Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A. S. Byatt notes, she is ?absolutely central to our culture?. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognisable Murdoch world, and the adjective ?Murdochian? has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interact intricately and strangely. Her story...

When Helen Forrester's father went bankrupt in 1930 she and her six siblings were forced into utmost poverty and slum surroundings in Depression-ridden Liverpool. The running of the household and the care of the younger children all fell on 12-year-old Helen. With very little food or help from her parents, Helen led a life of unrelenting drudgery and hardship. Writing about her experiences later in life, Helen Forrester shed light on an almost forgotten...

Helen Forrester continues the moving story of her early poverty-stricken life with an account of the war years in blitz-torn Liverpool, and the happiness which she so nearly captured but which was to elude her twice.

Josephine Cox returns to the land of her birth, the environment which provides so many settings for her novels, and in the company of her fictional characters rediscovers the influences which define her as a writer and which so enthrall her readers.

Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Artemis Cooper's biography explores a woman trying to make sense of her life through her writing, as well as illuminating the literary world in which she lived.

Taking in old age, the context of ones life and times, memory, reading and writing, and the identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others - this is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. This biography - by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired - pursues her life, her writing, and her secret...

Meg Hutchinson grew up as Margaret Rose Astbury in Wednesbury during the first half of the 20th century. She describes not only the constant struggle to make ends meet but also the laughter and love she enjoyed with her five sisters and parents who were too soft-hearted to punish any of their daughters.

Although the most popular novelist in history, with over two billion books sold worldwide, Agatha Christie lived a life shrouded in secrecy and fuelled by curiosity. Utilising over 5000 previously unpublished letters, notes and documents, Richard Hack allows Christie to write again, 33 years after her death.

'Kate's Daughter' gets to the heart of the Catherine Cookson story. With the help of material only made available since Catherine's death, Piers Dudgeon lifts the veil on the myth and lays bare the true nature of this complex and fascinating woman.