Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket


Emma John - 2016
    England fans heralded the dawn of a new era.Instead, it turned out to be the start of England's arguably worst streak in any sport--a decade of frustration, dismay, and comically bungling performances that no fan will ever forget. The English cricket team became infamous for their ineptitude and a byword for British failure. By 1999, the team had reached its nadir, losing at home to New Zealand to become, officially, the worst test team in the world, ranking below even Zimbabwe.With spectacularly poor timing, fourteen-year-old Emma John chose 1993 to fall in love with cricket and, mystifyingly, with that terrible English cricket team. One day, with nothing better to do, she asked her sports-fanatic mother to explain the rules of the game on TV. Within a fortnight, Emma was a full-fledged cricket geek.Nearly a quarter of a century later, she goes back to England to meet her teenage heroes and find out just what was going on in the Worst English Cricket Team of All Time. As she traipses back through her adolescence, Following On is also a personal memoir of what it was like to grow up following a team that always lost--and why on earth anyone would choose to do it.

Warren Gatland: My Autobiography: The definitive story by the three-time Grand Slam-winning coach


Warren Gatland - 2019
    The personal journey has been rewarding and challenging in equal measure, spanning many of the sport's most passionate heartlands such as New Zealand, Ireland, England and Wales. Gatland reflects in characteristically forthright and intelligent fashion on a lifetime spent playing and coaching the sport which has been his passion since as a young boy he first picked up an oval ball on New Zealand's North Island, dreaming of joining the ranks of the mighty All Blacks.Along the way we encounter the greatest matches, players and rivalries the sport has to offer, get introduced to a stunning cast of unforgettable characters who grace the story with their humour and humanity, and emerge with a striking appreciation of how rugby has managed to retain its appeal for millions around the globe.

Bowl. Sleep. Repeat.: Inside the World of England's Greatest-Ever Bowler


Jimmy Anderson - 2019
    565 Test Wickets and counting.Written with Felix White: musician, cricket enthusiast and Anderson's co-host on BBC Five Live's phenomenally popular podcast 'Tailenders', Jimmy invites us all into his world of cricket. Full of test-match sized stories and 20/20 anecdotes, this book contains everything you've dreamed of asking a top cricketer. And Jimmy provides the answers and insights into this world on and off the pitch. We tackle the big questions. And, importantly, the small ones;Do cricketers really watch Countdown instead of the Test whilst waiting to bat? What are those conversations in the slip cordon?And what does he eat as a tailender?

The Crime Factory: The Shocking True Story of a Front-Line CID Detective


Officer 'A' - 2012
    . . The Crime Factory. Where they perform life-saving medical care in the street, comfort people as they die, deal with gruesome suicides and murders as first-on-scene, attend cot-death post-mortems, examine rotting dead junkies for signs of murder, watch guilty rapists and paedophiles walk free, fight drunk soldiers, gypsies and various psychotic individuals, go undercover to catch scumbags who force-feed them crack, find missing children, arrest thieves, muggers, dealers, rapists and murderers . . . The Crime Factory. It's enough to drive anyone insane. The first book of its kind, this is the unforgettable and explosive true story of what life is really like as a police detective in the twenty-first century.

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor


Adam Kay - 2017
    Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward. As seen on ITV's Zoe Ball Book Club This edition includes extra diary entries and a new afterword by the author.

Laughing at My Nightmare


Shane Burcaw - 2014
    From awkward handshakes to having a girlfriend and everything in between, Shane handles his situation with humor and a "you-only-live-once" perspective on life. While he does talk about everyday issues that are relatable to teens, he also offers an eye-opening perspective on what it is like to have a life threatening disease.

Back Story


David Mitchell - 2012
    Despite what David Miliband might think

It's Been Emotional


Vinnie Jones - 2013
    Bold and frank, this is Vinnie laid bare. Born and bred in Watford, Jones represented and captained the Welsh national football team after qualifying through a Welsh grandparent. He won the 1988 FA Cup final against Liverpool before moving to Wimbledon and then Leeds United. He has also played for Chelsea. His celebrity status has grown over the years after appearing in the 2010 series of Big Brother and coming third, as well as the hugely successful British Heart Foundation CPR campaign. Vinnie's bad boy tag has followed him into the world of film where he has used his hard man status to secure roles in hugely successful Brit Flicks, such as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

How Sachin Destroyed My Life ...but gave me an All Access Pass to the world of cricket


Vikram Sathaye - 2014
    The book documents his incredible journey of Indian Cricket as he takes us inside dressing rooms, hotels and the inner thoughts of leading cricketers. With a foreword by Sachin Tendulkar, this book is laced with crackling humour and brimming with interesting anecdotes, insights, quotes, and candid photographs, from cricketing legends like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag, among others. This book promises to reveal many more inside secrets!

Jonny: My Autobiography


Jonny Wilkinson - 2011
    He has accumulated phenomenal achievements, world points records, an impressive list of broken body parts, and a drop goal that will be remembered forever.But the peculiar calmness with which he played the game masked a very different reality.In Jonny, he reveals the extraordinary psychology that he had to tame in order to be able to dominate his sport. For most of his life, he was driven by a quest for perfection and an obsession to be the best player in the world; here he shows how these two facets of his competitive mind took such a hold of him that they sent him to the top of the world, then swept him up and dragged him down in a spiral of despair.Jonny's career has spanned the far reaches: amazing high and iconic moments, then a fight against injury that culminated in a battle with depression.Here he tells of the physical toll he knew his body was taking from rugby, even from his youth; he tells of how he never wanted to be a kicking fly-half but learnt to adapt his natural game to play the style that Clive Woodward believed necessary to win a World Cup, and how he nearly walked out on Martin Johnson's England team 13 years later.Jonny is the unrelenting, brutally honest account of one of the most revered, successful and complex athletes ever to play rugby for England."

The Life and Loves of a He Devil


Graham Norton - 2014
    He is loved for his delight in the peculiar and for his ability to find humor and a common ground in all that life brings. Here is Graham's funny and honest memoir on the theme of love. As he shows, it's really the things you love that make you who you are and so Graham tells his story from his Irish childhood to the present day, describing just what and who he loved—and sometimes lost—as a young boy, and his new loves and obsessions—big and small—as he's grown older. It's been 10 years since his last book and being a decade older Graham has come to realize that what makes a life interesting is less what happens to you and more what inspires and drives you, what you love. From Dolly Parton and dogs to wine and Ireland, Graham tells of his life and loves with characteristic humor and outrageous candor.

Spectacles


Sue Perkins - 2015
    What I found was that she hadn't kept some of it. She had kept all of it - every bus ticket, postcard, school report - from the moment I was born to the moment I finally had the confidence to turn round and say 'Why is our house full of this shit?'Sadly, a recycling 'incident' destroyed the bulk of this archive. This has meant two things: firstly, Dear Reader, you will never get to see countless drawings of wizards, read a poem about corn on the cob, or marvel at the kilos of brown flowers I so lovingly pressed as a child. Secondly, it's left me with no choice but to actually write this thing myself.This, my first ever book, will answer questions such as 'Is Mary Berry real?', 'Is it true you wear a surgical truss?' and 'Is a non-spherically symmetric gravitational pull from outside the observable universe responsible for some of the observed motion of large objects such as galactic clusters in the universe?'Most of this book is true. I have, of course, amplified my more positive characteristics in an effort to make you like me. Thank you for reading.

Inside: The autobiography


Chris Judd - 2015
    He's one of the game's out-and-out champions, having captained two of the greatest clubs in the league - the West Coast Eagles and Carlton - and taken the Eagles to premiership victory in 2006. He's won the Brownlow Medal twice, been a dual Leigh Matthews Trophy winner - awarded to the AFL's Most Valuable Player as voted by the players - and selected as an All Australian six times.His autobiography is a unique journey into the game, describing with extraordinary candour what it's like to climb to the highest levels, to achieve the ultimate goal of your sport, and to experience the full measure of heartache and failure that inevitably accompanies more than a decade of playing at the elite level. Few sportsmen have shared such intimacy and insight into their world, and the result is a book that's worthy of Chris Judd the player - intelligent, surprising, and head and shoulders above the competition.

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee


Sarah Silverman - 2010
    If you like Sarah’s television show The Sarah Silverman Program, or memoirs such as Chelsea Handler’s Are You There Vodka? It’s Me Chelsea and Artie Lange’s Too Fat to Fish, you’ll love The Bedwetter.

I'm Just a Person


Tig Notaro - 2016
    Hit with this devastating barrage, Tig took her grief onstage. Days after receiving her cancer diagnosis, she broke new comedic ground, opening an unvarnished set with the words, “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer.” Word of the set went viral instantly. This set was ultimately released as Tig’s sophomore album, Live, which sold 100,000 units in just six weeks and was nominated for a Grammy. Now, the wildly popular star takes stock of that no good, very bad year—a difficult yet astonishing period in which tragedy turned into absurdity and despair into joy. An inspired combination of the deadpan silliness of her comedy and the open-hearted vulnerability that has emerged in the wake of that dire time, Untitled is a moving and often hilarious look at this very brave, very funny woman’s journey through the darkness and her thrilling return.