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Autobiography

Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive

£25.00

The definitive monograph on Alex Prager, one of the truly original image makers of our time.

Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker whose elaborate sets and complex staging draw on a rich cultural heritage of cinematic style, informed by street photography, to produce work that is unerringly memorable. At once temporal and timeless, bright but shadowed, Prager’s images exist within a hyperreal world, deeply rooted in the eerie undertones of Los Angeles, where the line between reality and fiction is blurred.

Prager’s critically acclaimed work is introduced here, spanning a decade of photographic work and five films. This collection of carefully curated photographs is complemented by an in-depth interview by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Musee des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and discursive essays by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Mansfield, executive director of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, and Clare Grafik, senior curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Boy About Town: A Memoir

£8.00

As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history.

 

Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity.

 

Featuring a vibrant cast of supporting characters (from school friends to rock stars), and built up from notebooks, diaries, interviews, letters, and issues of his now legendary fanzine Jamming!, Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.

Brutally Honest

£9.50

The tell-all memoir from the loudest, proudest Spice Girl – and the truth behind the headlines

 

As one-fifth of the iconic Spice Girls and judge on X Factor and America’s Got Talent, Melanie Brown, a.k.a Scary Spice, has been an international star since her twenties. Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success.With deep personal insight, remarkable frankness and trademark Yorkshire humour, the book removes the mask of fame and reveals the true story behind the Spice Girls, as well as the horror of her most recent marriage and her 10 year struggle to be free.

Bunnyman: A Memoir

£20.00

Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and ’70s, when skinheads, football violence and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things, a young Will Sergeant found the emerging punk scene provided a shimmer of hope amongst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of the Second World War.

 

From school-day horrors and mud flinging fun to nights at Liverpool’s punk club, Eric’s, Sergeant was fuelled by and thrived on music. It was this devotion that led to the birth of the Bunnymen, to the days when he and Ian McCulloch would muck around with reel-to-reel recordings of song ideas in the back parlour of his parents’ council estate house, and to finding a community – friends, enemies and many in between – with those who would become post-punk royalty from the likes of Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Teardrop Explodes to name a few.

 

It was an uphill struggle to carve their name in the history of Liverpool music, but Echo and the Bunnymen became iconic, with songs like ‘Lips Like Sugar,’ ‘The Cutter’ and ‘The Killing Moon’. By turns wry, explicit and profound, Bunnyman reveals what it was really like to be part of one of the most important British bands of the 1980s.

Diary of a Young Naturalist

£16.00

Winner of the 2020 Wainwright Prize, Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of Dara McAnulty’s world, from spring to summer, autumn to winter, on his home patch, at school, in the wild and in his head. Evocative, raw and beautifully written, this very special book vividly explores the natural world from the perspective of an autistic teenager juggling homework, exams and friendships alongside his life as a conservationist and environmental activist. With a sense of awe and wonder, Dara describes in meticulous detail encounters in his garden and the wild, with blackbirds, whooper swans, red kites, hen harriers, frogs, dandelions, skylarks, bats, cuckoo flowers, Irish hares and many more species. The power and warmth of his words also draw an affectionate and moving portrait of a close-knit family making their way in the world.

Faith, Hope and Carnage

£20.00

Created from more than forty hours of intimate conversations with the journalist Sean O’Hagan, this is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave’s own words, of what really drives his life and creativity.

 

The book examines questions of belief, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave’s life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years.

 

Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true visionary.

God’s Lonely Men

£9.99

Pete Haynes was the drummer and founder of the cult punk band The Lurkers. Here, he charts their rise from playing in West London pubs and clubs to appearing on Top of the Pops. Then they came down with a crash. This tell-all insider’s look at the 70s punk scene mixes brutal humour with a sharp critique of the human condition from the point of view of a working class man. Haynes share his experience with The Sex Pistols, The Clash and many more classic bands and writes about what punk was really about.

Harry Gruyaert: Between Worlds

£40.00

A new collection from the award-winning Magnum photographer.

A master of colour-saturated images, Harry Gruyaert has roamed the world searching for the perfect light for more than forty years. His very intuitive and physical sense of place immerses the spectator in a world that borrows simultaneously from the cinematic universe and from that of the painter. Dissolving the boundaries between the exterior and interior, Between Worlds offers just such a sensory immersion.

No matter the setting, the country or the era, Gruyaert deploys a luminous alchemy suspended in time. Where are we? It doesn’t matter: in Gruyaert’s world, the pleasure of getting lost reigns.

In the Blood

£16.99

In the Blood is Andrew Motion’s beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England – an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life. It also tells the story of how these worlds are shattered, when his mother suffers a terrible riding accident.

 

 

The tragedy shadows the book, feeding its mood of elegy as well as its celebratory vigilance. Written from a teenage child’s point of view, without the benefit of adult hindsight, Motion captures the pathos and puzzlement of childhood with great clarity of expression and freshness of memory. We encounter a strange but beguiling extended family, a profound love of the natural world, a troubled schooling, and a growing passion for books and writing.

 

 

By turns funny and elegiac, In the Blood is a wonderful picture of a vanishing England, a remarkable insight into a poet’s mind, and a deeply moving portrait of the bond between a mother and her son.

It’s Always Summer Somewhere

£20.00

Felix White, for reasons often beyond him, has always been deeply in love with cricket. His passion for the game is at the fore on the BBC ‘s number one cricket podcast and 5Live show, Tailenders, which he co-presents with Greg James and Jimmy Anderson. It’s Always Summer Somewhere is his funny, heartbreaking and endlessly engaging love letter to the game.

 

Felix takes us through his life growing up in South West London and describes how his story is forever punctuated and given meaning by cricket. Through his own exploits as a slow left arm spinner of ‘lovely loopy stuff’, to the tragic illness of his mother, life with The Maccabees and his cricket redemption, Felix touches on both the comedic and the tragic in equal measure. Throughout, there’s the ever-present roller coaster of following the England cricket team. The exploits of Tufnell (another bowler of ‘lovely loopy stuff’), Atherton, Hussain et al, are given extra import through the eyes of a cricket-obsessed youth. Felix meets them at each signposted moment to find out what was really behind those moments that gave cricket fans everywhere sporting memories that would last forever, sending the book into an exploration of grief, transgenerational displacement and how the people we’ve known and things we’ve loved culminate and take expression in our lives.

 

It’s Always Summer Somewhere is an incredibly honest detail of a life lived with cricket. It offers a sense of genuine empathy and understanding not just with cricket fans, but sports and music fans across the world, in articulating our reasons for pouring so much meaning into something that we simply cannot control. Culminating in the heart-stopping World Cup Final in 2019, the book finally answers that question fans have so often asked… what is it about this game?

Last Chance Texaco

£20.00

This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song.

 

Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner Rickie Lee Jones, in her own words. It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music.

 

With candour and lyricism, the ‘Duchess of Coolsville’ (Time) takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, to her years as a teenage runaway, through her legendary love affair with Tom Waits, and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee’s stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs – ‘Chuck E’s in Love,’ ‘Weasel and the White Boys Cool,’ ‘Danny’s All-Star Joint’ and ‘Easy Money’ – but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, a pimp with a heart of gold, and tales of her fabled ancestors.

Manifesto: A radically honest and inspirational memoir from the Booker Prize winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

£9.99

‘This honest, engaging memoir shares such gems . . . the perfect read for anyone who dreams big’ The Times and Sunday Times , Books of the Year

The powerful, urgent memoir and manifesto on never giving up from Booker prize-winning trailblazer, Bernardine Evaristo

In 2019, Bernardine Evaristo became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize since its inception fifty years earlier – a revolutionary landmark for Britain. Her journey was a long one, but she made it, and she made history.

Manifesto is her intimate and fearless account of how she did it. From a childhood steeped in racism from neighbours, priests and even some white members of her own family, to discovering the arts through her local youth theatre; from stuffing her belongings into bin bags, always on the move between temporary homes, to exploring many romantic partners both toxic and loving, male and female, and eventually finding her soulmate; from setting up Britain’s first theatre company for Black women in the eighties to growing into the trailblazing writer, theatre-maker, teacher, mentor and activist we see today – Bernardine charts her rebellion against the mainstream and her life-long commitment to community and creativity. And, through the prism of her extraordinary experiences, she offers vital insights into the nature of race, class, feminism, sexuality and ageing in modern Britain.

Bernardine Evaristo’s life story is a manifesto for courage, integrity, optimism, resourcefulness and tenacity. It’s a manifesto for anyone who has ever stood on the margins, and anyone who wants to make their mark on history. It’s a manifesto for being unstoppable.

‘Raw and emotive . . . a powerful account of how Evaristo got to the top of her game – it’s moving, but there’s also much humour and joy’ Independent

‘Bernardine Evaristo is one of those writers who should be read by everyone, everywhere’Elif Shafak

‘Bernardine Evaristo is one of Britain’s best writers , an iconic and unique voice, filled with warmth, subtlety and humanity. Exceptional’ Nikesh Shukla

Novelist as a Vocation: The master storyteller on writing and creativity

£18.99

A unique look into the mind and craft of a master storyteller.

Haruki Murakami’s myriad fans will be delighted by this unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.

Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing.

‘The world’s most popular cult novelist’ Guardian

‘A master storyteller’ Sunday Times

‘Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers’ New York Times Book Review

Older Brother

£12.99

How can we narrate grief? Can we really rationalise death? Pain cannot be told in the present, only in the past; however, Mella chooses to narrate it in the future, as if everything bad is about to happen further down the line, until something reminds him that the future actually arrived a long time ago.

 

During the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist, dies after being hit by lightning. Combining memoir and fiction, this novel is the urgent exploration of the brotherly bond, and the effects that death has on our inner circles. An exploration that takes the author back into his past, and right into the centre of his obsessions.

 

‘If I can t be free in my writing, I cannot be free anywhere else’, admits the narrator towards the end of this fascinating book that interweaves fiction with brotherhood and grief at the centre of family relations.

On the Edge: My Story (Audiobook CDs)

£6.50

Richard Hammond is one of our most in-demand and best-loved television presenters. On September 20, 2006, he suffered a serious brain injury following a high-speed car crash, and the nation held its breath. On the Edge is his compelling account of life before and after the accident and an honest description of his year of recovery, full of drama and incident. It is also, perhaps, his explanation of why, as a married man and father of two young daughters, he was prepared to risk all by strapping himself to the front of a jet engine with the power of eleven Formula One cars.

Rock On

£5.90

How would you like a six-figure marketing job at the hallowed record label that signed everyone who counts in the last fifty years of pop music? Before you answer, we’ll throw in a plush office, a hip assistant and a bottomless expense account.

 

When Dan Kennedy is hired by a major label he thinks he has been handed a pass to the secret kingdom of rock and roll. In reality, he has walked into an episode of The Office. Whether directing a gangsta rapper’s video or battling his better judgement to create a campaign celebrating twenty-five years of Phil Collins’ love songs, he’s in way over his head. And from the looks of those around the boardroom, he’s not alone.

 

Cameos by aging pop stars, dinosaur music-biz kingpins, hip-hop thugs, Iggy Pop and others make up the cast of this brilliant power ballad to rock and roll, office life and all the wage slaves who’ve done their damndest to hide from Human Resources when the axe falls.

 

If you have ever bought a record, worked in an office, tried to get into a creative industry or suspected that some things are not all they’re cracked up to be, Rock On will make you laugh more than you thought possible.

Taste: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller

£9.99

THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

A Guardian book of the year
A Times book of the year
A Daily Mail book of the year

From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen. For Stanley and foodie fans, this is the perfect, irresistible gift.

‘It’s impossible to read this without becoming ravenous!’ — Nigella Lawson

‘It is as infectious as it is delicious, as funny as it is insightful. The only reason to put this book down, is to go cook and eat from it’ — Heston Blumenthal

From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen.

Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada , The Hunger Games , and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbookand The Tucci Table , and now he takes us beyond the recipes and into the stories behind them.

Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, New York, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Nightand Julie & Julia , falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last.

Written with Stanley’s signature wry humour and nostalgia, Taste is a heartwarming read that will be irresistible for anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal.

The man, the myth, The Devil Wears Prada legend Stanley Tucci has blessed our hungry souls with a food memoir [… in which] he divulges some of his most treasured memories and stories behind favourite recipes – prepare to feel bereaved when it’s over’ – – Evening Standard

SuperbTaste enriches the reader and establishes Tucci as one of the wisest and most generous personalities of our time’ – – Daily Mail

The Hardest Climb

£16.00

After becoming the first man to conquer the highest peak on each of the seven continents at the first attempt, Alistair’s hardest climb was surviving a brain haemorrhage. Foreword by Sir Chris Bonington. The book is fascinating and inspiring, and contains some stunning photographs from Dr. Sutcliffe’s climbing expeditions. His wife Clare also makes personal contributions at the end of each chapter.

The Quentin Blake Book

£30.00

A fully illustrated overview of the life and work of the universally loved Quentin Blake, released ahead of the artist’s 90th birthday in December 2022.

Quentin Blake is an artist who has charmed and inspired generations of readers. Tracing Blake’s art and career from his very first drawings – published in Punch when he was 16 – through his collaborations with writers from Roald Dahl and John Yeoman to Russell Hoban and David Walliams, to his large-scale works for hospitals and public spaces and right up to his most recent passions and projects, acclaimed author Jenny Uglow here presents a fully illustrated overview of Quentin Blake’s extraordinary body of work, with accompanying commentary by the artist himself.

With unprecedented access to the artist’s entire archive, The Quentin Blake Book reveals the stories behind some of Blake’s most famous creations, while also providing readers with an intimate insight into the unceasing creativity of this remarkable artist.

The Sea, the 70s and the Passage

£12.00

Yearning for a life at sea from the age of 13, the author couldn’t wait to leave home and join the British Merchant Navy. But to do that was harder than he’d thought.

 

Profound dyslexia (undiagnosed in the 1960s) offered him little prospect of getting qualifications and in 1968 he left school at 15, just after his parents’ marriage had broken up. But perseverance in hardship, plus a chance meeting on a train, launched him on a round-the-world odyssey, sailing on many different ships out of the Royal Docks, London.

 

It was a real education – in more ways than you’d ever imagine.

Things I’ve Been Silent About

£17.99

Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets; a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval – these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir.

 

Nafisi’s intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerising fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi’s father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with classic tales like the “Shahnameh”, the “Persian Book of Kings”. When her father began to see other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi’s complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal – as well as political, cultural, and social – injustices.

Triksta

£5.00

Signed copies

 

What lunacy would cause a 55-year-old white male, neither lean nor hungry, to embroil himself in the world of New Orleans rap, not merely as an observer, but as an active participant – ideas man, talent-spotter, lyricist, and would-be producer? And why did his experience, after many tribulations, end up so profoundly joyous and fulfilling?

 

Nik Cohn has loved (and hated) hip-hop since its birth, thirty years ago, and loved (and hated) New Orleans for even longer. The city has haunted him from childhood, an addiction he’s never wanted to kick. But nothing prepared him for the experience of being pitched, more or less by accident, into the role of Triksta, rap impressario.

 

A white alien in a black world, with no funding or qualifications, and not a clue what he was doing, he had to rethink himself from scratch.Surrounded by a cast-list that included such names as Choppa and Soulja Slim, Big Ramp and Lil T, Bass Heavy, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Shorty Brown Hustle, he entered a world of tiny backstreet studios, broken-down slums and gun turfs, almost unimaginable to those who know New Orleans only as the touristic Big Easy.

 

Triksta is the story of a three-year odyssey that became all-consuming – a journey to the heart of rap, and New Orleans, and self-knowledge. Hilarious, tragic, startling, and exhilirating, sometimes all at once, it is Nik Cohn’s greatest book.

William Klein: Yes

£65.00

The last book completed by William Klein within his lifetime: A landmark retrospective encompassing Klein’s legacy of creativity across photography, filmmaking, painting, book design, graphic design and beyond.

Photographer. Filmmaker. Artist. Designer. To master one of those disciplines would be a lifetime achievement for any creative individual, yet William Klein’s career was celebrated in each of them over the last eight decades. Klein was one of the great image makers of the 20th century and one whose work remains an enduring creative influence on the work of contemporary artists, photographers and filmmakers.

With over 250 images, this career retrospective explores the late William Klein’s entire creative and artistic arc. Directed by Klein himself, from the selection of content to book design, this large-format publication looks back at his uncompromisingly creative lifetime, showcasing Klein’s prolific and relentlessly innovative contribution to the world of photography, art, design and filmmaking.

Published in association with a major retrospective at the International Center of Photography, this book is a comprehensive take on his career. While best known as a photographer who broke all the rules and conventions, William Klein: Yes focuses on the full range of Klein’s work, from his abstract paintings through to his startling, authentic street photography and photobooks and his dynamic, satirical take on filmmaking. With a flowing, chronological text by David Campany, this book will be both an introduction to William Klein for a new generation and a source of fresh insights for those who already know who William Klein was: a true original.