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In the Berlin of 1942, Lilly Wust was married to a soldier and was the mother of four children. Her quiet domestic life was forever changed when she met and fell in love with Jewish Felice Schragenheim. Aimee and Jaguar, as the two called one another, embarked on an ecstatic affair, exchanging letters and poems and even signing a marriage contract. After only a year, their happiness was destroyed by the Gestapo: Felice was taken away to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Lilly received a las...

In 1974 Hannah Pool was adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up unable to imagine what it must be like to look into the eyes of a blood relative until one day a letter arrived from a brother she never knew she had. Not knowing what to do with the letter, Hannah hid it away. But she was unable to forget it, and ten years later she finally decided to track down her surviving Eritrean family and embarked upon a journey that would take...

Dubravka Ugresic is Croatia's finest living writer. Escaping from a dreadful situation in Zagreb, she finds herself living in Middletown, Conneticut. There she compiles a witty, sardonic dictionary of everyday American life shot through with absurdity and her awareness of the barbaric realities of Sarajevo and Dubrovnik. Diary, autobiography, travel book and fiction: this is a strange and lovely book. Like Waugh or Nabokov, the author registers American life in a deadly deadpan voice. Jogging. S...

This is a moving account of Gayle Feldman's fight against cancer, interwoven with memories of her mother, her mother's death, her grandmother's death and her sister-in-law's death - all of whom died of the same cancer. At 40, after hormone fertility drugs, Feldman becomes pregnant, only to discover at week 35 that she has a malignant lump in her breast. This means inducing the baby and a biopsy 60 hours later. Ben is born safely but starts to turn blue, although he will ultimately recover. Feldm...

Early in his life, Carl Gustav Jung was an admirer and protege of Freud, but after their celebrated quarrel he became his enemy and rival. With his discovery of the collective unconscious (the part of the mind we may share with all other human beings, living and dead), with his profound interest in myth and symbol and his explorations into the true alchemy, astrology and even UFOs, Jung is now established as a source of "alternative" ideas that have fascinated generations. This biography portray...

Dancing in the Sea is the beautifully written and moving account of Catherine Hill's horrific experience of a hijack, after which she was left permanently disabled.When she was 25, Catherine and her Italian boyfriend Picci went travelling through India. On their journey home their Pan Am flight from Bombay to Germany was hijacked when it landed in Pakistan to pick up additional passengers. Four PLO terrorists took over the aircraft and the hostages endured about 17 hours of terror. Convinced tha...

Desert Rose details Coretta Scott King's upbringing in a family of proud, land-owning African Americans with a profound devotion to the ideals of social equality and the values of education, as well as her later role as her husband's most trusted confidant and advisor.

A Class Apart is a selection of photographs and letters culled from the archive of Montague Glover (1898-1983), documenting the intimate, rarely recorded lives of gay men in Britain from the First World War to the 1950s. The book features Glover's three obsessions: the Armed Forces, working class men, and his lifelong lover Ralph Hall. A seamless blend of the personal and the historical make A Class Apart a unique portrait of a secret relationship and of an undiscovered period in British gay hi...

Her childhood was idyllic: fishing by moonlight, dressing her cats in doll clothes, stealing apples from the orchards planted on the Western frontier. Slim, lively Jessie Lee dreamed a little girl's dreams in an exquisitely remembered world of one-room schoolhouses, snowy Christmases, and a family that survived scarlet fever and floods with the power of love. But for Jessie Lee, as for the nation, World War I put an end to those years of innocence. She lost her beloved fiance and mother in one y...

Diane Farr Numb3rs star, Loveline veteran, and FunnyorDie.com contributor always took for granted that she could love anybody she chose. But when she, a white woman, fell in love with a Korean-American man, she quickly learned a tough lesson: When it comes to navigating the landscape of interracial love in America today . . . you're going to step on some landmines. At turns introspective and outrageous, Kissing Outside the Lines is Farr's unapologetic often hilarious look at the complexities...

This is an unusual narrative in that it successfully combines subjectivity -- how an English person was led by a sequence of educational developments, personal encounters and historical constraints to become the founder of the German-Jewish Centre at the University of Sussex; and objectivity -- a book that introduces English and American readers to an important and evolving field of historical and cultural studies through intellectual autobiography. It documents the formative experiences of a sc...

This is a non-fiction account of the author's daughter's first three years. From her first days, Brian Hall has been fascinated by her interactions with the world around her - what she noticed, what she cared about, and what links she made. By the time of her third birthday, she was living in a rich complex of games, fears and dreams that had points of contact with the adult world, but that spun on its own axis.

This is a record of the life and achievements of Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, better known as Sue Ryder. During the war, she served with the highly secret Special Operations Executive, created by Winston Churchill to co-ordinate Resistance activities in German-occupied Europe, attached to the Polish sections of SOE. What she witnessed from that time to the end of the war - especially the selfless, cheerful courage of men embarking on the most hazardous of operations - left her determined to relieve...

John Bird has changed the lives of countless people, but first of all he had to change his own. Here he turns his attention to his own past and traces his life from the slums of Notting Hill, through crime, vagrancy and homelessness, to redemption when he launched "The Big Issue". This is an evocation of a life which could so easily have gone the other way, and also a great testament to the human ability to overcome adversity, when energy meets that rarer quality, opportunity.

Part autobiographical, part fiction, this is a satirical and self-accusing tour of the London gay scene in what subsequently proved to be the last days before AIDS became a reality. The book takes the form of a series of dramatic monologues and dialogues involving a small cast of queens who move from one watering hole to the next in the course of a 24 hour period, descending into hell, the gay night-club Heaven.