Eva Cassidy's albums "Songbird, Live at Blues Alley, Eva By Heart, Time After Time," and "Imagine" have sold over a million and a half copies in the U.S. and millions more worldwide. Her songs have been heard on many television shows and film soundtracks, and the video of her classic performance of "Over the Rainbow" is the most requested in BBC history. Yet she lived to see only one of her solo albums released, a CD she underwrote herself and sold from the trunk of her car before her tragic death. Capturing Eva's essence and tender life story, "Eva Cassidy: Songbird" collects the intimate memories of relatives, close friends, and the musicians who collaborated with her. The book tells the story of her too-brief life and enduring music. Featuring candid full-color photos and reproductions of Eva's original artwork, a vivid portrait emerges of a woman who devoted her energies to the things she truly loved-giving encouragement to those around her, tending to plants at the nursery where she worked, and performing her music at clubs in Washington, D.C. She succumbed to cancer at age thirty-three just as the world was starting to notice her arresting voice. Eva Cassidy's music continues to grow in recognition from critics and legions of fans throughout the world. The rock icon Sting has said her voice possesses "a magical quality. People respond to its purity. It suggests something ethereal-something unattainable." This American edition contains two new chapters about her influences and her posthumous success in her native country. With the publication of "Eva Cassidy: Songbird," the woman behind the unforgettable voice will at last be known.

    Her latest memoir – the long-awaited sequel to Tout Soul – features more tales from the French countryside and takes the reader on a 3000-kilometre road trip from Paris to Spain and Portugal. Accompanied by her sixteen-year-old niece and her charismatic black dog Biff, the author mingles with surfers in Biarritz, upsets religious pilgrims in Fatima and learns never to argue with a Spanish waiter. She also discovers Lisbon’s best-kept secret and how to ‘be like a bee’ in Madeira. Meanwhile, back in France, a new expat is behaving very badly indeed… Featuring a quirky cast of characters in the French countryside, Sweet Encore is sprinkled with anecdotes form the author’s previous life as a fashion editor – meeting Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in New York, incurring the wrath of a famous Italian fashion designer, and receiving an invitation to a private dinner with Madonna in Milan. So, pour yourself a glass of something chilled, sit back and enjoy a sparkling summer read.

     What was Paris to Hemingway, and he to Paris? And how much of his city survives for us to visit and explore? In Hemingway's Paris: A User's Guide, prize-winning author John Baxter (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World) evokes the French capital as it was between 1921 and 1926, when Hemingway lived there, and provides a unique insider's guide to the city he knew and loved. John Baxter was born in Australia, but has lived in Paris for 25 years, most of that time in the building which Sylvia Beach made her home while running the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop. As well as writing extensively about the city and its history, he leads literary walks around sites associated with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. More details on www.johnbaxterparis.com.

    One of the best-known and most beloved broadcasters in Britain, the charismatic BBC Radio 2 DJ has achieved legendary status with a hugely loyal following thanks to his tireless pioneering of new music, his warm and passionate personality and his soothing voice.Having thrown away the rule book as a teenager, Johnnie has always made decisions from the heart. As a result, he has had a brilliantly colourful life, with more ups and downs than a rollercoaster ride. He made his name in the 1960s when he and Radio Caroline, where his night-time show was essential listening for 86% of radio listeners, continued broadcasting in defiance of Government legislation. In 1976 he walked out of Radio 1 because of his outspoken views and his insistence on playing album tracks. He made front page news when he described the Bay City Rollers as 'musical garbage' and when he was caught snorting cocaine.In his memoir, he reveals all about his time with Radio Caroline, his drug addiction, his fight against cancer and his spiritual awakening. Honest, passionate and humorous, his autobiography will provide inspiring and entertaining listening to his million of fans.

    She talks of her life, career, family and loves and impending motherhood with surprising intimacy and, being true to her outspoken reputation, complete honesty.

    Freddie's friends lost Freddie. In this biographical volume of memories, Freddie Mercury's life is celebrated, remembered and recounted by a collection of his closest friends, lovers, collaborators and colleagues.

    With three friends she starts the Vulture Club for aspiring groupies – and so begins a festival of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.As Nikki gets older, her conquests get bigger and the stakes get higher. From Australian Crawl to INXS, Pseudo Echo to Duran Duran, she is living her teenage dream – but is the groupie life all it’s cracked up to be?One Way or Another is an irresistible romp through a world of pub rock, big hair, wild nights and mornings after. With irrepressible humour and a bulging little black book, Nikki McWatters recalls an age when everything seemed possible – even if everything wasn’t such a good idea.

    Betsy rejected the Hollywood pattern (no swimming pool or fancy car) and writes of being drawn to the Communist Party, of the coming of the blacklist that brought an end to the optimism of the thirties and forties, and of the terrifying moment when she found her own name on the list.And she makes us understand why she ultimately burst out of the cocoon of her idyllic marriage -- moving to Europe and coming into her own as an actress, winning the Golden Palm at Cannes for Marty, and falling in love with and marrying the director Karel Reisz.

    Lumped into the burgeoning alt-country movement, the band soon landed a major label deal and recorded an instant classic: Strangers Almanac. That's when tour manager Thomas O'Keefe met the young musician.For the next three years, Thomas was at Ryan's side: on the tour bus, in the hotels, backstage at the venues. Whiskeytown built a reputation for being, as the Detroit Free Press put it, "half band, half soap opera," and Thomas discovered that young Ryan was equal parts songwriting prodigy and drunken buffoon. Ninety percent of the time, Thomas could talk Ryan into doing the right thing. Five percent of the time, he could cover up whatever idiotic thing Ryan had done. But the final five percent? Whiskeytown was screwed.Twenty-plus years later, accounts of Ryan's legendary antics are still passed around in music circles. But only three people on the planet witnessed every Whiskeytown show from the release of Strangers Almanac to the band's eventual breakup: Ryan, fiddle player Caitlin Cary, and Thomas O'Keefe.

    Based in part on four hours of previously unreleased and unpublicized deathbed interviews with Wells, this account delves deeply into her rapid rise and long fall as a recording artist, her spectacular romantic and family life, the violent incidents in which she was a participant, and her abuse of drugs. From tumultuous affairs, including one with R&B superstar Jackie Wilson, to a courageous battle with throat cancer that climaxed in her gutsiest performance, this history draws upon years of interviews with Wells’s friends, lovers, and husband to tell the whole story of a woman whose songs crossed the color line and whose voice captivated the Beatles.

    Through the years, the group's trademark razor-sharp choreography, finely tuned harmonies, and compelling vocals made them the exemplars of the Motown style. This is the frank, revealing story of the legendary supergroup, told by its founder.

    He was a giant of the saxophone and a major composer. His music influenced both rock stars and classical musicians. There was a mystical quality, a profound melancholy emanating from this quiet, self-contained man that moved listeners--some of whom knew little about music but heard something beyond music's boundaries in the sounds his saxophone created. J. C. Thomas traces John Coltrane's life and career from his North Carolina childhood through his apprenticeship with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, to its culmination in the saxophonist's classic quartet that played to steadily increasing audiences throughout America, Europe, and Japan.The author has drawn on the recollections of the people who knew Coltrane best--boyhood friends, band members like Elvin Jones, spiritual mentors like Ravi Shankar, and the women who loved him." Chasin' the Trane" is the story of a man who struggled against drug addiction, studied African and Eastern music and philosophy, admired both Einstein's expanding universe and the shimmering sounds a harp makes, and left behind the enduring legacy of a master musician who was also a beautiful man.

    Pedalling along curvaceous country lanes or freewheeling through valleys and vineyards – earning your supper in this sleepy corner of France is nothing short of a privilege.Tony and Ludmilla have landed a job with a specialist cycling and walking holiday company in the South of France … but that’s not something we can hold against them for too long!They head off to the mediaeval marvel of Cordes-sur-Ciel in the Tarn – a region so achingly beautiful and laden with history and mystery they have to pinch themselves to be sure such a place really does exist.When their cyclists turn up for a week’s pedal-powered adventure they will need a reliable back-up service when they puncture a tyre or come face to jowl with a ‘devil dog’ intent on devouring their panniers. And when their walkers take the wrong trail and find themselves humming Bonnie Tyler’s ’70s hit ‘Lost in France’, they too will need a timely rescue. Well, that’s the theory …

    But his life was filled with tragedy, including years of electroshock therapy in psychiatric institutions, illnesses, physical and mental abuse from people who fed him dangerous drugs to control him, and the indifference of his contemporaries to his genius. Francis Paudras, a young jazz fan who met Powell in the late 1950s, released him from his unfavorable surroundings, encouraged him to create some of his finest music, and took care of him as if he were his child. Powell’s story, Dance of the Infidels, is one of the most moving of jazz memoirs—and served as the basis for Bertrand Tavernier’s film ’Round Midnight, starring Dexter Gordon. Here, for the first time in English, is a portrait of a friendship as surprising and heartbreaking as Bud Powell’s timeless music.

    Theirs was a groundbreaking union between one DJ and five rapping MCs. One of the first hip hop posses, they were responsible for such masterpieces as “The Message” and “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” In the 1970s Grandmaster Flash pioneered the art of break-beat DJing—the process of remixing and thereby creating a new piece of music by playing vinyl records and turntables as musical instruments. Disco-era DJs spun records so that people could dance. The original turntablist, Flash took it a step further by cutting, rubbing, backspinning, and mixing records, focusing on “breaks”—what Flash described as “the short, climactic parts of the records that really grabbed me”—as a way of heightening musical excitement and creating something new. Now the man who paved the way for such artists as Jay-Z, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, and 50 Cent tells all—from his early days on the mean streets of the South Bronx, to the heights of hip hop stardom, losing millions at the hands of his record label, his downward spiral into cocaine addiction, and his ultimate redemption with the help and love of his family and friends. In this powerful memoir, Flash recounts how music from the streets, much like rock ’n’ roll a generation before, became the sound of an era and swept a nation with its funk, flavor, and beat.