We make eye contact for the merest fraction of a second, and in this moment I know exactly what's coming…." A tragicomic collection of latter day Grimm's Fairy Tales, Allena Hansen's true life accounts won the IBPA 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award for best memoir/autobiography. "Chomp, Chomp, Chomp; How I Survived a Bear Attack and Other Cautionary Tales" introduces us to the bon vivant and social pariah Hunter S. Thompson toasted as "the distaff Hunter S. Thompson" and her sworn antagonist, Andrew Breitbart called out as "the coolest person in the room." Offering herself up as a cautionary example, Hansen poses the age-old question, 'What makes a survivor?" Read this book and remain as puzzled as ever, but as you marvel at her uncompromisingly bad judgment and uncanny resilience, you just might learn something that could save your life.

    A right wing survivalist amasses a cache of weapons and resists calls to surrender. A drug trafficker barricades himself and his family in a railroad car, and begins shooting. A cult leader in Waco, Texas faces the FBI in an armed stand-off that leaves many dead in a fiery blaze. A sniper, claiming to be God, terrorizes the DC metropolitan area. For most of us, these are events we hear about on the news. For Gary Noesner, head of the FBI’s groundbreaking Crisis Negotiation Unit, it was just another day on the job. In Stalling for Time, Noesner takes readers on a heart-pounding tour through many of the most famous hostage crises of the past thirty years. Specially trained in non-violent confrontation and communication techniques, Noesner’s unit successfully defused many potentially volatile standoffs, but perhaps their most hard-won victory was earning the recognition and respect of their law enforcement peers.Noesner pursued his dream of joining the FBI all the way to Quantico, where he not only became a Special Agent, but also—in the course of a distinguished thirty-year career—the FBI’s Chief Negotiator. Gaining respect for the fledgling art of crisis negotiation in the hard-boiled culture of The Bureau, where the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover still loomed large, was an uphill battle, educating FBI and law enforcement leaders on the job at an incident, and advocating the use of psychology rather than force whenever possible. Noesner’s many bloodless victories rarely garnered as much media attention as the notorious incident management blunders like the Branch Davidian disaster in Waco and the Ruby Ridge tragedy.Noesner offers a candid as well as fascinating look back at his years as a rebel in the ranks and a pioneer on the front lines. Whether vividly recounting showdowns with the radical Republic of Texas militia, the terrorist hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, and self-styled messiah David Koresh, or clashes with colleagues and superiors that expose the internal politics and power-plays of America’s premier law enforcement agency, Stalling for Time crackles with breathtaking suspense and insight in equal measure. Case by case, minute by minute, it’s a behind the scenes view of a visionary crime-fighter in action.

    Sugar - the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild - is the person thousands turn to for advice. Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond.  Rich with humor, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.

    I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

    This is the story about Father Bernard Bissonnette, a priest from Grosvenordale, Connecticut and the fifty-year path of destruction and heartache he left in his wake. There were dozens of victims, first in his home state and then in New Mexico, where the Catholic Church sent him to be “cured,” only to recycle him in parishes throughout the state. It highlights the Deary family of Putnam, Connecticut, whose eldest son, Tommy – the second of their thirteen children – was one of Bissonnette’s earliest victims, and who, after struggling for many years with depression, marital problems, and his own sexual identity, eventually killed himself. And it follows the tireless efforts of his youngest brother to overcome the obstructionism and hostility of the Catholic Church and track down Father Bissonnette, confront him with his misdeeds, then bring him to justice – or at least get him thrown out of the Church.

    No one knew that Nance was the “Missoula Mauler,” a psychopath responsible for a series of sadistic sex slayings that rocked the idyllic town between 1974 and 1986.   Nance’s only requirement for murder was accessibility—a preacher’s wife, a teenage runaway, a female acquaintance, a married couple. Putting on a friendly façade, he could easily gain his victims’ trust. Then, one September night, thirty-year-old Nance pushed his luck, preying on a couple who lived to tell the tale.   A true story with an incredible twist, written by former Wall Street Journal editor John Coston and complete with photos, To Kill and Kill Again reveals the disturbing compulsions of a charming serial killer who fooled everyone he knew, stumped the authorities, terrified a community, and nearly got away with it.

    Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esme Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalisation to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang's analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.

    This is the true story of one of those girls.In 2014, Chessy Prout was a freshman at St. Paul’s School, a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, when a senior boy sexually assaulted her as part of a ritualized game of conquest. Chessy bravely reported her assault to the police and testified against her attacker in court. Then, in the face of unexpected backlash from her once-trusted school community, she shed her anonymity to help other survivors find their voice.This memoir is more than an account of a horrific event. It takes a magnifying glass to the institutions that turn a blind eye to such behavior and a society that blames victims rather than perpetrators. Chessy’s story offers real, powerful solutions to upend rape culture as we know it today. Prepare to be inspired by this remarkable young woman and her story of survival, advocacy, and hope in the face of unspeakable trauma.

    Mary Bell, the younger but infinitely more sophisticated and cooler of the two, was found guilty of manslaughter. She evaded being branded as a murderer due to what the court ruled as 'diminished responsibility', but she was sentenced to 'detention' for life.Step by step, Gitta Sereny pieces together a gripping and rare study of a horrifying crime; the murders, the events surrounding them, the alternately bizzare and nonchalant behaviour of the two girls, their brazen offers to help the distraught families of the dead boys, the police work that led to their apprehension, and finally the trial itself. What emerges from this extraordinary case is the inability of society to anticipate such events and to take adequate steps once disaster has struck.

    On programmes such as My Word! and My Music his distinctive voice became familiar to millions as he displayed an astonishingly well-stocked mind and a genius for ad libbing and outrageous puns. Later, working at the BBC and then at London Weekend Television, he produced some of the best television comedy of the 1960s and 70s. He has written highly successful books for children, and two bestselling anthologies of humour.Frank Muir recalls, in glorious detail, a happy 1920s childhood in the seaside town of Ramsgate, where he was born in his grandmother's pub in Broadstairs, and in London, where he attended an inexpensive but excellent school of a kind no longer to be found. He remembers his very first joke at the age of six, when he knew that his destiny was to make people laugh. He also knew from an early age that he wanted to write, but it took a childhood illness for him to discover that humour and writing could be combined. The death of his father forced him to leave school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory making carbon paper. Then, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the RAF as an air photographer and his memories of the war years, as might be imagined, are engagingly different from the usual kind. It was during those years, with their rich fund of comic material, that he began his career as scriptwriter and performer. At his demob in 1945 he moved naturally to London and the Windmill Theatre, that remarkable breeding ground of talent where new comedians like Jimmy Edwards and Alfred Marks vied with nude girls for the attention of the audience. In story after story he recalls the lost world of London in the 1940s and early 50s, when the laughter and creative ideas seemed to explode out of post-war shabbiness and austerity. Then came the BBC, the legendary partnership with Denis Norden, and half a century of fulfilling the boyhood ambition of that Kentish lad. 'All I ever wanted to do was to write and amuse people.'

    Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.

    Desperate pleas from her parents to return her safely went unanswered. There was no trace of the baby. For seventeen years, on her birthday, the Nurses lit candles and hoped and prayed. Living not far away from the Nurses, 17-year-old Miché Solomon had just started Matric. She had a boyfriend. She had devoted parents. She was thinking about the upcoming school dance and the dress her mother was going to make for her. She had no idea that a new girl at her school, who bore an uncanny resemblance to her, and a DNA test would shake her world to its foundations. Miché is now 22. This is her story - for the first time in her own words. Told with astonishing maturity, honesty and compassion, it is also a story of what it means to love and be loved, and of claiming your identity.

    It reveals three lives, separate but entwined, that have experienced unspeakable horror, unrelenting loyalty and unforgettable courage.From as early as three years old, Juliana, Celeste and Kristina were treated as sexual beings by their 'guardians' in the infamous religious cult known as the Children of God. They were made to watch and mimic orgies, received love letters and sexual advances from men old enough to be their grandfather, and were forced into abusive relationships. They were denied access to formal schooling, had to wander the streets begging for money, and were mercilessly beaten for 'crimes' as unpredictable as reading an encyclopaedia.Finally, unable to live with the guilt of what had happened to her children, their mother escaped with Kristina, cutting herself off from her remaining children in a bid to save at least one child. Desperate to save her sisters, Kristina eventually returned to the place of her torture to free Celeste. Years later, Juliana found the courage to escape, knowing that the child she was carrying would be subjected to the same fate if she did not.Now the three sisters have finally come together to reveal in full and horrific detail their existence within the Children of God cult. Their stories reveal a community spread throughout the world and its legacy of anorexia, depression, drug abuse, suicide and even murder. Lives are ripped apart and painstakingly mended with a shared strength that finally enabled the sisters to free themselves from the shadows of their past.

    Her solo stand up show, Susan Calman is Convicted, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and dealt with subjects like the death penalty, appearance and depression. The reaction to the show she wrote about mental health was so positive that she wanted to expand on the show and write a more detailed account of surviving when you're the world's most negative person. The Crab of Hate is the personification of Calman's depression and her version of the notorious Black Dog. A constant companion in her life, the Crab has provided her with the best, and very worst of times. This is a very personal memoir of how, after many years and with a lot of help and talking, she has embraced her dark side and realised that she can be the most joyous sad person you'll ever meet.

    The top-level investigation that followed was a tipping-point for democratic South Africa. It exposed the corrupt relationship between South Africa’s chief of police and Interpol president Jackie Selebi and his friend Glenn Agliotti, and revealed a shadowy underworld dominated by drug lords, steroid-fuelled bouncers, hitmen for hire, an international smuggling syndicate, a dubious security unit moonlighting for the police and sinister, self-serving sleuths abusing state agencies. It even cost the country’s most senior prosecutor his job.Indemnified by an agreement struck with the state, Mikey Schulz, Nigel McGurk and Fiazal “Kappie” Smith come clean to Mandy Wiener in exclusive interviews about the chilling events leading up to the night Kebble was shot dead and the life paths of the “bungling assassins”. Glenn Agliotti, the man once accused of orchestrating the hit, has also provided Wiener with unlimited access to his story, as have other characters whose versions of the events are previously untold.This true-crime tale is set against the fascinating background of political interference at the highest level, a bitter feud between two arms of the country’s law-enforcement authorities, a festering police service tainted by dirty cops and the shady relationships between the magnate and aspirant young political turks who were ready recipients of his largesse.Killing Kebble is not the story of one murder. It’s a gritty, fast-paced chronicle of how one death blew the lid off Johannesburg’s underworld.