical experiments, she was forced to fight daily for her and her twin's survival. In...

From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in a penal colony in the Urals for standing up for what she believed in. 'One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom' Chris Kraus, author...

The trouble started when their dream came true.

First they took French. Then they took leave of their senses. They bought a 400-year-old cottage in rural France from an ad on the Internet. Their “completely restored” farmhouse certainly looked charming, but the pool leaked, the walls cracked, and the electricity fizzled whenever they switched on...

'A memoir to stand alongside classics by the likes of Jeanette Winterson and Lorna Sage … a compelling and ultimately joyous account of self-determination’ Sunday Times

Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. She spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating...

Sexual abuse, human trafficking, drug addiction, rape, prison, and domestic violence—Barbara Amaya experienced it all on first on the streets of Washington DC and then New York City, most of it before her sixteenth birthday. In Nobody’s Girl she shares her journey from trafficking victim to human rights advocate, weaving together a story of loss, pain...

The fiercely honest, fearless, darkly funny autobiography of global tennis star Maria Sharapova In the middle of the night, a father and his daughter step off a Greyhound bus in Florida and head straight to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. They ring the bell, though no one is expecting them and they don't speak English. They have arrived from Russia...

GUARDIAN, EVENING STANDARD AND BOOKFORUM BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 Kathy Acker: Rich girl, street punk, scholar, stripper, victim, media-whore ... and cultural icon. The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, many of them created by her. Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Acker's legend has faded, but her writing...

The Eat, Pray, Love for busy executives, Take Off Your Shoes invites the reader to join a journey of self-rediscovery.

A hard-charging CEO of a large enterprise, Ben Feder discovers that he is losing the very things that sustained him over his years of business success. Unsettled by his insight and determined to rebuild family relationships and...

Growing up with ten siblings on a farm in rural Grove City, PA, Beth Voltz came in contact with many animals, as one would expect when you live on a farm. But the Voltz family farm would usually have a few additions each week—the townspeople would often drop off their unwanted, or worse, dying animals for the Voltz family to take care of. Grave Tales:...