Husna's Story by Farid Ahmed

$37.00 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Husna Ahmed was a victim of the Christchurch mosque terrorist attack on 15 March 2019. She was shot while looking for her husband, who was in a wheelchair. The couple had been praying when a gunman burst into the mosque. He shot and killed 51 people that day and injured many others. In this book Husna's husband, Farid Ahmed, tells Husna's story, including the day of the attack. Farid describes the selflessness and bravery with which Husna lived her life. As well as looking after her daughter and paraplegic husband, Husna was an important member of the community, helping women and running classes for children. Her last selfless act was going back into the mosque to look for her husband on that fateful day, after she had already led other women and children to safety. Husna's husband, quite remarkably, forgives the alleged killer. Farid's philosophy of forgiveness, peace and love is an example of how faith and humanity can be tools for navigating even the most horrific of tragedies. ...Show more

Dead People I Have Known by Shayne Carter

$40.00 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs | Reading Level: good

In Dead People I Have Known, the legendary New Zealand musician Shayne Carter tells the story of a life in music, taking us deep behind the scenes and songs of his riotous teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys and his best-known bands Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer. He traces an intimate history of the Dunedin Sound that distinctive jangly indie sound that emerged in the seventies, heavily influenced by punk and the record label Flying Nun. As well as the pop culture of the seventies, eighties and nineties, Carter writes candidly of the bleak and violent aspects of Dunedin, the city where he grew up and would later return. His childhood was shaped by violence and addiction, as well as love and music. Alongside the fellow musicians, friends and family who appear so vividly here, this book is peopled by neighbours, kids at school, people on the street, and the other passing characters who have stayed on in his memory. We also learn of the other major force in Carter's life: sport. Harness racing, wrestling, basketball and football have provided him with a similar solace, even escape, as music. Dead People I Have Known is a frank, moving, often incredibly funny autobiography; the story of making a life as a musician over the last forty years in New Zealand, and a work of art in its own right. ...Show more

Heida - A Shepherd at the Edge of the World by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir

$27.99 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

I'm not on my own because I've been sitting crying into a handkerchief or apron over a lack of interested men. I've been made every offer imaginable over the years. Men offer themselves, their sons...drunk fathers sometimes call me up and say things like: "Do you need a farmhand?" "I can lift the hay ba les" "I can repair your tractors"... Heida is a solitary farmer with a flock of 500 sheep in a remorseless area bordering Iceland's highlands. It's known as the End of the World. One of her nearest neighbours is Iceland's most notorious volcano, Katla, which has periodically driven away the inhabitants of Ljotarstadir ever since people first started farming there in the twelfth century. This portrait of Heida written with wit and humour by one of Iceland's most acclaimed novelists, Steinunn Sigurdardottir, tells a heroic tale of a charismatic young woman, who at 23 walked away from a career as a model in New York to take over the family farm when her father died. I want to tell women they can do anything, and to show that sheep farming isn't just a man's game. I guess I've always been a feminist. When I was growing up, there was a female president, and I used to wear the same clothes and play with the same toys as the boys. It was just normal to me. Divided into four seasons, HEIDA tells the story of a remarkable year, interwoven with vivid stories of her animals and farm work and paints a unforgettable portrait of a remote life close to nature. We humans are mortal; the land outlives us, new people come, new sheep, new birds and so on but the land with its rivers and lakes and resources, remains. ...Show more

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

$27.99 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 WAINWRIGHT BOOK PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 POLARI FIRST BOOK AWARD At a crossroads in his life, the demons Luke Turner has been battling since childhood are quick to return - depression and guilt surrounding his identity as a bisexual man, experiences of sexual abuse, and the religious upbringing that was the cause of so much confusion. It is among the trees of London's Epping Forest where he seeks refuge. Away from a society that struggles to cope with the complexities of masculinity and sexuality, Luke begins to accept the duality that has provoked so much unrest in his life - and reconcile the expectations of others with his own way of being. ...Show more

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

$28.00 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

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

Mudlarking: Lost & Found on the River Thames by Lara Maiklem

$35.99 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK'Driven by curiosity, freighted with mystery and tempered by chance, wonders gleam from every page' Melissa Harrison Mudlark (/'mAdla;k/) noun A person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbour Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over fifteen years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. These objects tell her about London and its lost ways of life. Moving from the river's tidal origins in the west of the city to the point where it meets the sea in the east, Mudlarking is a search for urban solitude and history on the River Thames, what Lara calls 'the longest archaeological site in the world'. ...Show more

How to Be a Family - How I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together by Dan Kois

$45.00 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

In this "funny and honest" (Pamela Druckerman) memoir, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together.   What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family?   Dan Kois a nd his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take. ...Show more

The Man in the Red Coat (HB) by Julian Barnes

$45.00 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. The age of glamour and pleasure often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. Barnes' touchpoint through this world is the third man, Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynecologist and free-thinker, a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the French Belle Époque--its heroes and villains, its writers, its dandies, its artists and thinkers--and a life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, this new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive. ...Show more

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

$37.99 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Ray: "Traitor or Patriot? Now we have Edward Snowden’s own story — high-school dropout; hacker; joined the Army after 9/11; top secret security clearance at the age of 22.  Will make you wonder about the wisdom of Australia sharing its intelligence with the U.S. And make you worry abou t how much the government knows about you — which is everything."     Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government's system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online - a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet's conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic. ...Show more

The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: The Extraordinary Life of Dr Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare

$48.00 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia . . . The international bestseller Self-Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, has helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so. Yet even as letters and phone calls from readers around the world flooded in, thanking her for helping to improve - and in some cases to save - their lives, Dr Claire Weekes was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. Just who was this woman? Claire Weekes was driven by a restless and unconventional mind that saw her become the first woman to earn a Doctor of Science degree at Australia's oldest university, win global plaudits for her research into evolution, and take a turn as a travel agent, before embarking on a career in medicine. But it was a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis that would set her heart racing and push her towards integrating all she'd learned into a practical treatment for anxiety - a tried-and-true method now seen as state-of-the-art 30 years after her death. This book is the first to tell her remarkable story. ...Show more

Towards the Mountain : A Story of Grief and Hope Forty Years on from Erebus by Sarah Myles

$39.99 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Marking the 40th anniversary of the Erebus disaster, this is the first book on that tragedy written by one of the affected families.

David Thorp as Metaphor by Jeshel Forrester

$9.99 NZD

Category: Biographies & Memoirs