By night, I am Glamrou, an empowered, fearless and acerbic drag queen who wears seven-inch heels and says the things that nobody else dares to. Growing up in a strict Iraqi Muslim household, it didn’t take long for me to realise I was different. When I was ten years old, I announced to my family that I was in love with Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. The resultant fallout might best be described as something like the Iraqi version of Jerry Springer: The Opera. And that was just the beginning. This is the story of how I got from there to here: about my teenage obsession with marine biology, and how fluid aquatic life helped me understand my non-binary gender identity; about my two-year scholarship at Eton college, during which I wondered if I could forge a new identity as a British aristocrat (spoiler alert: it didn’t work); about discovering the transformative powers of drag while at university (and how I very nearly lost my mind after I left); and about how, after years of rage towards it, I finally began to understand Islam in a new, queer way. Most of all, this is a book about my mother. It’s the journey of how we lost and found each other, about forgiveness, understanding, hope – and the life-long search for belonging.

    Chicken--slang for a young male prostitute--revisits his year of living dangerously, in a narrative of dazzling inventiveness and searing candor.

    Or, I could say things like, 'Not since War and Peace...' or 'Move over Alice Walker...' Well come on now, if a book were all those things it would be a novel, and I wouldn't resort to such low tactics...So I'll give it you straight.' As befits the sassy, original entertainer, this is no ordinary autobiography filled with the boring details. Instead, Whoopi delivers twenty-five monologues with titles such as Fate, Trust, Home, Self, Cost, Race, Choice, Dick, Death and Dream. Under the chapter 'Wind' she reveals: 'A lot of people don't know this about me...but that's how I got my name, from my frequent farting. When I was in my 20s and diagnosed with ulcers, I was encouraged to fart up a storm, and my friends started calling me Whoopi. I was like a walking whoopee cushion, they said. It was an easy tag and the name stuck.

    No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    He chronicles the torture of finding a job before the internet when you had to talk on the phone all the time, and fantasizes, as we all do, about who to tell off when he finally wins an Oscar. As Gary himself says, "These are essays from my childhood and young adulthood about things that still annoy me."Original, brazen, and laugh out loud funny, Do You Mind if I Cancel? is something not to be missed.

    A NATURAL WOMAN chronicles King's extraordinary life, drawing readers into her musical world, including her phenomenally successful #1 album Tapestry, and into her journey as a performer, mother, wife and present-day activist. Deeply personal, King's long-awaited memoir offers readers a front-row seat to the woman behind the legend. The book will include dozens of photos from King's childhood, her own family, and behind-the-scenes images from her performances.

    Growing up in a working class area of Reading with the mad-cap Doonan clan, Simon yearned to get out and find the Beautiful People who he imagined lived fabulous lives of glitz and glamour. This is the story of his attempt to do just that.

    An evocative, moving and at times hilarious true-life story about growing up gay in a small town, finding out you're adopted, and losing your father at the age of fourteen. Always an outsider, the Rhona of 1979 was desperate to fit in at any cost, and here lies the bittersweet humour. At the heart of the book is the Clubhouse, a place that symbolises all that is normal, happy, and secure. And behind the club, outside, Rhona and her friends are smoking, fighting, kissing and drinking. In this darkly funny and deeply biographical first book, Rhona Cameron takes us back to a year when everything seemed to change. A new British government came to power, the Eighties were approaching and at times life felt so precarious that it really looked like she and her family might never make it through the next year, let alone the next decade.

    That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love,are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has happened." In this journal, she says, "I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths,to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there."In this book, we are closer to the marrow than ever before in May Sarton's writing.

    I always responded, 'Why would I change? Being me is the easiest person to be.' I was lying. It wasn't. At the Beijing Olympic Games, he made history with an unforgettable dive, the first to ever score perfect tens from all four judges, and won gold for Australia. Grinning with pride from front pages around the world, there was no hint of the personal demons that had led this supremely talented young dynamo to quit diving less than two years before. Joyously out and proud, Matthew was a role model for his courage both in and out of the pool. Yet the crippling self-doubt and shadow of depression that had plagued him all his life forced him into premature retirement, at one point reduced to circus diving to earn money. Even after Beijing and being ranked No 1 in the world, those closest to Matthew could not guess that beneath that cheeky, fun-loving exterior he was painfully aware of how easily it could unravel. In the lead-up to the London Olympics, when injury threatened his hopes, he will have to find the strength again to balance his striving for perfectionism with the fear of his self-doubt taking hold again. Told with the honesty and courage he is admired for, Twists and Turns is an inspiring story of a true champion, in and out of the pool.

    

    But for many years Maeve was a journalist, writing for The Irish Times.From 'The Student Train' to 'Plane Bores', 'Bathroom Joggers' to 'When Beckett met Binchy', these articles have all the warmth, wit and humanity of her fiction. Arranged in decades, from the 1960s to the 2000s, and including Maeve's first and last ever piece of writing for The Irish Times, the columns also give a fascinating insight into the author herself.With an introduction written by her husband, the writer Gordon Snell, this collection of timeless writing reminds us of why the leading Irish writer was so universally loved.

    After they were jailed in 1969 for thirty years for murder, Pearson's biography The Profession of Violence enjoyed a cult following among the young and was said to be the most popular book in H.M.'s prisons, after the Bible. Ron died in 1995. Reg followed him five years later, and both of their funerals drew crowds on a scale unknown for film stars, let alone for two departed murderers. Since then, far from fading with their death, public fascination with the twins has never flagged. Their clothes and memorabilia are sold at auction like religious relics. Ron's childlike prison paintings fetch more money than those of many well-known artists. And people still refer to them like popular celebrities. Why? This is the question Pearson asked himself, and over the past three years he has been re-examining their history, unearthing much previously unknown material, and has come to some fascinating conclusions. The Immortal Murderers reveals new facts about the Krays' tortured relationship as identical twins; a relationship which helped predestine them to a life of crime; a relationship that made them utterly unlike any other major criminals. Pearson has discovered two new and unsuspected murders, along with fresh light on the killings of George Cornell and Jack 'the Hat' McVitie. There are facts about the twins' obsession with publicity, and how far this made them 'actor criminals' murdering for notoriety. Most riveting of all are the chapters which reveal how Ron Kray caused a major sexual scandal in which a prime minister, together with other leading politicians, condoned the most outrageous establishment cover-up in British politics since the war. The Immortal Murderers contains many more surprises, but the one thing that emerges is that the Kray twins were not only stranger but also far more important than anyone ever suspected. Fascination with them will forever remain; they will never lose their role as the immortal murderers.

    These previously unpublished journals stretch from May 1991 until two weeks before the author’s death in February 1994.

    But when she least expects it, her reckless past catches up with her; convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at an infamous women's prison in Connecticut, Piper becomes inmate #11187-424. From her first strip search to her final release, she learns to navigate this strange world with its arbitrary rules and codes, its unpredictable, even dangerous relationships. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with tokens of generosity, hard truths and simple acts of acceptance.