Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why--despite all the evidence to the...
Author
Formats
Description
Nancy Mitford was, in the words of her sister Lady Diana Mosley, "very complex." Her highly autobiographical early work, the biographies and novels of her more mature French period, her journalism, and the vast body of letters to her family, to friends such as Evelyn Waugh, and to the great love of her life, Gaston Palewski, all tell an intriguing story. Drawing from these, as well as conversations with Mitford's two surviving sisters, acquaintances,...
Author
Description
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues...
Author
Formats
Description
"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her...
Author
Formats
Description
"Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction-above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea-that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica,...
Author
Formats
Description
"As a thirteen-year-old de Rosnay read and reread Rebecca, becoming a lifelong devotee of Du Maurier's fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following Du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious sixteen-year-old, a twenty-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old woman."--
Author
Description
"From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden...
Author
Formats
Description
"The modern romance novel is elevated to a subject of serious study in this addictively readable biography of pioneering celebrity author Elinor Glyn. Society darling Elinor Glyn shocked her English peers with the 1907 publication of Three Weeks, an intensely erotic novel that launched her to international fame and infamy. Historian Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn's meteoric rise for the first time, beginning where most romance novels end: with her...
Author
Description
From Frederick Forsyth, the grand master of international suspense, comes his most intriguing story ever: his own. He was the RAF's youngest pilot at the age of nineteen, barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, got strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau, and was accused of helping fund a 1973 coup in Equatorial Guinea. The Stasi arrested him, the Israelis feted him, the IRA threatened...
Author
Formats
Description
"For two months every year, from 1946 to his death eighteen years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. This book explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming's iconic post-war hero"--Dust jacket flap.
Author
Description
"It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie's books still sell over four million copies each year-- more than thirty years after her death-- and it shows no signs of slowing. But who was the woman behind these mystifying,...
Author
Description
J.G. Ballard has been, for over fifty years, one of this country's most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, "Empire of the Sun", in this revelatory autobiography he charts the course of his astonishing life. "Miracles of Life" takes us from the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, to the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp, to Ballard's arrival in a devastated Britain. Ballard recounts...
Author
Description
"In this definitive biography Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré, Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight. Of course, the pseudonym John le Carré has helped to keep the public at a distance. Sisman probes Cornwell's unusual upbringing, abandoned by his mother at the age of only five and raised by his con man father (when not in prison), and explores his background...
Author
Formats
Description
Roald Dahl is one of the most famous children's book authors ever. Now in this Who Was--? biography, children will learn of his real-life adventures. A flying ace for the British Air Force, he was married to an Academy Award-winning actress. He also wrote books and screenplays for adults. Entertaining and readable, this biography has 80 black-and-white illustrations.
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Alachua County Library District can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Suggest Materials Service. Submit Request