The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks

$30.00 NZD

Category: Biography

A major new talent redefines the literature of rural life. Old world met new when a shepherd in the English Lake District impulsively started a Twitter account. A routine cell phone upgrade left author James Rebanks with a pretty decent camera and a pre-loaded Twitter app--the tools to share his way of life with the world. And what began as a tentative experiment became an international phenomenon.James has worked the land for years, as did his father, and his father before him. His family has lived and farmed in the Lake District of Northern England as long as there have been written records (since 1420) and possibly much longer. And while the land itself has inspired great poets and authors we have rarely heard from the people who tend it. One Twitter account has changed all that, and now James Rebanks has broken free of the 140-character limit and produced "the book I have wanted to write my whole life." The Shepherd's Life is a memoir about growing up amidst a magical, storied landscape, of coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s among hills that seem timeless, and yet suffused with history. Broken into the four seasons, the book chronicles the author's daily experiences at work with his flock and brings alive his family and their ancient way of life, which at times can seem irreconcilable with the modern world. An astonishing original work, The Shepherd's Life is an intimate look from inside a seemingly ordinary life, one that celebrates the meaning of place, the ties of family to the land around them, and the beauty of the past. It is the untold story of the Lake District, of a people who exist and endure out of sight in the midst of the most iconic literary landscape in the world.   From the Hardcover edition. ...Show more

Someone's Wife by Linda Burgess

$36.99 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: very good

A brilliant collection of personal essays from a quietly subversive writer. These pieces read like the freshest of recent novels: clever, restrained and wittily observant. They range across the personal and the observational. There are essays on her lifetime of being an All Black wife (once an AB, alway s an AB); her love of teaching, education and the young; and a powerful essay on the death of her baby, Toby, striking in its honesty.  Linda is interested in family and friendship; shared and sometimes distorted memories. Her personal truths link to universal truths. Linda explores the era in which she grew up, and her experiences are timeless. She looks at living overseas, at children leaving home, at house-hunting in Wellington, at travelling with a grandchild, at Leonard Cohen concerts as tribal gatherings.  In the hands of a writer as accomplished as Linda Burgess, these essays are riveting and engaging. ...Show more

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang

$38.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: 3 Biography

The best-known modern Chinese fairy tale is the story of three sisters from Shanghai, who for most of the twentieth century were at the centre of power in China. It was sometimes said that 'One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country', but there was far more to the Soong sisters than thes e caricatures. As China battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, each sister played an important, sometimes critical role, and left an indelible mark on history. Red Sister, Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Chinese republic, and later became Mao's vice-chair. Little Sister, May-ling, was Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of the pre-Communist Nationalist China and a major political figure in her own right. Big Sister, Ei-ling, was Chiang's unofficial main adviser. She made herself one of China's richest women - and her husband Chiang's prime minister. All three sisters enjoyed tremendous privilege and glory, but also endured constant attacks and mortal danger. They showed great courage and experienced passionate love, as well as despair and heartbreak. The relationship between them was highly charged emotionally, especially once they had embraced opposing political camps and Ching-ling dedicated herself to destroying her two sisters' world. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a gripping story of love, war, exile, intrigue, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a monumental journey, from Canton to Hawaii and New York, from exiles' quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. In a group biography that is by turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape the history of twentieth-century China.   ...Show more

The One Tenor - A Salute to Mario Lanza by Lindsay Perigo

$29.95 NZD

Category: Biography

Confessions of a Bookseller (HB) by Shaun Bythell

$32.99 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: very good

"Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?" Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to c ontend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. The Diary of a Bookseller (soon to be a major TV series) introduced us to the joys and frustrations of life lived in books. Sardonic and sympathetic in equal measure, Confessions of a Bookseller will reunite readers with the characters they've come to know and love. ...Show more

A Delayed Life: The True Story of the Librarian of Auschwitz by Dita Kraus

$28.00 NZD

Category: Biography

The powerful, heart-breaking memoir of Dita Kraus, the real-life Librarian of Auschwitz Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys o f a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi-occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezin, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation. Dita writes unflinchingly about the harsh conditions of the camps and her role as librarian of the precious books that her fellow prisoners managed to smuggle past the guards. But she also looks beyond the Holocaust - to the life she rebuilt after the war- her marriage to fellow survivor Otto B Kraus, a new life in Israel and the happiness and heartbreaks of motherhood. Part of Dita's story was told in fictional form in the Sunday Timesbestseller The Librarian of Auschwitzby Antonio Iturbe. Her memoir tells the full story in her own words. ...Show more

A Sharp Left Turn: Notes on a life in music, from Split Enz to Play It Strange by Mike Chunn

$45.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: very good

A rollicking yarn about the early days of ground-breaking band Split Enz, but also the powerful story of how Mike Chunn dealt with a crippling mental health issue and went on to become one of our most influential music identities. This is a gripping read that works on several levels. It's the sliding-d oor story of someone who might have become a world-famous pop star had he not suffered from a severe phobic disorder.It's the story of an assortment of young musicians trying to find their feet as bands in the late 70s and early 80s, and the associated euphoria and craziness of that life.It's Mike's personal story of struggling with agoraphobia and eventually finding a way through. Told in Mike's own words, this is also a loving evocation of a 50s and 60s New Zealand childhood, and a beautifully written memoir that will resonate with anyone who loves a well-told story. ...Show more

Eleanor by David Michaelis

$59.99 NZD

$65.00 (7% off)

Category: Biography

Prizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America's longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world's most widely admired and influential women. I n the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt's remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York's Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York's most important power couple in a generation. When Eleanor discovered Franklin's betrayal with her younger, prettier social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept FDR's bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR's first presidential campaign, and younger men. Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband's proxy in presidential ambition, and then the people's proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a "world mind." She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together. Drawing on new research, Michaelis's riveting portrait is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever. ...Show more

A Half Baked Idea - A How Love, Grief and Cake Took Me from the Courtroom to the Cordon Bleu by Olivia Potts

$37.00 NZD

Category: Biography

'An utterly beautiful, moving, bittersweet book on love and loss. I loved it' Dolly Alderton At the moment her mother died, Olivia Potts was baking a cake, badly. She was trying to impress the man who would later become her husband. So she ate the cake, completely unaware that, 275 miles away, her moth er was dying. Afterwards, grief pushed Olivia into the kitchen. She came home from her job as a criminal barrister miserable and tired, and baked soda bread, pizza, and chocolate banana cake. Her cakes sank and her custard curdled. But she found comfort in jams and solace in pies, and what began as a distraction from grief became a way of building a life outside grief, a way of surviving, and making sense of her life without her mum. And so she concocted a plan: she would begin a newer, happier life, filled with fewer magistrates and more macaroons. She left the bar and enrolled on the Diplôme de Pâtisserie at Le Cordon Bleu, plunging headfirst into the eccentric world of patisserie, with all its challenges, frustrations and culinary rewards - and a mind-boggling array of knives to boot. Interspersed with recipes ranging from passionfruit pavlova to her mother's shepherd's pie, this is a heart-breaking, hilarious, life-affirming memoir about dealing with grief, falling in love and learning how to bake a really, really good cake. *** 'Funny, sharp and sad. I laughed so much (and I cried)' Ella Risbridger, author of Midnight Chicken 'An open-hearted, uproariously funny, moving love story. It will make you laugh and cry in equal measure, and fall in love with baking, with eating, and with love itself' Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook ...Show more

Moon Over Martinborough by Jared Gulian

$39.99 NZD

Category: New Zealand

The hilarious tale of how two American city boys learn to become olive farmers on a lifestyle block in New Zealand. For Jared Gulian, leaving the United States and coming to tiny Wellington, New Zealand, was switch from the bright lights of big cities enough. So when his partner CJ decided they just had to buy a rundown olive orchard in the Wairarapa, it was almost too much to cope with. First they'd have to drive over the dangerous Rimutaka range road to get there, and he was terrified of heights. And second, they'd have to figure out what on earth you do with 500 olive trees that hadn't been pruned for years, a geriatric rooster, warring hens, an obese kunekune pig, cast sheep, marauding cattle and understanding your neighbours when they said "yiece' but meant 'yes'. In this endearing, hilarious, wry and warm-hearted book, Jared Gulian describes the first four years of their new life in the country, its disasters and small triumphs, its surprises and pleasures. But most of all he describes the warmth of local community that welcomed him, saved him from certain peril, taught him how to cook, how to care for animals, and how to understand and love the land. Its specially commissioned line drawings set this book apart as a little treasure. ...Show more

Bill and Shirley: A Memoir by Keith Ovenden

$35.00 NZD

Category: Biography

Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith were two of New Zealand's most significant twentieth-century figures: Sutch as an economist, influential civil servant, and inspirational proponent of innovation in the fields of social and economic development, and Smith as glass-ceiling breaker in the formerly male-dominat ed world of the law. Keith Ovenden's wise, urbane memoir begins with the early years of his marriage to Sutch and Smith's only child, Helen Sutch, and carries through Sutch's trial on charges under the Official Secrets Act to Smith's death over 30 years later. It offers unprecedented insights into both the accusations against Sutch and Smith's remarkable legal practice and, behind both, some of the dramas of their domestic life. Deeply intelligent and beautifully crafted, Bill and Shirley: A Memoir is a unique and intimate study of two complex and fascinating New Zealanders. ...Show more

Nat Tate by Boyd, William

$24.00 NZD

Category: Biography

The infamous literary hoax that fooled the art world On January 8 1960, artist Nat Tate set out to burn his entire life's work. Four days later he jumped off a Staten Island ferry, killing himself. His body was never found. When William Boyd published his biography of Abstract Expressionist Nat Tate, tributes poured in from a whole host of artists and critics in the New York art world. They toasted the troubled genius in a Manhattan launch party attended by David Bowie and Gore Vidal. But Nat Tate never existed. The book was a hoax. Will Boyd's biography of a fake artist is a brilliant probe into the politics of authenticity and reputation in the modern art scene. It is a playful and intelligent insight into the fascinating, often cryptic world of modern art. ...Show more