Afua Hirsch is British. Her parents are British. She was raised, educated and socialised in Britain. Her partner, daughter, sister and the vast majority of her friends are British. So why is her identity and sense of belonging a subject of debate? The reason is simply because of the colour of her skin. Blending history, memoir and individual experi...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story, written and read by Christie Watson. Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astonishing account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness....

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff's journey through his son's drug addiction. David's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view-a real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Boy in the Water written and read by Tom Gregory. Eltham, South London. 1984: the hot fug of the swimming pool and the slow splashing of a boy learning to swim but not yet wanting to take his foot off the bottom. Fast-forward four years. Photographers and family wait on the shingle beach as a boy in a bri...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Churchill by Andrew Roberts, read by Stephen Thorne. Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world. There have been over a thousand previous biographies of Churchi...

When Jo Brand hosted Have I Got News For You late last year, her calm explanation of the effects of sexism on women to a bemused all-male cast turned into a viral phenomenon. There has been a whole tradition of books over hundreds of years where a father shares his wisdom with his son - started by Lord Chesterfield in the 18th century - while women...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Becoming by Michelle Obama. An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States 'A genuine page-turner, full of intimacies and reflections' Evening Standard 'A polished pearl of a memoir' New York Times 'A rich, entertaining and candid memoir. And overall Obama's a fun...

This is a necessary book - painful, harrowing, tragic, but also uplifting' The Times Little Lien wasn't taken from her Jewish parents - she was given away in the hope that she might be saved. Hidden and raised by a foster family in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, she survived the war only to find that her real parents had not. Much later, she...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Thomas Cromwell by Diarmid MacCulloch, read by David Rintoul. Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offic...

Jazz Jennings is one of the youngest and most prominent voices in the national discussion about gender identity. At the age of five, Jazz transitioned to life as a girl, with the support of her parents. A year later, her parents allowed her to share her incredible journey in her first Barbara Walters interview, aired at a time when the public was m...

What happens when a black detective goes undercover in the KKK? An extraordinary true story. In 1978, Ron Stallworth is the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department. In the local paper, he finds a classified ad for the Ku Klux Klan - and a P.O. box for interested enquiries. All he's expecting are some racist br...

Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. With fierce compassion and honesty, she reported from the most dangerous places in the world, fractured by conflict and genocide, going in further and staying longer than anyone else. In Sri Lanka in 2001, Marie was hit by a grenade and lost...

In three years Stormzy has risen from one of the most promising musicians of his generation to a spokesperson for a generation. Rise Up is the story of how he got there. It's a story about faith and the ideas worth fighting for. It's about knowing where you're from, and where you're going. It's about following your dreams without compromising who y...

Hello! I'm Brian Limond, aka Limmy. You might know me from Limmy's Show. Or you might not know me at all. Don't worry if you don't. They asked me to write a book about mental health, because I sometimes talk about my mental health in tweets and interviews, like suicidal thoughts and anxiety, and what I've done to try to deal with it. I said to them...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Pianist of Yarmouk by Aeham Ahmad, read by Nezar Alderazi. One morning on the outskirts of Damascus, two starving friends were walking through their war-ravaged city. They entered a once familiar street that had now been turned to rubble - concrete bridges towered over them like tombs and houses were tu...

Meet the forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd. He solves the mysteries of unexplained or sudden death. He's a detective in his own right. And he has one, ultimate and pressing question to answer: How did this person die? Unnatural Causes is an unputdownable record of an extraordinary life, a unique insight into a remarkable profession, and abo...

Meet Anne Lister, the 18th Century landowner, industrialist, explorer, lesbian and feminist icon. This is her story... Anne was different from society's expectations of a woman at the time: she not only did not wish to marry, but she also did not want to conform. Anne was only interested in women and had 'marriage' ceremonies with Mariana Lawton a...

Penguin Presents the audio edition of Daemon Voices, written and read by Philip Pullman with an introduction by Simon Mason. In over 30 essays, written over 20 years and recorded by the author himself in his home city of Oxford, one of the world's great story-tellers meditates on the art of story-telling. Warm, engaging and often amusing collection...

When Stevie's social worker tells Cathy, an experienced foster carer, that Stevie, 14, is gender fluid she isn't sure what that term means and looks it up. Stevie, together with his younger brother and sister, have been brought up by their grandparents as their mother is in prison. But the grandparents can no longer cope with Stevie's behaviour so...

Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure. After 13 years service in the military, with 4 years as a Special Boat Service (SBS) snipe...

In the summer of 1990, Cathy's brother Matty was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out, two weeks before receiving his GCSE results. Sitting by his unconscious body in hospital, holding his hand and watching his heartbeat on the monitors, Cathy and her parents willed him to survive. They did not know then that there are many fates...