Catalog Search Results
Author
Publisher
Pegasus Crime, an imprint of Pegasus Books, Ltd
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was." Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her...
Author
Publisher
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
"From Frederick Forsyth, the grand master of international suspense, comes his most intriguing story ever--his own"--
He was the RAF's youngest pilot at the age of nineteen, barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, got strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war; the Stasi arrested him, the Israelis feted him, the IRA threatened him. And that's just for starters. Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue...
Author
Publisher
Pegasus Books
Pub. Date
[2018]
Description
"It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie's books still sell over four million copies each year--more than thirty years after her death--and it shows no signs of slowing. But who was the woman behind these mystifying,...
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
[2013]
Description
"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
"In this definitive biography Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré, Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight. Of course, the pseudonym John le Carré has helped to keep the public at a distance. Sisman probes Cornwell's unusual upbringing, abandoned by his mother at the age of only five and raised by his con man father (when not in prison), and explores his background...
Author
Formats
Description
"From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John Le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his highly anticipated memoir, Le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity...
Author
Publisher
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
Originally published in 2015, this definitive biography, now released in its entirety after the great novelist's death in 2020, reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a masterful meditation on the complex relationship between biography and subject.
10) Elegy for Iris
Author
Publisher
St. Martin's Press
Pub. Date
c1999
Description
"I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing."
So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved...
Author
Series
Publisher
Doubleday, Page
Pub. Date
1926 [c1925]
Description
"A Personal Record (1912) both documents and fictionalizes Joseph Conrad's early life and the opening stages of his careers as a writer and as a seaman. It is also an artistic and political manifesto. The introduction traces Conrad's sources and gives the history of writing and reception. The essay on the text and the apparatus set out the textual history. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places, and gloss foreign terms....
Author
Series
Publisher
Grosset & Dunlap
Pub. Date
c2012
Description
Roald Dahl is one of the most famous children's book authors ever. Now in this Who Was-- ? biography, children will learn of his real-life adventures. A flying ace for the British Air Force, he was married to an Academy Award-winning actress. He also wrote books and screenplays for adults. Entertaining and readable, this biography has 80 black-and-white illustrations.
13) The Lineup: the world's greatest crime writers tell the inside story of their greatest detectives
Publisher
Little, Brown and Co
Pub. Date
2009
Appears on list
Description
Shares the stories behind the creations of many of the mystery genre's most popular characters, revealing the inspirations for such examples as Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch and Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe.
Author
Publisher
Harper Audio
Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
Douglas Adams's "six-part trilogy," The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy grew from a blip of a notion into an ever-expanding multimedia universe that amassed an unprecedented cult of followers and became an international sensation. As a young journalist, Neil Gaiman was given complete access to Adams's life, times, gossip, unpublished outtakes, and files (and became privy to his writing process, insecurities, disillusionments, challenges, and triumphs)....
Author
Publisher
St. Martin's Press
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
Traces the life and achievements of classic novelist Daphne du Maurier, sharing creative insights into the master writer's life at different ages and her enduring influence in literature.
"Though Daphne du Maurier's most famous work, Rebecca, is beloved across the world, she remains one of the most enigmatic British novelists, her heart's secrets as shrouded in darkness as the tales she told. Tatiana de Rosnay, fascinated by du Maurier since childhood,...
17) Ian Fleming
Author
Publisher
St. Martin's Press
Pub. Date
2013.
Description
Sportsman, womanizer, naval commander, world-traveler, spy, the suave Old Etonian creator of the Cold War's archetypal secret agent was infinitely more complicated and interesting than his major fictional character, Agent 007, as Lycett shows in this full-length biography of Ian Fleming.
Author
Publisher
Liveright Publishing Corporation
Pub. Date
[2022]
Description
"The modern romance novel is elevated to a subject of serious study in this addictively readable biography of pioneering celebrity author Elinor Glyn. Society darling Elinor Glyn shocked her English peers with the 1907 publication of Three Weeks, an intensely erotic novel that launched her to international fame and infamy. Historian Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn's meteoric rise for the first time, beginning where most romance novels end: with her...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc
Pub. Date
2021.
Description
"A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair. Graham Greene lived a life as strange and compelling as those in his brilliant novels. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the...
Author
Publisher
Pegasus Books
Pub. Date
2015
Description
"For two months every year, from 1946 to his death eighteen years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. This book explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming's iconic post-war hero"--