True Whit: Designing a Life of Style, Beauty and Fun – Whitney Port

True Whit: Designing a Life of Style, Beauty and Fun
Whitney Port

Fashion icon and MTV mega-star Whitney Port shares personal stories, beauty and fitness secrets and invaluable advice on everything girls need to know to start out their independent lives in style. Intimate, honest and funny, this is Whitney Port revealed. Whitney shares her philosophy on fashion, beauty, romance and careers, balancing it all in this conversational guide for twenty-somethings setting up on their own, something she knows plenty about…

MTV’s The City followed Whitney Port as she moved from Los Angeles to New York City and learned to navigate her new life in the Big Apple. From backstabbing co-workers and bitchy bosses to cheating boyfriends and a daring new career in fashion design, Whitney – the ‘everygirl’ – handled it all with grace and style. For the first time ever, through personal stories and private snapshots, Whitney shares the true reality of being an emerging fashion designer, including her creative process, sketches and fabrics. Beautifully illustrated with Whitney’s private photos, and with advice from her friends Lauren Conrad (star of The Hills) and Kelly Cutrone (The City), this book is everything a girl could possibly need to figure out what she wants from her life, and how to make it happen.

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Swallow the Swell – Keddy Flett

Swallow the Swell
Keddy Flett

Meet Keddy Flett, a beer-bellied twenty-six year old man who needs change in his life. Desperately. And so, with more neuroses than Woody Allen to his disadvantage, Keddy and his Chinese girlfriend Poppy Lin flee Sydney, Australia, in favour of South America.

However, Keddy is about to encounter his demons in the most awkward, tense and socially paralysing way possible – manifested in ‘Bathroom Anxiety’ – in the fear that, at any second, his body will give out and he’ll be stuck in the middle of shitstorm.

Swallow the Swell invites you to hitch a ride in the distorted, sarcastic and hilarious crevasses of Keddy’s brain as he unlocks the mystery to his uncommon condition.

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Call The Midwife – Jennifer Worth

Call The Midwife: A True Story Of The East End In The 1950s
Jennifer Worth

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure.

But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction.

Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the community of nuns (including one who was accused of stealing jewels from Hatton Garden) and the camaraderie of the midwives with whom she trained.

Funny, disturbing and incredibly moving, Jennifer’s stories bring to life the colourful world of the East End in the 1950s. Continue reading »

Confessions of a Conjuror – Derren Brown

Confessions of a Conjuror
Derren Brown

In Confessions of A Conjuror, Derren Brown invites you on a whimsical journey through his unusual mind. Structured around various stages of a conjuring trick, performed by his younger self in a crowded restaurant, Derren’s endlessly engaging narrative takes you from the history of magic, to speculations on the manufacturing of Monster Munch and the correct way to poach an egg, via discussions about psychology, what he hums while cleaning his teeth and the social niceties surrounding parmesan cheese.

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Bossypants – Tina Fey

Bossypants
Tina Fey

Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything.

Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.

Before 30 Rock, Mean Girls and ‘Sarah Palin’, Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey’s story can be told.

From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon — from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence. Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we’ve all suspected: you’re no one until someone calls you bossy.

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Life and Laughing: My Story – Michael McIntyre

Life and Laughing: My Story
Michael McIntyre

Michael reveals all in his remarkably honest and hilarious autobiography Life and Laughing. His showbiz roots, his appalling attempts to attract the opposite sex, his fish-out-of-water move from public to state school and his astonishing journey from selling just one ticket at the Edinburgh Festival to selling half a million tickets on his last tour.

Michael’s story is riveting, poignant, romantic and above all very, very funny.

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Dreams from my Father – Barack Obama

Dreams from my Father
Barack Obama

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father’s life and reconcile his divided inheritance.

Written at the age of thirty-three, Dreams from my Father is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama’s journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

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Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter – Adeline Yen Mah

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
Adeline Yen Mah

Snow White’s stepmother looks like a pussycat compared to the monster under which Adeline Yen Mah suffered. The author’s memoir of life in mainland China and – after the 1949 revolution – Hong Kong is a gruesome chronicle of nonstop emotional abuse from her wealthy father and his beautiful, cruel second wife. Chinese proverbs scattered throughout the text pithily convey the traditional world view that prompted Adeline’s subservience… Falling Leaves is an Asian Mommie Dearest.

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Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self – Joseph Galliano

Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self
Joseph Galliano

If you were to write a letter to your 16-year-old self, what would it say?

In Dear Me, some of the world’s best loved personalities have written just such a letter. Dear Me includes letters from three knights, a handful of Oscar winners, a bevy of Baftas, an intrepid explorer, a few teenage pop stars, an avid horticulturalist, pages and pages of bestselling authors, a dishy doctor, a full credit of film directors, a lovey of top actors, a giggle of comedians and an Archbishop!

The letters range from the compassionate to the shocking via hilarity and heartbreak, but they all have one thing in common: they offer a unique insight into the teenager who would grow up to be…. Stephen Fry, Annie Lennox, Paul O’Grady, Jackie Collins, Fay Weldon, Alan Carr, Peter Kay, Debbie Harry, Brenda Blethyn , Jonathan Ross, Liz Smith, Will Young, Alison Moyet, Rosanne Cash, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Yoko Ono, Emma Thompson… to name but a few.

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Loose Girl – Kerry Cohen

Loose Girl
Kerry Cohen

“There is a new boy I like. I see him every other day when our classes let out at the same time. He has long, dark hair and unbelievably beautiful eyes. Almost immediately I can feel the energy between us, the promise of something to come.”

Kerry first noticed the power she had over the opposite sex at the age of eleven. By the time she was in her teens she was obsessed by boys, and soon she needed sex just to feel alive. Sleeping with countless partners, Kerry’s misguided search for love was getting out of hand. But would she ever find what she really needed?

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