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Autobiography of the world-famous, and much-loved, actress.Best known for her role as Annie Hall in Woody Allen's film of the same name, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, Keaton has had a fascinating and highly successful career, with roles in ‘The Godfather’, ‘Reds’, ‘Father of the Bride’, ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ and many more. Personally Keaton has had relationships with Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, and Al Pacino – all of whom she remains in touch with today and who she will speak about in the book.Diane Keaton’s mother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and during the fifteen year long battle with this heartbreaking and debilitating disease, Diane began to reflect on both of their lives – their commonalities and their differences, the dreams they each realized and the dreams they deferred. Soon after her mother passed away last September, Diane started to write. The result is a memoir that is as touching, funny, and iconic as its author; an illumination of an ordinary girl’s journey to become an extraordinary woman – and the defining relationship that made it all possible. Diane Keaton’s Academy Award-winning career, both in front of and behind the camera, has made her a cinema legend and touchstone for a generation.

A third memoir from the author of the huge international bestsellers ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and ‘‘Tis’. In ‘Teacher Man’, Frank McCourt details his illustrious, amusing, and sometimes rather bumpy years as an English teacher in the public high schools of New York City.Frank McCourt arrived in New York as a young, impoverished and idealistic Irish boy – but who crucially had an American passport, having been born in Brooklyn. He didn't know what he wanted except to stop being hungry and to better himself. On the subway he watched students carrying books. He saw how they read and underlined and wrote things in the margin and he liked the look of this very much. He joined the New York Public Library and every night when he came back from his hotel work he would sit up reading the great novels.Building his confidence and his determination, he talked his way into NYU and gained a literature degree and so began a teaching career that was to last thirty years, working in New York’s public high schools. Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in ‘Teacher Man’, the third in his series of memoirs.The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout ‘Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were…’ Through sharing his own life with these kids he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people’s attention came ‘Angela’s Ashes’.Frank McCourt was a legend in such schools as Stuyvesant high school – long before he became the figure he is now, he would receive letters from former students telling him how much his teaching influenced and inspired them – and now in ‘Teacher Man’ he shares his reminiscences of those thirty years as well as revealing how they led to his own success with ‘Angela's Ashes’ and ‘’Tis’.

Previously published in paperback as October Sky.Three years in the life of Homer ‘Sonny’ Hickam, from the moment he sees the Sputnik satellite overhead in West Virginia to his successful launch of a prizewinning rocket.In 1957, Coalwood, West Virginia, was a town the post-war boom never quite reached, and dominated by the black steel towers of the mine. For fourteen-year-old Homer ‘Sonny’ Hickam there are only two routes in life: a college football scholarship, or a life underground. But from the moment the town turns out to watch the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik, as it passes overhead, Sonny and his friends embark on a mission of their own – to form the Big Creek Missile Agency, and build a rocket.Looking back after a distinguished career as a NASA engineer, Homer Hickam tells the warm, vivid story of youth and ambition that inspired the 1999 film October Sky. It is the tale of a group of teenage boys who dared to imagine a life beyond the confines of the coal pit, and went on to design, build and launch the rockets that would change their lives, and their town, forever.

In August 1930, a Norwegian sloop, sailing in the Arctic Ocean, stopped at a remote island, where its crew members foudn a book, together with a boathook stamped ‘Andree’s Pol. Exp 1896’. Not far from the boat was a body leaning against a rock, with its frozen legs extended. They carefully opened the jacket the corpse was wearing. When they saw a large monogram ‘A’, they knew who they were looking at: S. A. Andrée, the Swede who, in 1897, set off to discover the North Pole, one of the last unmapped places on earth.The Ice Balloon is the story of the heroic ago of polar exploration, and the dream of conquering one of the most inhumane landscapes on earth. In this golden age of discovery, Andrée’s ambition was the most original and remarkable, with many comparing him to Columbus for novelty and daring. For, of the thousand or so people who had gone looking for the Pole, at least seven hundred and fifty of whom had died, only Andrée used a balloon.

A collection of essays on Jorge Luis Borges by his long-time friend and collaborator.Jorge Luis Borges – Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer – is widely considered one of the giants of 20th-century world literature.Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked alongside Borges for a number of years creating English translations of his work, the only translations personally overseen by Borges himself. In The Lesson of the Master, a memoir and essays, he writes about his time with Borges but also offers us a unique insight on the man and his work.It is an indispensable volume for Borges readers and his growing legion of students and scholars.

‘Why couldn’t I be a perfumer’s muse? I’ve come such a long way in the realm of scent. In fact, I was never really meant to poke my nose into it …’The Perfume Lover by Denyse Beaulieu is an intimate journey into the mystery of scent.What if the most beautiful night in your life inspired a fragrance?Denyse Beaulieu is a respected fragrance writer; it is her world, her love, her life. When she was growing up, perfume was forbidden in her house, spurring a childhood curiosity that went on to become an intellectual and sensual passion.It is this passion she pursued all the way to Paris, where she now lives, and entered the secretive world of the perfume industry. But little did she know that it would lead her to achieve a fragrance lover’s wildest dream …When Denyse tells a famous perfumer of a sensual night spent in Seville under an orange tree in full blossom, wrapped in the arms of a beautiful young man, the story stirs his imagination and together they create a scent that captures the essence of that night. This is the story of that perfume.As the unique creative collaboration unfolds, the perfume-in-progress conjures intimate memories, leading Beaulieu to make sense of her life through scents. Throughout, she weaves the evocative history of perfumery into her personal journey, in an intensely passionate voice: the masters and the masterpieces; the myths and the myth-busting, down to the molecular mysteries that weld our flesh to flowers…The Perfume Lover is an unprecedented account of the creative process that goes into composing a fragrance, and a uniquely candid insider’s view into the world and history of fragrance.Your world will never smell the same.

The Sunday Times bestseller‘Delivering my first baby is a memory that will stay with me forever. Just feeling the warmth of a newborn head in your hands, that new life, there’s honestly nothing like it… I’ve since brought more than 2,200 babies into the world, and I still tingle with excitement every time.’It’s the summer of 1968 and St Mary’s Maternity Hospital in Manchester is a place from a bygone age. It is filled with starched white hats and full skirts, steaming laundries and milk kitchens, strict curfews and bellowed commands. It is a time of homebirths, swaddling and dangerous anaesthetics. It was this world that Linda Fairley entered as a trainee midwife aged just 19 years old.From the moment Linda delivered her first baby – racing across rain-splattered Manchester street on her trusty moped in the dead of night – Linda knew she’d found her vocation. ‘The midwife’s here!’ they always exclaimed, joined in their joyful chorus by relieved husbands, mothers, grandmothers and whoever else had found themselves in close proximity to a woman about to give birth.Under the strict supervision of community midwife Mrs Tattershall, Linda’s gruellingly long days were spent on overcrowded wards pinning Terry nappies, making up bottles and sterilizing bedpans – and above all helping women in need. Her life was a succession of emergencies, successes and tragedies: a never-ending chain of actions which made all the difference between life and death.There was Mrs Petty who gave birth in heartbreaking poverty; Mrs Drew who confided to Linda that the triplets she was carrying were not in fact her husband’s; and Muriel Turner, whose dangerously premature baby boy survived – against all the odds. Forty years later Linda’s passion for midwifery burns as bright as ever as she is now celebrated as one of Britain’s longest-serving midwives, still holding the lives of mothers and children in her own two hands.Rich in period detail and told with a good dose of Manchester humour, The Midwife’s Here! is the extraordinary, heartwarming tale of a truly inspiring woman.

This is Nicky’s story, one of four individual journeys taken from Wherever You Are by The Military Wives.At 33, Nicky Clarke had stopped thinking she would ever fall in love. But they say when you stop looking, love happens – and that was the year she was swept off her feet by Hugo Clarke, a major in the Scots Guards. A year later Hugo and Nicky were married. But life in the military is never calm for long, and the next few years saw Hugo leave for Iraq and Afghanistan for months at a time.In married quarters Nicky met other military wives quickly, but forging friendships proved difficult: the occasional coffee morning just wasn’t enough. Nicky decided that this community needed to be brought together.With the help of a friend and a local choirmistress, Nicky set a time for the local wives to gather and sing. Before she knew it, a family was growing and a support network was formed. The first Military Wives choir was born.Mere months later, the choir would become a nationwide phenomenon. The Wives would go on to perform for the Queen, record a bestselling album and achieve a Christmas number 1.This is one woman’s true story of heartbreak and hope; of how singing changed the course of her life.Sales of this ebook will benefit the Military Wives Choirs Foundation, a network of choirs that reaches across the military community to provide support, guidance and funding for individual choirs, but first and foremost to bring women closer together through singing. The Foundation is a registered subsidiary charity of SSAFA Forces Help.

This is Claire’s story, one of four individual journeys taken from Wherever You Are by The Military Wives.Claire Balneaves never thought she’d end up as a military wife. But when she met a young medical assistant, Dave Balneaves, at a naval hospital, everything changed. Before long Claire and Dave had tied the knot and moved into married quarters – and Claire began to settle into the unique life of a military wife. Moving from house to house, from country to country, often solitary – in many ways Claire lived as a single mother. When family and medical difficulties cast a cloud over her personal life, Claire had no one to turn to.But from the moment she joined a nascent choir of military wives, that changed: wives with similar stories came together to sing, and there they found solace and strength. They found each other.Mere months later, the Military Wives choir would have met Gareth Malone, performed for the Queen, recorded a bestselling album and achieved a Christmas number 1.This is one woman’s true story of heartbreak and hope, and of how the choir changed the course of her life.Sales of this book will benefit the Military Wives Choirs Foundation, a network of choirs that reaches across the military community to provide support, guidance and funding for individual choirs, but first and foremost to bring women closer together through singing. The Foundation is a registered subsidiary charity of SSAFA Forces Help.

“I've told you before, and I will tell you again, if you are unable to read the Holy Book you will be punished.” The teacher’s face was a mask of anger. “Understand?”Born in 1975 in the UK to a Pakistani father and an English mother, Alexander Khan spent his early years as a Muslim in the north of England. But at the age of three his family was torn apart when his father took him to Pakistan. Despite his desperate cries, that was the last he saw of his mother – he was told she had walked out and abandoned them; many years later he learned she was told he’d died in a car crash in Pakistan.Three years on Alex is brought back to England, but kept hidden at all times. His father disappears to Pakistan again, leaving Alex in the care of a stepmother and her cruel brother. And it is then that his troubles really begin. Seen as an outsider by both the white kids and the Pakistani kids, Alex is lost and alone.When his father dies unexpectedly, Alex is sent back to Pakistan to stay with his ‘family’ and learn to behave like a ‘good Muslim’. Now alone in a strange, hostile country, with nobody to protect him, Alex realises what it is to be truly orphaned. No one would listen. No one would help. And no one cared when he was kidnapped by men from his own family and sent to a fundamentalist Madrassa on the Afghanistan border.A fascinating and compelling account of young boy caught between two cultures, this book tells the true story of a child desperately searching for his place in the world; the tale of a boy, lost and alone, trying to find a way to repair a life shattered by the shocking event he witnessed through a crack in the door of a house in an isolated village in Pakistan.