If you loved the TV series 'Call the Midwife', this real life account of a young woman's journey from convent to casualty is just for you. Kicking the Habit is the story of Eleanor Stewart's transition from carefree young woman of the Beatles generation through to a reclusive life in a French convent and on to serving as an inner city midwife.Beginning among the parties and nightclubs of the swinging sixties, Eleanor's story is one of drama, excitement, exhilaratio...

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and remarkable scientists of our age and author of the scientific bestseller "A Brief History of Time", which sold over 25 million copies across the world and will be adapted as a children's book in the Autumn of next year. In this compelling memoir his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates the inside story of their extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease...

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...

The No. 2 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER from the author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling Canon Clement Series'Immensely moving and disarmingly witty' Nigella Lawson'Such a moving, tough, funny, raw, honest read' Matt Haig'Beautifully written, moving and gut-wrenching, but also at times very funny' Ian Rankin'Captures brilliantly, beautifully, bravely the comedy as well as th...

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Derv...

Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsThe New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied....

Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn't seen it coming, and she certainly wasn't ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had?The Stranger in the Mirror is one woman's attempt to understand what mi...

'A second's silence and then an almighty scream. It was the most moving thing I had ever seen . A baby, a real live baby, another human life had entered the world. It didn't seem possible and yet I had witnessed it with my very own eyes.'Born into a happy working-class North London family in the mid-twentieth century, Katie is determined to 'do something' with her life. Working in the impoverished East End in the 1950s, she meets the Sisters of St John the Divine - a commu...

From the double Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel, a novel that Knits together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous. Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit.One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places...

All the Reverend Francis Oughterard had ever wanted was some peace and quiet, instead he becomes entangled in a nightmare world of accidental murder, predatory female parishioners, officious policemen and a drunken bishop. As the vicar's life spirals out of control it is his supercilious cat, Maurice, and bone obsessed hound, Bouncer, who save the day.A Load of Old Bones is a charming and farcical romp through a 1950's mythical Surrey.Praise for Suzette A. ...

In Burgundy, France, in 1926, a famed archaeologist dies a terrible death in a country not his own.*…*Thus begins CWA Historical Dagger Award winner Barbara Cleverly’s dazzling new mystery novel. And soon aspiring archaeologist Laetitia Talbot will find herself embroiled in a murderous conspiracy centuries in the making.Letty’s joy at snaring a place in the excavation of an ancient church in Burgundy is dimmed by the tragedy of her godfather Daniel’s violent death. But whe...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERShirley Leach lived in a world of extreme comfort, wealth and status. With every good thing life had to offer, she was due to marry the man she loved a man who, in turn, adored her. But all this was to change in a single moment.One happy day, in the midst of writing to her fiancée, her hand stopped writing unbidden; then it continued by itself, etching the words which would change her life forever:*...but...