NCW Libraries

"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....

Fifty years after his death, C.S. Lewis continues to inspire and fascinate millions. His legacy remains varied and vast. He was a towering intellectual figure, a popular fiction author who inspired a global movie franchise around the world of Narnia, and an atheist-turned-Christian thinker. In C.S. Lewis-A Life, Alister McGrath, prolific author and respected professor at King's College of London, paints a definitive portrait of the life of C.S. Lewis....

"A groundbreaking biography that places an obsessive, unrequited love at the heart of the writer's life story, transforming her from the tragic figure we have previously known into a smoldering Jane Eyre. Famed for her beloved novels, Charlotte Brontë has been known as well for her insular, tragic family life. The genius of this biography is that it delves behind this image to reveal a life in which loss and heartache existed alongside rebellion...

A biography of the author of "The Chronicles of Narnia" who converted from atheism to Christianity.

On a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990, a young single mother named Joanne Rowling conceived the idea of a children's book about a boy wizard named Harry Potter. Five years later, that idea became the basis for the most successful book franchise in the history of publishing. Here is the rags-to-riches story of J.K. Rowling, who overcame numerous hardships to rise seemingly overnight from a destitute welfare mother in England to one of the...

"With a foreword by Eric Metaxas, best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Amazing Grace. The enthralling biography of the womanwriter who helped end the slave trade, changed Britain's upper classes, and taught a nation how to read. The history-changing reforms of Hannah More affected every level of 18th-CenturyBritish society through her keen intellect, literary achievements, collaborative spirit, strong Christian principles, and colorful personality....

"An electrifying, revelatory life of D.H. Lawrence, with a focus on his difficult middle years"-- Wilson focuses on Lawrence's decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was suppressed following an obscenity trial, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Taking after Lawrence's own literary model, Dante, Wilson's book pursues Lawrence around the globe and reflects his life of wild allegory. The result is a triptych...

Told through a central character, Alex, the disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism. A modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption set in a dismal dystopia whereby a juvenile deliquent undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior.

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's brutally honest account of his experience as a militiaman during the Spanish Civil War. In the last days of 1936, Spain was five months into a bitter civil war, in which volunteers from many countries were helping the elected government of the Spanish Republic battle a military coup led by General Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Some foreigners flocking to Spain had come for another reason:...

From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is...