A lovely young Australian couple Cameron and Sam Bloom were holidaying with their three little boys in Thailand when Sam leant against a safety fence, riddled with dry rot. The barrier collapsed beneath her and Sam stood poised on the edge for a seemingly infinite slither of time - 'Leaning back over the void at an impossible angle, her slim arms waving wildly, fingers extended as if to find purchase in the air and take flight. And then she was gone. She didn't scream. I never heard her hit the ground.' With frightful head injuries causing constant migraine, her spine was shattered at T6 and T7 and in Cameron's absence, a callous doctor brusquely told Sam that it was obvious she would never walk again. 'My brave wife was devastated.' In the darkest days of her struggle towards some sort of recovery, the pain and depression was constant. Suddenly a new and unexpected member of the family came into their lives - an injured magpie chick abandoned after she fell from her nest in a car park near Grandma's house. She became their little girl, and known as Penguin Bloom. In many ways the penguin saved them and as the little chick grew into a strong and beautiful bird, Sam found she could talk to her and they became inseparable, one always looking after the other. The three little boys fed and petted her and the bird was free to come and go from the house. The story is told with the photographer-author's own beautiful images about a crazy little bird who helped make the family whole again. The number one international bestseller. B/w photos. Paperback, 272pp.

'A beautiful, lyrical story of personal healing that deftly interweaves botanical history and lore, and highlights the importance of urban green spaces in an increasingly disconnected world.' - Kayte Nunn. Interweaving gardening history with memoir, here is nature writing and knowledge of horticulture to inspire readers to get planting and how plants have the power to help us find ourselves. When she suddenly finds herself uprooted, heartbroken, grieving and living out of a suitcase in her late 20s, Alice Vincent begins planting seeds. She nurtures pot plants and vines on windowsills and draining boards, filling her many temporary London homes with greenery. The benefits of sticking your hands in soil and where horticulture fits with the modern urban experience is blended in one enjoyable cocktail of memoir and botanical history. As the months pass and with each unfurling petal and budding leaf, Alice begins to come back to life. The book is a poem to wild hope, strength and tenderness in nature and in ourselves. 350pp, paperback.

You may remember Ron as a young child actor on Happy Days as Richie Cunningham opposite Henry Winkler's the Fonz? You may remember Clint who co-stared with a trained black bear in the US TV series Gentle Ben or playing the bizarre alien Balok in Star Trek? For the first time brothers Ron and Clint Howard tell the story of their childhoods as two of the busiest child actors of the 1960s and 70s. Their mother and father were not typical stage parents - Rance and Jean Howard, farm-belt Oklahomans who bucked family tradition, moved to California to make a go at showbusiness. While pursuing their dreams could prove frustrating at times, they happily adjusted their lives to also become mentors and managers to their sons in a tremendous act of love and sacrifice. The boys grew up frugally in a family that lived determinedly beneath its means, even if 12 year old Ron earned more than pitching legend Sandy Koufax at the time. They were barred from sleeping over at friends' houses to avoid kidnapping. They learned about the birds and the bees from graffiti in TV studio men's cloakrooms. Ron suffered from bullying at school and bridled at his parents' protectiveness. Clint rebelled and spiralled into substance abuse when the jobs stopped coming, but the strength of the Howard family held fast. The boys blossomed anew as they approached adulthood, the former an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and one of his generation's most popular directors. From critically acclaimed dramas A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon, Rush and Apollo 13 to the hit comedies Parenthood and Splash, Ron has created some of Hollywood's most memorable films. He made his directorial debut in 1977 with Grand Theft Auto and also starred in The Music Man. Clint is now a much loved character actor in Seinfeld, Rock & Roll Highschool, Arrested Development, The Water Boy and many horror films. Their lives have brought them into contact with a who's who of Hollywood - George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Shirley Jones and many others, but Dad and Mom have remained their guiding stars. 24 pages of photos, 393pp.

Leading literary biographer Hermione Lee presents a unique portrait of the great playwright Tom Stoppard, drawing on long conversations and time spent with him in rehearsal rooms, as well as unprecedented access to private archives and over 100 interviews with family, friends and stars of stage and screen. The book tracks him from his family's escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia through his leap to fame with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, marriages and fatherhood, worldwide travels and his amazing flow of work for theatre, film and radio. There are countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendall to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn, to Steven Spielberg and long exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself. It tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he has ever lived in, every piece of writing he has ever done, every play and film he has ever worked on in the story of a complex, elusive and private man whose plays are full of wit, verbal dexterity and addressing cerebral topics. Packed with names from the mid 20th century arts and literary scene, this is an intellectual and brilliantly detailed biography with chapters about his wife Miriam, Prisoners of Conscience, Script Doctor, Sir Tom, OM and the Eightieth Year among them and a Stoppard family tree. A monumental 977 pages, 24 pages of photos including colour and of actors such as Sinéad Cusack and a lampooning Private Eye cartoon from 2017.

Notorious for his booming voice and unprintable language, Brian Blessed is a classical actor with major Shakespearean roles to his credit as well as being a superb entertainer and famous all-round good bloke. The son of a coal-heaver, Brian worked his way up from the bottom, attending Bristol Old Vic theatre school where he commenced his lifelong love-hate friendship with Peter O'Toole. Apart from Lawrence of Arabia, O'Toole's most famous role was his disastrous Macbeth at London's Old Vic. On the first night Blessed, who was playing Banquo, had to get the plastered O'Toole into something like a costume and propel him onstage. Blessed had become a household name with his first big role as the young PC Fancy Smith in Z-Cars. In those days he was still aiming to be a Shakespearean actor and was devastated to receive a call from Orson Welles asking him to play Hotspur in Henry IV just after he had started Z-Cars. A major film role was playing Talthybius opposite Katharine Hepburn's Hecuba in Cacoyannis's Trojan Women. As an aficionado of Hepburn's films he managed to give as good as he got, surprising her with his analysis of where her leading man and partner Spencer Tracy had been ad-libbing, and he finally told her he was bored sick of hearing about Spencer all the time. Hepburn took it well. Although she stridently claimed to be an atheist, saying her farewells Hepburn showed Brian her religious side. Kenneth Branagh's Henry V took Blessed to Tokyo, where he was asked to escort Princess Anne on a state visit to meet the emperor and other dignitaries. Neither of them knew which was the emperor and Blessed's tale of their collusion in trial and error is a great royal story. Brian's dad was spotted taking illegal photos but was forgiven because of his vintage Japanese camera. 376pp, photos.

Six women who are a century old tell their stories in this amazing social history. Olive Gordon came from British Guiana in the fifties and loves talking about the time she met her husband Ray on her first night in London. Joyce Reynolds, a classics don at Cambridge, encountered her share of prejudice against women high achievers, and she enjoys discussing the old days with her friend and neighbour, the well-known classicist Mary Beard. Helena Jones lives in Brecon and fills her life with politics, the Women's Institute, and raising funds for the Eisteddfod with her celebrated Welsh cakes. Although Edna Cripps grew up in poverty in rural Lincolnshire, she is not self-pitying and has a vast store of human understanding. Phyllis Ramsay is an archetypal Edinburgh widow who confides her old-fashioned view that mothers should stay at home to look after their children. She was born in the British Raj, grew up shooting for the pot, and still does her own cooking. Finally, Ann Baer, nee Sidgwick, left school without qualifications but comes from an academic, bohemian family and returned to higher education later in life. All except Ann were the eldest of a number of siblings and as they grew up had to take their turn with domestic responsibilities. Helena's life revolved round chapel and bathing the baby, and when her sister died she had the job of telling her other siblings. Her career in teaching was a lifelong vocation. When Edna's father died young of double pneumonia, she lost her hope of going to Grantham High School, like Margaret Thatcher, and went into domestic service at the age of 14, having her long hair cut off and being expected to pluck game and skin rabbits. All the six children were educated to believe in the glories of the British empire, including Olive in British Guiana. Though most of the girls got married they are reticent about their sex lives. Joyce remained single, and Phyllis married on a two-week acquaintance. 340pp.

'Of course, there is something about the phrase 'political wife' that still evokes an image of a passive, helmet-haired, jam-making woman standing silently behind her husband, either smiling admirably as he asks for votes or frowning firmly as he admits to abusing his power or marriage. When my husband was elected as an MP, I remember being invited to join a Westminster Wives group. The first event they planned was a trip to the Aga Centre for a cookery demonstration.' What is it like to be the wife of a politician in modern- day Britain? Sasha Swire finally lifts the lid. For more than 20 years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. Swire detonates the stereotype of the dutiful wife. From shenanigans in Budleigh Salterton to state banquets in Buckingham Palace, gun-toting terrorist-busters in pizza restaurants to dinners in Downing Street sitting next to Boris Johnson, Devon hedges to partying with city hedgies, she observes the great and the not-so-great at the closest of quarters. Painfully revealing and often hilariously funny, here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries. Her secret diary covers not only the rise and the fall of her friends the Camerons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left Parliament. Set against a backdrop of country house shooting weekends and boozy dinners at Chequers, but seen through the sceptical eyes of a woman one step removed from the head-butting stags, there is acute political intelligence at work from Lady Swire, wife of Sir Hugo Swire, former MP for East Devon from 2010-2016, a Minister of State for the Northern Ireland Office and Foreign Office and who was the daughter of John Nott. Name dropping index, 527pp, Sunday Times Political Book of the Year. Gripping and appalling in equal measure.

Python Terry Jones is a longstanding friend of Bibliophile's. His near neighbour, the illustrator and brilliant animator Terry Gilliam, has the deadpan Minnesota farm boy take on Monty Python's Flying Circus and way beyond. Compared to Max Ernst by our other friend, the late great George Melly, Terry Gilliam writes candidly about his life as a director, screenwriter, animator, actor and member of Monty Python. His films Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) has ranked him among the top film directors. We can turn with him on the windmills of his mind as we see preparatory sketches for a cinematic adaptation of Don Quixote, end of shoot drawings from his films, the day when his hand was chopped down through the tendons whilst gardening at home, happy memories of Time Bandits and even happier days on filming The Life of Brian on location in Tunisia, within easy reach of Franco Zeffirelli's old sets for Jesus of Nazareth ("of which we made liberal use"). He had been out promoting The Holy Grail in LA with Eric Idle when they first met George Harrison and together they formed Handmade Films. Read about the real Fawlty Towers and Devon's rudest host, his escape-from-success trips camping in Greece and sketches of John Cleese as a vulture, David Frost as an Angel, his relationships with other filmmakers and actors but most of all his visions. Studded with film stills, sketches, colour artworks, nonsense collages, behind-the-scenes Python photos and even his own US Army dog tags, this is an album full of memories, the most visual autobiography you will ever see. 297pp, 8" x 10", colour.

From twanging the strings of his first plastic Tommy Steele guitar, Alan Johnson was determined to become a rock star. His life has always been lived to a musical soundtrack. His earliest memories of the bleak, postwar, pre-rock 'n' roll West London landscape into which he was born are suffused with the melodies that wafted from the rented Bakelite wireless in the slum where he lived with his frail and dauntless sister. His love affair with pop music blossomed alongside the music itself which exploded into being in the mid-1950s and embodied the iconoclastic spirit of a new era. Here Alan looks back at his pursuit of rock stardom and his parallel life as a supermarket worker, postman, union official and father of three through his music on vinyl, cassette tape or blasting from the stages of the Marquee Club in Soho or the Wimbledon Palais. Here are the sounds of Chuck Berry and Lonnie Donegan, of the Yardbirds and Dylan, of Bowie, Elvis Costello and Springsteen and not forgetting the Beatles, the band he has worshipped since 1963. He recalls with affection a vanished world of Dansettes, dance halls and smoky pubs, Flower Power and platform shoes before he was elected to Parliament as MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997 and serving in five Cabinet positions including Home Secretary. His big break in two local bands never really came and he is honest, poignant and very funny in his nostalgic celebration of music. 261pp, eight pages of colour and archive photos.

The publishing supremo has helped thousands of ordinary motorists become home mechanics with his wonderful Haynes Car Repair Manuals. The biography looks under the bonnet at his extraordinary life and his legacy to the motoring world and how one man's vision and enthusiasm gave a small enterprising rural Somerset a global footprint. The story begins with John's childhood in Ceylon and his schooldays, when as a young entrepreneur he sowed the seeds of what would become his iconic car repair manuals, to his time as a young RAF officer and the driving force behind the Haynes brand and the Haynes International Motor Museum. It all began with the classically sleek, low slung open-topped British two-seater the AC Cobra. John had owned MGs and Minis and Triumphs, big bodied Fords and Jaguars and stately Rolls Royces. He had raced cars too nearly every weekend and ended up in hospital just weeks before his wedding to Annette in the summer of 1963 when his Lotus spun violently on the track circuit at Goodwood and flipped over hurling him straight onto his back. His passion for motor racing remained, and both his business and personal lives were fundamentally changing. The business of Haynes Publishing with its iconic catalogue of car repair manuals took roots, taking apart the cars, photographing them and putting them back together, drawing cutaways and plans, writing and printing the first generation of manuals and selling them along with an assortment of other motoring titles from a combination office cum bookshop in Odcombe. John was awarded and OBE in 1995 for his services to the British publishing industry and his Haynes Motor Manuals touched the lives of more than 200 million people around the globe. The speed and suddenness of his final decline caught everyone by surprise. Eight pages of colour and archive photos including hauling the engine of his Austin Healey Sprite up fur flights of stairs and his glamorous wife on their honeymoon posing in front of their MG. 248pp.