Tick Bite Fever is the unconventional memoir of a very unconventional childhood.In the early Seventies, Dave Bennun's family transplanted themselves from Swindon to the wilds of Kenya. His father, who was a doctor, had lived in Africa before (but had felt it expedient to leave when the South African government realised he was carting explosives around in the boot of his car for the ANC). For Dave, Kenya was bemusingly new. It would be his home for the next 16 years.

David Bennun had lived in Africa his whole life. At the age of 18 he came to Britain, the mother country. The country he had read about in Punch magazine or seen in films like Chariots of Fire. He was in for a shock. A very big shock indeed: 'I could not have been less prepared had I spent my life up to that point listening to 30-year-old broadcasts of the Light Programme.'In this timely follow-up to the critically acclaimed Tick Bite Fever, Davi...

Vic Reeves' vivid, enchanting, and utterly hilarious childhood memoir is a comic masterpiece.Before there was Vic Reeves, there was a boy called James Moir who was much the same as any other lad.Obsessed with owning a pet crow, a master at writing his name and terrified of his father's immense moustache. Growing up in Yorkshire and then CountyDurham, the boy who would be Reeves somehow managed to escape the attentions of 'Randy Mandy' and get a crash course in pig castration, befor...

On February 22, 2011, journalist Jane Bowron had been living in her hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, when the city was struck by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, only five months after a 7.1 earthquake. While the first quake had caused damage but no fatalities, the second became the ultimate horror story: entire suburbs were decimated, houses collapsed, hillsides fell away, and people were killed or trapped in rubble and raging fires. As the historic city lay in ruins, Bowron managed to f...

When I was 10, I was taken from my quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic new world. Africa, at once breathtaking and soul-destroying, from the snow-capped mountains and teeming game plains of Kenya and Tanzania to the haunted hunger-stalked dustbowls of Ethiopia and the Sudan – the hideous and the magnificent have always gone hand in hand there.Nobody who has once set foot on the soil of Africa will ever be quite free of it again. When I first went there, I ...

Moab is My Washpot is in turns funny, shocking, tender, delicious, sad, lyrical, bruisingly frank and addictively readable.Stephen Fry's bestselling memoir tells how, sent to a boarding school 200 miles from home at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love, ecstasy, carnal violation, expulsion, imprisonment, criminal conviction, probation and catastrophe to emerge, at eighteen, ready to try and face the world in which he had always felt a stranger.Fry w...

When an elephant saved Sally Henderson's life in Botswana, it was to change her irrevocably. A passion to conserve this majestic species was ignited, and in 1990 she left Australia to join an elephant research project in the wilds of Zimbabwe.What follows is a remarkable journey into the world of Africa's elephants, and a deeply personal memoir of one woman's awakening and the choices she makes to follow her calling.Sally paints a rare and unforgettable portrait of a Herd a...

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb Look, has written a book about his life.As well as giving a specific account of every single time he's scored some smack, this disgusting memoir also details:the singular, pitbull-in...

The delightful tale of a young couple who in the late 1970s, on impulse, became the new landlords of the most remote, bleak and lonely pub - The Tan Hill Inn - located in the bleak landscape of the Yorkshire Dales. Having seen an article in the newspaper about the pub's search for a new manager, they arrived just three weeks later as the new landlords of the The Tan Hill Inn. It is a wild, wind-swept place, set alone in a sea of peat bog and heather moorland that stretches unbroken as far ...

A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles.Séamas O’Reilly’s mother died when he was five, leaving him, his ten (!) brothers and sisters, and their beloved father in their sprawling bungalow in rural Derry. It was the 1990s; the Troubles were a background rumble, but Séamas was more preoccupied with dinosaurs, Star Wars, and the actual location of...

Alan Hollinghurst's first novel is a tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.By the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty.

The dazzlingly funny second volume of Danny Baker's memoirs: the television years.Since my first book was published I have had countless friends and family members get in touch to say how come I hadn't included this story or that tale. Was I ashamed of being shot twice, once up the arse, in Jamaica Road? How long should a man live with such a secret? If by retrospectively dropping my trousers every few pages I can reveal a fuller picture of myself during these year...