General Books

New Zealand’s greatest war hero, Charles Upham, was one of the few people in history to have won the Victoria Cross twice. In consultation with Upham, and with those who knew him, Kenneth Sandford has crafted a fine testament to his legenday exploits, his acumen as a soldier, and the classical...

I heard a horrible screaming sound, like an animal being slaughtered ...then I realised it was me.' When Katie Piper was 24, her life was near perfect. Young and beautiful, she was well on her way to fulfilling her dream of becoming a model. But then she met Daniel Lynch on Facebook and her world qu...

 One year ago, a modest middle-aged woman from a village in Scotland was catapulted to global fame when the YouTube video of her audition for Britain's Got Talent touched the hearts of millions all over the world. From singing karaoke in local pubs to live performance with an eighty-piece orch...

On 2 March 1989 ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was snatched off the street by a stranger and bundled into a white van. Hours later she found herself in a dark cellar, wrapped in a blanket. When she emerged eight years later, her childhood had gone. In "3,096 Days" Natascha tells her incredible story...

Crisis is a first-hand account of the 2007-09 global financial and economic meltdown, as experienced, observed and interpreted by Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The book backgrounds the crisis, then takes readers from the overheated markets of 2007, through the collapse o...

Patrick Hennessey is a graduate in his 20s. He reads Graham Greene, listens to early-90s house on his iPod and watches Vietnam movies. He has also, as an officer in the Grenadier Guards, fought in some of the most violent combat the British army has seen in a generation. This is the story of how a m...

David Kenyon Webster's memoir is a clear-eyed, emotionally charged chronicle of youth, camaraderie, and the chaos of war. Relying on his own letters home and recollections he penned just after his discharge, Webster gives a first hand account of life in "E Company, 101st Airborne Division,"...

Julia Child single-handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking, with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef. But as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France. Indeed...

What could one man find if he embarked on a journey through fantasy world after fantasy world? In an enthralling blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir, forty-year-old former D&D addict Ethan Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds—from Boston to New Zeal...

A unique book of wisdom and experience that reaches from the most violent slums of New York City to the highest planes of spiritual thought by the RZA, hip-hopas most exalted wise man. The RZA, the Abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan and hip-hop cultureas most dynamic genius, imparts the lessons heas lear...

This book is part memoir, part urban tale with a beginning, middle and end. It's the story of a place and the people who lived there, and a family, and of what happened to them in the radical changes of the 80s and 90s. It's also the story of New Zealand over the last two decades; what we've won, an...

This book chronicles the unforgettable account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games--games that left him ...

A true story of love in wartime and in peace by one of New Zealand's finest writers. In Crete during the Second World War a wounded Maori Battalion soldier and a young Cretan woman fall in love when the young infantryman is sheltered by her family. After marrying in Crete, Ned and Katina come back t...

Deaf people in New Zealand are often little known outside their own culture. People of the Eye brings their world to life in personal histories translated into English with a series of photographs of the deaf community. The storytellers are both old and young, and they reflect both the diversity and...

From prize-winning journalist to chat show king on a show voted one of the top ten British TV programmes of all time, Michael Parkinson's starry career spans over four decades. Now an international celebrity himself, the man from a humble but colourful Yorkshire mining family who can tease out the s...

Imagine being a middle-class, university-educated young Pakeha woman from Wellington's leafy suburbs and turning your back on all that to live in a house with Black Power gang connections in the rundown inner-city. Imagine organising the young women who come to live in that house, most of whom are f...

'I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories'  One morning in February 1952, a journalist called Ian Fleming sat down at his desk and set about creating a fictional secret agent. James Bond was born and would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative cre...

In her first acclaimed volume of memoir (At the End of Darwin Road), Fiona Kidman described her background and childhood, evoking the places she lived in and the people she knew. It finished with the publication of her first, hugely successful novel. In this sequel, she explores further the influenc...

On the morning of the 10th December 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the po...

In this second volume of Martha Long's bestselling memoirs, aged 13, Martha is rescued by the courts from the clutches of her evil stepfather, Jackser, and her feckless mother, Sally. After numerous arrests for shoplifting, a judge rules that she is to be sent to a convent school with the instructio...

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sunk a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him for at home, an...

Kelvin is one of three psychics selected to investigate unsolved murders on the acclaimed TV2 series Sensing Murder - now in its second series and one of the country's highest-rating TV shows. From his early days growing up in an isolated rural environment to travelling the world as an acclaimed psy...

Michael Booth has had his fill of celebrity chefs and their recipes. He wants to know how to cook, not just to follow recipes. So, he burns his cookery books and, together with his young family, heads for a new life in Paris - reasoning that, if anyone can be trusted to make food complicated, it's t...

The true story of a marriage (not really), a lovable and relentless mother, a six-year old who says his parents cannot get married (but wants to go to the reception), a partner who doesn't want to act like a straight person, and the author, who has written a hilarious and poignant memoir about makin...

'8 May, 1995. My alarm clock goes off at 6am. I get up and walk outside to survey the sky. Will we be going topdressing today? At 7am I leave with my first load, 900 kg. I land back four or five minutes later when the Fletcher is reloaded. Climbing away from the base of the airstrip in a northerly d...

"The dressing gown was pink candlewick. Old brown vomit stains on the lapels tried to hide themselves in shame as I swept into the room, weaving my way towards the silver drinks tray with its Waterford crystal decanters of whisky and brandy. By the time I raised the decanter to toast the elite ...

By day…he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night…he spent it as fast as he could on drugs, sex and travel. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab; to the wife and kids who waited for him at home; and the fast-tal...

"American Prometheus" is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became...

James Frey wakes up on a plane, with no memory of the preceding two weeks. His face is cut and his body is covered with bruises. He has no wallet and no idea of his destination. He has abused alcohol and every drug he can lay his hands on for a decade - and he is aged only twenty-three. What happens...

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanit...

One day a woman of average means waltzes by a jewellery shop window and spots a GBP20,000 diamond necklace. She can't get it out of her head. Eventually she gets the idea of sharing it with friends, persuading them to chip in a grand each to buy the necklace. This is the story of 13 ordinary women, ...

Ranulph Fiennes has travelled to the most dangerous and inaccessible places on earth, almost died countless times, lost nearly half his fingers to frostbite, raised millions of pounds for charity and been awarded a polar medal and an OBE. He has been an elite soldier, an athlete, a mountaineer, an e...

An autobiographical portrait of Stephen King's home life, his family and his traumatic recent accident. He offers an insight into his world as well as analysis, advice and instruction on writing. Find out what books and films influenced the young writer, his first idea for a story, the true life tal...

When she agrees to take on one of the abused horses just rescued by the local SPCA, a new chapter opens in Susan Richard's difficult life. She lost her mother at the age of five and was raised by uncaring relatives; she married unhappily and divorced; and she'd been an alcoholic. Now, at the age of ...

'Those of you with a sense of humour, a love of hunting and a liking for yarns about the characters that roam the New Zealand mountains, this book is for you.'Big Al' once again revisits his beloved terrain: yarns of off-road New Zealand. With his characteristic humour and love for the land - and la...

'I was born on 31 January 1979 - a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number nine or the sound of loud voices arguing.' Like the character Hoffman portrayed, he can perform extraordinary maths in his head, sees numbers a...

Bullied at school, and growing up dreaming of revenge, Mark 'Chopper' Read determined to be the toughest in any company. He became a crime commando who terrorised drug dealers, pimps, thieves and armed robbers on the streets and in jail - but boasts never to have hurt an innocent member of the publi...

Journalist, author, and broadcaster Ian Cross has made many splashes in New Zealand's small pond and in this rich and rewarding memoir he reveals much of his life that would easily elude any would-be biographer: The bizarre troubles he and another young journalist fell into in Panama under the direc...

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant...

The sensational critical biography of this phenomenal entrepreneur and his business practices -- fully updated to cover Branson's recent ventures. No British tycoon is more popular, few claim to be richer and none has masterminded a more recognisable brand than Richard Branson. What is behind the s...