Secondhand Biography, Memoir & Travel Bargain Book Box SP2939

Secondhand Biography, Memoir & Travel Bargain Book Box SP2939

This box won't keep still — it moves from Arctic ice to rural Provence, from Cambodian brothels to AFL football grounds, from Angela's Ashes to a Bill Bryson road trip. Nineteen books united by the commitment to telling the truth about what it actually feels like to be alive.

1. Letters to My Daughter — edited by Heather Henderson — The private Menzies: letters to his daughter revealing the political and personal beliefs of Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister in his own completely unguarded voice.
2. The Road of Lost Innocence — Somaly Mam — A Cambodian girl sold into sexual slavery who became one of the most powerful advocates for trafficking survivors in the world; harrowing, honest, and ultimately extraordinary.
3. Storyteller — J.D.F. Jones — Laurens van der Post was adventurer, author, soldier, mystic, and friend to princes — and, as this biography reveals, something of a fabulist; a riveting account of a life that was itself a kind of fiction.
4. A Life on the Left — Bill Guy — Clyde Cameron was never the kind of man who compromised quietly; this account of one of Australian Labor's most combative figures crackles with the energy of its subject.
5. Committed — Elizabeth Gilbert — The author of Eat Pray Love agrees to marry again and spends a year investigating the history, anthropology, and philosophy of the institution she's so reluctant to enter; sharp, candid, and far more interesting than it has any right to be.
6. Love Has No Limits — Tori Harris — An inspirational true story about what love asks of us when the terms are hardest; deeply moving.
7. My Attainment of the Pole — Dr. Frederick A. Cook — Cook claims he reached the North Pole first, and whether you believe him or not, the account of the journey itself is extraordinary; one of polar exploration's most contested and compulsive narratives.
8. A Piano in the Pyrenees — Tony Hawks — An Englishman buys a farmhouse in France, has a grand piano shipped across the Channel, and discovers that the gap between the life you imagine and the life you get is both funnier and more instructive than expected.
9. Halfway to Hollywood — Michael Palin — The Python years giving way to the travel years, the films giving way to television, the diaries recording all of it with the warmth and precise observation that make Palin's journals essential reading.
10. Notes from a Big Country — Bill Bryson — A man who spent twenty years explaining America to the British now turns to explaining it to itself, with the faintly baffled affection of someone who loves a place too much to pretend it makes sense. One of his best.
11. Journey from Venice — Ruth Cracknell — Australia's finest stage actress reflects on travel, theatre, and the texture of a life in the arts; a memoir that reads as beautifully as she performed.
12. The Full Montezuma — Peter Moore — A trip through Central America and the Caribbean that goes wrong in most of the ways travel can go wrong, and right in all the ways that matter; Moore is self-deprecating, observant, and extremely funny.
13. Stand Your Ground — Kevin Sheedy — Four premierships, a philosophy forged from obsession and setback, and a voice that never stops believing football is about something bigger than football; Sheedy on his own terms.
14. La Belle Saison — Patricia Atkinson — The vineyards of the Lot-et-Garonne through another season: physical labour, financial anxiety, and the recurring wonder that comes with choosing to grow something in foreign soil. Quietly addictive.
15. By Little and By Little — Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg — The essential writings of one of the twentieth century's most radical Catholic voices: journalist, pacifist, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and one of the great American prose stylists.
16. Can a Duck Swim? — June Porter — A life told with characteristic Australian candour; warm, funny, and full of the specific detail that makes autobiography worth reading.
17. Angela's Ashes — Frank McCourt — A Limerick childhood of astonishing poverty, presided over by a mother of immense dignity and a father who drank the rent; one of the great memoirs in the English language, and still essential.
18. My Family and Other Animus — James Jeffrey — Gently lyrical and funny in equal measure — a book about the family you're born into and the person you become in spite of, and because of, them.
19. My Dream of You — Nuala O'Faolain — A woman approaching sixty researches a Victorian Irish scandal and finds it holding up a mirror to everything she has never allowed herself to want; a novel of longing and intelligence from one of Ireland's most powerful voices.