Nothing ​Holds Back the Night

Dannii Minogue - My ​Story
Dannii ​Minogue first appeared on television aged seven. She signed her first record deal at the age of seventeen and ever since she has been wowing audiences around the world with her charm and her charisma. The daughter of a dancer mother, Dannii found the spotlight early and discovered a passion for entertaining that has never faded. After early soap opera appearances, including Home and Away, a string of chart hits in the early 90s (Love And Kisses, Success, Jump To The Beat, Baby Love, This Is It ...) launched Dannii as an established pop singer before she then re-invented herself as one of the world's most popular female dance acts. Most recently, she has found a new army of loving fans as a judge on The X Factor, where she has charmed audiences with her sincerity, compassion and warmth. Her recent emotional Pier's Morgan interview was watched by a record-breaking six million viewers. In this very personal and uplifting autobiography, Dannii talks openly for the first time about the highs and lows of her 30 year career; her marriage and subsequent divorce to Julian McMahon; the trials and tribulations of her role as an X Factor judge; her relationship with sister Kylie and, of course, becoming a mother. Explosively revealing, Dannii Minogue: My Story is set to be the autobiography of the year.

Louise Pentland - Life ​with a Sprinkle of Glitter
Aloha ​Sprinklerinos! Imagine you are in one of those glorious vintage shops where every surface is laden with treasure. Cut glass, pill boxes, old cameras, pendants, chests of drawers and stacks and stacks of books. This book is like that. Each chapter is one of those gem encrusted tins that you can open, peep inside and enjoy. You can either methodically wander the entire shop, looking at each individual item in order, or, you can dance around with wild abandon, opening and closing whatever you like, whenever you like. You can take in tiny bits of it at a time or you can devour it all in one go. I don't mind. I don't mind how you go about it; all that matters to me is that you take something from it. Divided into four sections: Glitz, Create, Need to Knows and All About Love, you'll find all my little tips and tricks, stories and insights and nuggets of advice. I want you to walk away from this book feeling uplifted. I want you to feel as though you are equipped to deal with something in your life and deal with it in the best possible, positive way. I want to show you how I find so much joy and enrichment in my life and how you can do it too, with just a Sprinkle of Glitter...Toodlepip! Xxx

Jean-Dominique Bauby - The ​Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
This ​memoir was literally composed with a blind of an eye. By turns mischievous, angry, and wistful, the former editor French Elle shares the joys and sadness that crept over him when he became afflicted with a disease that left his entire body paralyzed -- except for his left eye, which he learned to use with a blinking alphabet to communicate with the rest of the world. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an unforgettable account of Bauby's own determination to live as fully in his mind as he had been able to in his body.

Mindy Kaling - Is ​Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Mindy ​Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?” Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you’ve come to the right book, mostly! In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka.

Arthur Fleischmann - Carly Fleischmann - Carly's ​Voice
In ​this international bestseller, father and advocate for Autism awareness Arthur Fleischmann blends his daughter Carly's own words with his story of getting to know his remarkable daughter--after years of believing that she was unable to understand or communicate with him. At the age of two, Carly Fleischmann was diagnosed with severe autism and an oral motor condition that prevented her from speaking. Doctors predicted that she would never intellectually develop beyond the abilities of a small child. Carly remained largely unreachable through the years. Then, at the age of ten, she had a breakthrough. While working with her devoted therapists, Carly reached over to their laptop and typed "HELP TEETH HURT," much to everyone's astonishment. Although Carly still struggles with all the symptoms of autism, she now has regular, witty, and profound conversations on the computer with her family and her many thousands of supporters online. One of the first books to explore firsthand the challenges of living with autism, Carly's Voice brings readers inside a once-secret world in the company of an inspiring young woman who has found her voice and her mission.

Sheila Munro - Lives ​of Mothers & Daughters
Sheila ​Munro is the daughter of one of the world's most admired fiction writers: Alice Munro, three-time winner of Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award. In "Lives of Mothers and Daughters," she reveals what it was like to grow up with a mother of such tremendous renown. At the core of the book lies a loving and intimate biography of Alice, presented as only a daughter can. Sheila traces the story back to her ancestors, who left Scotland in the early 19th century, before telling of Alice's birth in 1931, her youth growing up on an Ontario farm, and her two marriages, and two grandchildren - Sheila's own children. Sheila has a tale to tell that's her own as well, involving her writerly aspirations and her efforts to forge a unique path while following in her mother's footsteps. And so, from her perspective as both an author and a mother, Sheila writes frankly about her mother and her mother's writing. The legions of devoted Alice Munro fans will glimpse real-life settings, situations and characters that have worked their way into her fiction as Sheila offers a behind-the-scenes tour (replete with Munro family snapshots) of the inspirations for the tales Munro fans know and love.

Jeanette Winterson - Why ​Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
In ​1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, _Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit_, was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation. Oranges was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over that novel and its author's life. When Jeanette finally left her home, at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman, Mrs Winterson asked her: _why be happy when you could be normal_? This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking. Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.

Ellen DeGeneres - The ​Funny Thing Is...
Ellen ​DeGeneres published her first book of comic essays, the #1 bestselling My Point ... And I Do Have One, way back in 1996. Not one to rest on her laurels, the witty star of stage and screen has since dedicated her life to writing a hilarious new book. That book is this book. After years of painstaking, round-the-clock research, surviving on a mere twenty minutes of sleep a night, and collaborating with lexicographers, plumbers, and mathematicians, DeGeneres has crafted a work that is both easy to use and very funny. Along with her trademark ramblings, The Funny Thing Is... contains hundreds of succinct insights into her psyche and offers innovative features. Sure to make you laugh, The Funny Thing Is... is an indispensable reference for anyone who knows how to read or wants to fool people into thinking they do.

Lady GaGa - Terry Richardson - Lady ​Gaga
In ​this book of original, behind-the-scenes photographs, acclaimed photographer Terry Richardson follows superstar Lady Gaga during one year of her life, from Lollapalooza through the final show of her Monster Ball tour. During the time period he followed Gaga, Richardson took over 100,000 images and attended more than 30 Monster Ball dates around the world. From the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal rally in Portland, Maine, to the Thierry Mugler show at Maxime, Paris, Richardson captures Lady Gaga as you've never seen her before. A year-long global odyssey- -all access, nothing off limits--this is the book Lady Gaga fans have been waiting for.

Anna Lyndsey - Girl ​in the Dark
Anna ​was living a normal life. She was ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. But then she started to develop worrying symptoms: her face felt like it was burning whenever she was in front of the computer. Soon this progressed to an intolerance of fluorescent light, then of sunlight itself. The reaction soon spread to her entire body. Now, when her symptoms are at their worst, she must spend months on end in a blacked-out room, losing herself in audio books and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. It was during this period she began to write this book.

George Plimpton - Truman ​Capote
He ​was the most social of writers, and at the height of his career, he was the very nexus of the glamorous worlds of the arts, politics and society, a position best exemplified by his still legendary Black and White Ball. Truman truly knew everyone, and now the people who knew him best tell his remarkable story to bestselling author and literary lion, George Plimpton. Using the oral-biography style that made his Edie (edited with Jean Stein) a bestseller, George Plimpton has blended the voices of Capote's friends, lovers, and colleagues into a captivating and narrative. Here we see the entire span of Capote's life, from his Southern childhood, to his early days in New York; his first literary success with the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms; his highly active love life; the groundbreaking excitement of In Cold Blood, the first "nonfiction novel"; his years as a jet-setter; and his final days of flagging inspiration, alcoholism, and isolation. All his famous friends and enemies are here: C.Z. Guest, Katharine Graham, Lauren Bacall, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Huston, William F. Buckley, Jr., and dozens of others. Full of wonderful stories, startlingly intimate and altogether fascinating, this is the most entertaining account of Truman Capote's life yet, as only the incomparable George Plimpton could have done it.

Claire Bloom - Leaving ​a Doll's House
Claire ​Bloom is one of the most beautiful, gifted, and accomplished actresses of her generation, famous for her roles on stage (A Doll's House, A Streetcar Named Desire, Long Day's Journey into Night), in films (Limelight, Richard III, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), and on television (Brideshead Revisited, Shadowlands). Now in this startlingly honest yet good-humored memoir, she reveals a private life much at odds with her public success - a life of instability, loss, personal discovery, and renewal.

Margaux Fragoso - Tiger, ​Tiger
I ​still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time. At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at seven p.m., when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour; in the despair again at nine p.m. when we would go for a night ride, down to the Royal Cliffs Diner in Englewood Cliffs where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream. We were friends, soul mates and lovers. I was seven. He was fifty-one.

Chastity Bono - Michele Kort - The ​End of Innocence
For ​the first time, Chastity Bono shares the moving story of her early adulthood: how her traumatic tabloid outing as the openly gay daughter of Sonny and Cher threatened her burgeoning musical career, and how her first true love was taken from her by cancer. At an early age, Chastity survived challenges many of us never face. A story of love won and lost, of dreams fulfilled and destroyed, The End of Innocence is a coming-of-age story that provides a deeply personal look into the private struggles of a very public and courageous woman.

Craig Thompson - Blankets
"A ​rarity: a first -love story so well remembered and honest that it reminds you what falling in love feels like. Achingly beautiful." -- TIME "In telling his story, which includes beautifully rendered memories of the small brutalities that parents inflict upon their children and siblings upon each other, Thompson describes the ecstasy and ache of the obsession (with a lover, with God) and is unafraid to suggest the ways that obsession can consume itself and evaporate." -- The New York Times Book Review

Keegan Allen - life.love.beauty
Keegan ​Allen is the international breakout star of ABC Family’s hit television series, Pretty Little Liars. A gifted photographer and writer—and a dazzling film, television, and stage actor now counting millions of fans across the globe—Keegan Allen brings tremendous talent and energy to his first publishing project. Keegan tells a unique story with his photographs. On one hand, the book is a beautifully candid view into the glamour and timelessness of Hollywood, a mysterious yet wildly alluring place. One the other hand, it is a blissfully unassuming portrait of ordinary life—the unknown young woman gazing dreamily from the balcony of her hotel room, or the old woman who walks the same street every morning in her pink bathrobe, just to stop and talk to a passerby. Through his own stunning photography and captivating prose and poetry, _life. love. beauty._ chronicles the author’s life growing up just off the Sunset Strip, coming into his own as a young aspiring actor, looking for love and understanding, negotiating the seductions and disappointments of Hollywood, landing a plum role in a hit television series, encountering and embracing his fans, traveling the globe to promote his work, and striving to stay connected to his closest friends and loved ones.

Alison Weir - Elizabeth ​the Queen
In ​her highly praised The Six Wives of Henry VIII and its sequel, Children of England, Alison Weir examined the private lives of the early Tudor kings and queens, and chronicled the childhood and youth of Elizabeth I. This book begins as the young Elizabeth ascends the throne in the wake of her sister Mary’s disastrous reign. Elizabeth is portrayed as both a woman and a queen, an extraordinary phenomenon in a patriarchal age. Alison Weir writes of Elizabeth’s intriguing, long-standing affair with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; of her dealings — sometimes comical, sometimes poignant — with her many suitors; of her rivalry with Mary, Queen of Scots; and of her bizarre relationship with the Earl of Essex, thirty years her junior. Rich in detail, vivid and colourful, this book comes as close as we shall ever get to knowing what Elizabeth I was like as a person.

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer - A ​Promise is a Promise
Eduarda ​Oberra has been in a diabetic coma for 26 years. Her mother works around the clock caring for her daughter, feeding her every two hours and giving her insulin every four hours. Dr. Dyer read a story about Eduarda and made a commitment to help these women. The recording of this audio not only shares their incredible story with the world but also raises money for Eduarda's care.

Dragan Todorović - Diary ​of Interrupted Days
On ​April 22, 1999, one month into the NATO offensive against Serbia, Boris Bulie stands on the last barely functioning bridge over the Danube into Belgrade, watching bombs fall on the city he used to call home. His hired car has broken down on the bridge, and though his instincts command him to run to one side of the river or the other to escape the NATO jets, he stands transfixed by the surreal power of the scene. He is also transfixed by the waves of painful and bittersweet memories that brought him to his current impasse. Many novels would quickly wilt under the load of such a dramatically symbolic opening, but debut novelist Dragan Todorovic (author of the non-fiction work The Book of Revenge) wisely returns the action to a more human scale, moving the story back in time to the first of several interconnecting narratives that will, by the novel’s equally powerful ending, return the reader to Boris’s vigil above the Danube. The second chapter opens in 1992. Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic has seized power in a still-united Yugoslavia, but the cracks in the federation are growing every day. Provinces are threatening to become republics, ethnic borders are being drawn down the middle of ancient villages, and the Serbian-dominated army is propping up local militias, ostensibly to protect ethnic Serbians in Croatia and Bosnia. Belgrade, a city that has survived hundreds of wars and rebellions and clampdowns, is still, as Boris’s friend Sara reflects, “smart, lazy, informed, misguided Belgrade. Gossipy, benevolent, slow-rocking city.” But at a peace rally/concert in the city’s core, Boris, an artist whose work viciously parodies the excesses of the Milosevic regime, is attacked by Serbian nationalist skinheads, escaping with a few cuts and bruises and the certainty that he is living in a country “crossbreeding xenophobia with paranoia.” Headlining the concert is the enigmatic and wildly popular singer-songwriter Johnny, Sara’s longtime lover and Boris’s best friend. Johnny’s anti-war songs have attracted the attention of Milosevic’s secret police, who threaten to jail Johnny, Sara, and Boris on drug charges if the singer refuses a short tour of duty in the reserve army – strictly for propaganda purposes, he is assured. Johnny will do his time in the reserves, tell the local press that the Serbian forces are not the monsters the world media has made them out to be, and then return to his life of touring and songwriting. Johnny’s reluctant assent lands him behind the lines in Croatia fighting side by side with a private Serbian militia commanded by a sociopathic gangster known as The Candyman. The trauma and geographical distances of war splinter Johnny’s connections to Sara and Boris, who emigrate to Toronto to escape the violence. Impatient readers may initially be put off by the novel’s time shifts and deliberately fractured narrative structure, but Todorovic is after something more intriguing than the typical dramatic arc of war, dislocation, and memory. Like a postmodern visual artist, he uses a collage technique to deconstruct – without resorting to the distancing effects of deconstructivism – the linear narratives that we use to define and understand political and military conflicts, narratives that too often leave out the idiosyncracies and personal associations of the combatants and civilians on the ground. Diary of Interrupted Days bristles with the energy of those too-human personality tics, subjective reactions, and interpretations. The characters engage in erotically charged intimacies with tenderness and droll black humour before retreating into the protectionist postures of the traumatized. All of the novel’s multiple characters are delineated with the same degree of insight and sympathy, even The Candyman, who, while holding a pistol to Johnny’s head, is described as possessing an “oddly gentle face, as if the gun belonged to another person, someone who happened to share the same hands.” Todorovic laces the characters’ revolving narratives with surreal imagery, as when he describes the imploding air vacuum that proceeds an explosion: “The explosive burns the oxygen in the air, creating a strong vacuum that … draws everything towards the centre of the explosion. The bomb kills then hugs.” There are also passages of unexpected beauty. As Boris looks down on the Danube from the damaged bridge, he reflects, “Small rivers are leafy-green, and bigger ones turn grayish. This river had the steely surface of power.” Here the unmistakable rhythms of poetry create a resonant series of images that do not break ranks with the precision of prose. Todorovic’s fiction debut deserves the same acclaim as Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, a novel that took readers on an equally compelling descent into a war zone.

Lionel Shriver - So ​Much For That
The ​extraordinary new novel from the Orange Prize winning author of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'. What do you pack for the rest of your life? Shepherd Knacker is bored with his humdrum existence. He's sold his successful handy-man business for a million dollars and is now ready to embark on his 'Afterlife' - a one way ticket to a small island off the coast of Africa. He tries to convince his wife Glynis to come with him, but she laughs off the idea as preposterous.There's no way she'll let Shepherd uproot the family to some far-flung African island. When Glynis is diagnosed with an extremely rare and aggressive form of cancer, Shepherd's dreams of an exotic adventure are firmly put on hold. He devotes himself to caring for his sick wife, watching her fade before his eyes. Shepherd's best friend Jackson knows all too well about illness. His sixteen year old daughter has spent her life dosed up on every treatment going while he and his wife Carol feed their youngest daughter sugar pills so she won't feel left out. But then Jackson undergoes a medical procedure of his own which has devastating consequences ! So Much For That is a deeply affecting novel, told with Lionel Shriver's trademark originality, intelligence and acute perception of the human condition.