Childhood Memoir

In this follow-up to Billy's first international best seller, an autobiography set largely in Thailand's infamous prison system, Billy sets out to explore his experience of childhood abuse that would lead to a life of drug addiction and near-constant incarceration. After Billy's sentence in Klong Prem prison was commuted as a result of his extraordinary success as a Muay Thai boxer, he returned to the UK. In this vividly told story, Liverpudlian Billy contrasts his first-hand experience of one of the cruellest prison systems in the world with his experience of UK prisons.

In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she was a best-selling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.

As a child, Luiz Schwarcz knew little about his grandfather and namesake, Lajos. Only later did he learn that Lajos, a devout Hungarian Jew, had been put on a train to a Nazi death camp with his son André, whom he ordered to leap to freedom at a rail crossing while he himself was carried on to death. What young Luiz did know was that his father, André, who had emigrated to Brazil, was an unhappy and silent man. Luiz blossomed into the family prodigy, becoming a groundbreaking literary publisher. He found a home in the family silence—a home that he filled with reading.

This is the true story of a unique man who lived among the Indians in the early 1800's, and who in his twenties learned to read and write this book. He was a favorite in Europe. He spent time with Thomas Jefferson, shortly thereafter Mr. Hunter was assassinated in Texas while attempting to establish a home for numerous Indian tribes.

A true story that pulls at your heartstrings and stays with you as it leaves its mark!This powerful and touching story provides a picture of family life when a parent is in the military. It's a true story that gives children comfort in realizing they are not alone as they struggle with their emotions. Hopefully, the story will guide parents and children to talk openly about difficult situations. Every military family will feel a connection, and smile at the discovery that with discussion comes healing. It is all about the love that brings us together. Carolyn Watkins' books build confidence...

The never-before-published diaries of Alathea Fitzalan Howard - who spent her teenaged years living out World War II in Windsor Great Park with her close friends Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, the future queen of the United Kingdom - provide an extraordinary and intimate look at the British royal family.

From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. A kind of memoir that is also a peon to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire - for men and women - and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare. It is a life that navigates and transcends abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. It is the life of a misfit, one that forges a fierce and untrodden path to creativity and comes together in the shape of love.

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage - learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio - and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar’s. After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva.

Childhood Lost in Poverty is an account of the author’s childhood experiences, from infancy to young adulthood. The process enabled him to recognise how the poor parenting skills of his father, as well as his mother’s struggle to raise him and his sister up in poverty, compromised his relationships with his parents and affected his adult life.

In this vivid memoir, Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents’ journey from privilege to food stamps—from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society—and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it.

This is an engaging account of childhood years lived in the famous religious and socialist commune in upstate New York (1848-1880) dedicated to sharing property, work, and love. It is full of sketches of many community members and of their employees. It conveys the look and feel of the communal home, the Mansion House, and the surrounding world.

Leah Broad's magnificent group biography resurrects these four forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever.

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

In this “vivid...lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir - the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman) - a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him.

While most kids are served home-cooked dinners and tucked in with bedtime stories at night, Mary Zoe never knows which version of her mother, Zodie, to expect. She might be dressed to the nines, rhapsodizing about a more luxurious way of life, or she might be strewn naked on the floor, slumped into unconsciousness by drugs and alcohol. But either way, Mary Zoe has known from an early age that she wants a better life.

In this insightful, emotional, and thought provoking memoir, fashion mogul Blake Martin bares his soul and guides his audience through his childhood trauma. Through entertaining stories and brutal honesty, Martin stands on the pedestal of his truth.

To the young people of today, the 1960s seems like another age. But for those who grew up in this decade, school life, "mod" fashions and sixties pop music are still fresh in their minds. From James Bond to Sindy dolls and playing hopscotch in the street, life was very different to how it is now. After the tough and frugal years of the fifties, the sixties was a boom period, a time of changed attitudes and improved lifestyles. With chapters on home and school life, games and hobbies, music and fashion, this delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this lively era.

Adopted at six months old by Dubliners Sean and Helen Gallagher, PJ spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents' northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when - having lost the pub - Helen took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them 'care in the community'. Now it was a household of ten - PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever. Madhouse is PJ's riotous life story.

In Spirit of a Hummingbird, Felicia Thai Heath, the daughter of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who met in the United States, gives us a disquieting, eventful memoir based on her early childhood on the run with her father—a notorious Vietnamese kingpin and escaped convict—and her conflicted mother. Clever and mature beyond her age, young Felicia experienced poverty and witnessed abuse as her dysfunctional family bounced around in the United States and Canada. Amid all the tumult and terror, she found ways to love her family, educate herself, navigate her world, and discover her potential.