The daughter of Saddam Hussein's personal pilot describes her experiences of growing up as a palace insider, recounting how Hussein forced those closest to him to compete for his approval, her escape from Iraq through an abusive arran...

Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard's own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to 'pass' in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ra...

"Sarah's Seasons gives us insight into the life of an Old Order Amish woman—something rare and hard to come by. It also records the growing friendship between Martha Davis and Sarah Fisher and the juxtaposition of the author's...

An unforgettable story of the joy of motherhood, the bravery of a community, and the hope of one extraordinary woman At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in p...

Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She'd slept with too many men and a few women, and she didn't like dogs or chil­dren. Georga...

INCLUDING AN EXCLUSIVE CONVERSATION BETWEEN MERYL STREEP AND ANNA QUINDLEN“[Quindlen] serves up generous portions of her wise, commonsensical, irresistibly quotable take on life. . . . What Nora Ephron does for body image and Anne L...

At twenty-three, Dani Shapiro was in the midst of a major rebellion against her religious uringing. She had dropped out of college, was halfheartedly acting in television commercials, and was carrying on with an older married man when...

Recounts the remarkable true-life adventures of Ruth Harness, an American bohemian socialite and dress designer, who, in 1936, ventured into one of the most dangerous, unexplored regions of the world on a quest--which had already cost...

National Book Award FinalistFrom one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionat...

A collection of true stories by everyday women follows such remembrances as coming of age as an unfashionable white girl in an all-Puerto Rican neighborhood, experiencing embarrassment in front of a rock star, and receiving horrible m...

Parents are advised to approach this wrenching memoir with caution--it will evoke all their worst fears. IIt's not just that Martha Tod Dudman frankly delineates her daughter Augusta's descent into drinking, smoking, drug use, and tru...

An entertaining and eye-opening biography of America's most memorable first daughterFrom the moment Teddy Roosevelt's outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—t...

Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family. Her sisters included Nancy, doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and biographer; Diana, wife to the English f...

Waris Dirie leads a double life -- by day, she is an international supermodel and human rights ambassador for the United Nations; by night, she dreams of the simplicity of life in her native Somalia and the family she was forced to le...

The New York Times bestselling memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world's most remote places and then into fifteen months of captivity: "Exquisitely told…A young woman's harrowing coming-of-age story and an extrao...

Recounts the stories of nine women who made unconventional choices in order to bring about remarkable life achievements, including World Series of Poker Tournament champion Annie Duke, Iditarod winner Libby Riddles, and Playboy model-...

A delicious group biography of the young American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy at the turn of the twentieth century – the real women who inspired Downton Abbey.Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for ...

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they n...

When Joan Kelly took a weekend job as a professional submissive in a private dungeon, it seemed she'd finally found a perfect outlet for her pent-up desires. Suddenly, Joan was being paid to do things she'd only fantasized about. Hav...

Now available in paperback, the entrancing story of how one woman's journey of self-discovery gave her the courage to persevere in re-creating her life.Life is a work in progress, as ever-changing as a sandy shoreline along the beach....

Jo Ann Beard beautifully evokes her childhood in the early '60s, a time in which mothers continued to smoke right up to labor, one's own scabs were deeply interesting, and Barbie dolls seemed to get naked of their own volition, knowin...

A single city woman meets Mr. Right-he has amber eyes and a wily heart. There's only one catch . . . he has four legs and a tail.Relatively indifferent to the natural world, allergic to dogs, and happily independent, writer Louise Ber...

From acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne, the sensational true tale that inspired the major motion picture Belle (May 2014) starring Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Penelope Wilton, and Matthew Goode—a stunning story...

Describes how, inspired by a stunning portrait by pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the discovery of a long-forgotten trunk of old letters, the author investigated her own family history to uncover a long-hidden story ...

When Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared in 1937 during her attempted flight around the world, she was already known as America's most famous female aviator. Her sense of daring and determination, rare for women of her time, broug...

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something huge. Jazz, racy fashions, eyebrowraising new attitudes about art and sex—all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and st...

The secret story of Virginia Hall, America's greatest World War II spy heroine.

The first full scale biography of Wallis Simpson to be written by a woman, exploring the mind of one of the most glamorous and reviled figures of the Twentieth Century, a character who played prominently in the blockbuster film The Ki...

In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Flor...

The debut of a sparkling and reassuring memoirist -- an inspiration to late bloomers everywhere'I like to consider myself a late bloomer, meaning someone who will eventually, however late, come into bloom. Although when and if I will ...