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Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Explore these insightful works of biography and memoir, curated and recommended by Readings staff.
Rick Morton
Social mobility is not a train you get to board after you’ve scraped together enough for the ticket. You have to build the whole bloody engine, with nothing but a…
Available to order, ships in approx 4 weeksAvailable to order
Jillian Graham
Did Margaret Sutherland achieve more for Australian music than any other composer?
In stock at 6 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 6 shops
Judith Brett
Alfred Deakin-scholar, spiritualist, prime minister-was instrumental in creating modern Australia. In the first biography of Deakin in more than half a century, the acclaimed political historian Judith Brett deftly weaves…
In stock at 2 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 2 shops
Claire Tomalin
A memoir that follows Claire Tomalin through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to…
William Finnegan
A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer
In stock at 8 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 8 shops
Anthony Bourdain
After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all - and he meant all.
Patricia Lockwood
The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished…
In stock at 5 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 5 shops
Maggie Nelson
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson’s _The Argonauts _is a genre-bending memoir, a work of ‘autotheory’ offering fresh…
Paul Kalanithi
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor…
Timothy Conigrave
At an all-boys school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and…
Patti Smith
Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award Patti Smith’s evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe
In stock at 7 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 7 shops
Jeannette Walls
Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, ‘brilliant’ but alcoholic parents. At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with…
In stock at 3 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 3 shops
David Sedaris
A riotous collection of memoirs which explores the absurd hilarity of modern life and creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world.
In stock at 4 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 4 shops