Biography Bestsellers

Eben Etzebeth is the most-capped player in South African rugby history. A towering lock, his intelligence, energy and aggression on the pitch is feared, respected, often imitated but never matched.He is the heart and soul of a historically successful Springbok team and a key part of their astonishingly successful run that encompasses two consecutive World Cups and a current two-year-stint at the top of the world rankings. In this frank and disarming account, Eben uncovers the key factors in his extraordinary success, and how he keeps focused, both on and off the pitch. From his humble beginnings in Goodwood, a Cape Town suburb where nothing came easy, through his early club career and on to his hard-won place within the South African squad, UNLOCKED reveals the personal side of an astonishing professional career.This is an inspiring story of a man who has led from the front and played against the best in the world.

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Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.   Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me.  The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.   With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

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In her first non-fiction book in a decade, the no. 1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (Eat Pray Love) and creatively (Big Magic) shows how to break free.In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?All the Way to the River is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love – or to any other passion, substance or craving – and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.

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‘Nozipho’s story shows how all our experiences are rehearsals getting us ready for the big stages of life. It’s a wonderful piece of work!’ – Dr Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, former Deputy President of South AfricaWhen the flames of life’s challenges have swept through you, who do you become from the ashes?Nozipho Tshabalala is a high-performing, excellence-driven, successful black woman. Being in control of everything in her life was crucial to her survival and success. For the most part, it had always served her well – until it didn’t.In this captivating and deeply personal memoir, conversation strategist Nozipho invites you into her world – one shaped by political violence, professional triumphs on global stages and the intimate battles with loss that would test her most fundamental beliefs. Now in her 40s, she has realised that what she needed most to survive may not be what she needs to thrive.After the Fires is a call to reclaim the narrative amid life’s unexpected turns. It honours the complexity of womanhood while celebrating the possibility of becoming exactly who you were meant to be, even when that person looks nothing like what you imagined.With vulnerability and wisdom, Nozipho demonstrates how surrender becomes not an act of defeat but a pathway to freedom. Her story reminds us that sometimes our greatest strength lies not in holding tighter but in opening our hands to release what no longer serves us.

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Toe Covid-19 die mat onder Marita van der Vyver en haar Fransman se voete uitruk en hulle noodgedwonge hul ou groot huis op die Franse platteland moes verkoop, besluit hulle om die meeste van hulle aardse besittings ontslae te raak en ver in die wêreld te gaan reis. In hierdie reis, wat oor drie vastelande strek, word ’n hele leeftyd se herinneringe ontgin. Want soms moet mens baie verloor, en ook bereid wees om self verlore te raak, voor mens regtig vryheid kan wen.

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From the Academy Award®-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call 'catching greenlights. 'So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It's a love letter. To life. It's also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.

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Shocking and darkly funny, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to the decisions that are shaping our world and the people who make them. Welcome to Facebook.Sarah Wynn-Williams, a young diplomat from New Zealand, pitched for her dream job. She saw Facebook’s potential and knew it could change the world for the better. But, when she got there and rose to its top ranks, things turned out a little different.From wild schemes cooked up on private jets to risking prison abroad, Careless People exposes both the personal and political fallout when boundless power and a rotten culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative, Wynn-Williams rubs shoulders with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and world leaders, revealing what really goes on among the global elite – and the consequences this has for all of us.Candid and entertaining, this is an intimate memoir set amid powerful forces. As all our lives are upended by technology and those who control it, Careless People will change how you see the world.

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**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson

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I wanted to be who I felt I was. Broken. A wreck. Unloveable.’   There’s a moment where life happens. It’s the moment just before making a good decision, or a bad one. For Milton Schorr, just such a moment took place at the age of seventeen, when he found himself squatting on his haunches in a Cape Town flat with a heroin needle in his arm.   A friend sat with him, his thumb on the plunger, and a decision was to be made. Let the heroin slip inside, and take the road the drug offered, or turn away, and find a new life not defined by the endless quest for oblivion.   For Milton, the path was already set, as it had been at his first taste of shoplifting, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, Mandrax, LSD, Ecstasy and crack. In this memoir he details the life that led him to addiction, the wild and dark years of his drug use, his struggles to return to normality, and the reckoning with the self that ultimately led to his recovery.   Addict is a courageously honest account of Milton's life in active addiction and recovery. Today, two decades sober, he relates the pivotal points in his journey toward death, and back to life. This book is essential reading for anyone touched by addiction.

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‘A terrific book … His comedy is so universal that it has the power to transcend borders.’ – BILL GATES ‘… this is a moving, intimate story of growing up in South Africa from 1984. It stands as an archetypal rite-of-passage and coming-to-maturity tale, with unflinching and vivid accounts of home and school life in township and city, domestic violence, enterprising young men in Alex scrabbling to make the barest of livings …’ – MAIL & GUARDIAN Trevor Noah’s path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show in New York and beyond began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of his relationship with his fearless, rebellious and fervently religious mother – his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. The eighteen personal essays collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic and deeply affecting. Whether being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping or simply trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his world with an incisive wit and an unflinching honesty.

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