Showing titles in Art & Literature

Giles Wood and Mary Killen - better known as 'Giles and Mary off of Gogglebox' - joined us in the Audible Studios to discuss their debut audiobook The Diary of Two Nobodies. Believe it or not, they have a life outside that Channel 4 smash-hit programme: Giles is a brilliant artist and Mary a prolific author and journalist. They spoke to us about how they ended up on Gogglebox, what the most annoying things about each other are and the unusual term of endearment they use for each other.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Airhead, written and read by Emily Maitlis. As anchor for the BBC's key political news programme, Newsnight, Emily Maitlis has interviewed some of the most powerful and controversial figures on the political scene. She plans each interview meticulously...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a...

Bloomsbury presents These Precious Days written and read by Ann Patchett. A BARACK OBAMA TOP BOOK OF 2021 ‘A heartfelt and witty collection of essays on everything from marriage and knitting to the inevitability of death’ Guardian 'A pitch-perfect collection ... She can turn a sentence like...

“You don’t have to be Irish to cherish this literary gift—just being human and curious and from a family will suffice.” —Malachy McCourt, New York Times bestselling author of A Monk Swimming In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through...

When life got in the way of Mortimer and Whitehouse's friendship, they found their connection dwindled to occasional catch ups and one-off phone calls. Then, conveniently, they were both diagnosed with heart disease! And they realised life is short, and they should spend it together, doing what they love: fishing. Following the success of their BBC series, Gone Fishing, Mortimer and Whitehouse have created an audiobook of the same name, which is their love letter to the joys of angling, and the simple wonder of just having a laugh with your mates.

Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood. 'A fabulous odyssey ... I read it in a mad...

Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche, and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote. Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today and his unprecedented access to the Fleming archives and his nose for a story make this a fresh and eye-opening picture of a man who lived his life in the shadow of his famous creation.

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I'm getting ahead of myself. During the course of my life, I've barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau.

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘One truth I have learnt, as middle age enmeshes me like Virginia creeper, is that I shall never change—because my capacity for self-improvement is absolutely nil.’ A classic collection of journalism from the legendary Jilly Cooper. Wonderfully warm and...

Caroline Calloway is the viral storyteller who helped define the modern influencer era – an online legend whose life became one of the internet's most captivating sagas. Her voice isn't just distinctive – it is the culture she helped create. In Scammer: The Director's Cut, Caroline Calloway shares with you exactly how it is in her fabulously chaotic mind. 'The Director's Cut of the Scammer audiobook is an internet invention that's the first of its kind. And like all of my best breakthroughs it takes the existing framework of online culture we already know and love, and innovates.

Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of 98. Her vivid visual vocabulary, sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth, had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century.

In 2017 the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction for $450m. But is it a real da Vinci? In a thrilling narrative built on formidable research, Ben Lewis tracks the extraordinary journey of a masterpiece lost and found, lied and fought over across the centuries. In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small...

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, the sequel to Lemons, follows the lives of Chris, Ana and their daughter, Chloë, as they get to grips with a misanthropic parrot who joins their home, Spanish school life, neighbours in love, their amazement at Chris appearing on the bestseller lists . . and their shock at discovering that their beloved valley is once more under threat of a dam.

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts...

When he turned 65, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the days' events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. One of Britain's most amusing and original writers reflects on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters - a record of shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have ever been so frank about themselves and even fewer so entertaining.

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and a portrait of disillusionment with his early politics. Orwell’s experiences include being shot in the neck by a sniper, and being forced into hiding as factions of the Left battled on the streets of Barcelona. Orwell entered Spain intending to gather an experience worth writing as well as to fight Fascism, and wrote Homage to Catalonia within months of his return.

*A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week* Benjamin Zephaniah, who travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the...

A flicker of light almost appears at the end of the tunnel for prisoner FF8282, as he is transferred to North Sea Camp near Boston, Lincolnshire, a D-category prison. Under a less strict regime, the prisoners can enjoy a more relaxed set of rules, while slowly preparing to someday rejoin the world outside the walls. However, a minor breach of conditions gets him sent off to the notorious HMP Lincoln facility for twenty-two days, where more traumatic experiences await. "Heaven" is the third book in Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling series The Prison Diaries.

Agatha Christie’s ‘most absorbing mystery’ – her own autobiography. Over the three decades since her death on 12 January 1976, many of Agatha Christie’s readers and reviewers have maintained that her most compelling book is probably still her least well-known. Her candid Autobiography...