Akron Public Library

Boy, Roald Dahl's bestselling autobiography, is full of hilarious anecdotes about his childhood and school days. With fabulous new line drawings by Quentin Blake. "An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography". (Roald Dahl). This reissue includes 30 delightful new line drawings by the inimitable Quentin Blake. Throughout his young days at school and...

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

"In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant-as a member of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, Orwells account of life in the trenches-with a democratic army composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons-and of his near fatal wounding, is painfully vivid and occasionally comic. As the politics became...

"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. "In the spring of 1936 a man planted roses." That man was George Orwell, shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's...

Cambridge student Serena Frome's beauty and intelligence make her the ideal recruit for MI5. In 1972, the Cold War is far from over. England's intelligence agency is determined to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government. The operation is code named "Sweet Tooth." Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is the perfect candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young...

When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis--known as Jack--she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn't holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak...

"Jeanette Winterson s novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life's work to find happiness....

"In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis shares his enthralling spiritual journey through his early life, chronicling his conversion to the Christian faith. [...] Lewis starts with his childhood in Belfast, then describes his boarding school years and his youthful atheism in England, moves to his experience in World War I, and ends in Oxford. Through it all Lewis explores his lifelong search for joy and its role in pointing him toward god." -- From book...

"This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter--who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England--to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed....