When Shaun Ryder appeared in (and very nearly won) the 2010 TV series of ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’, the nation split into two camps. The over 55s and under 35s mostly didn’t have the slightest idea who he was and those whose age lay between knew exactly who Ryder was but were flabbergasted he’d survived the years of drugs and hard living with his mental faculties sufficiently in tact to be capable of doing much more than sitting in a corner talking to himself. As front man of the Happy Mondays, Salford-born Ryder was at the forefront of the late 80′s and early 90′s ‘Madchester’ movement, a major earner for the late Tony Wilson’s ‘Factory’ record label and by his own admission one of the people responsible for introducing the rave drug ‘Ecstasy’ into the UK via the now defunct but at the time notorious club, the Hacienda.

Shaun Ryder

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Two war reporters decide to settle down to a more ordinary, domestic life, away from the world’s conflicts, in Paris. They are having a baby. This effort at normal life turns out to be more stressful for them both than they could have imagined.

Janine di Giovanni has had a long and successful career reporting conflicts around the world, including Sarajevo, Grozny, Pristina, Baghdad, Mogadishu, Algiers and many others. I remember reading her articles and finding them powerful and moving, and the content horrific.

Janine Di Giovanni

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Student days are for many people the best days of their lives. Free at last from parental supervision and not yet encumbered by the responsibilities of work, marriage and mortgages, the years at university can be fantastic – more so perhaps in the past before the introduction of massive student loans and tuition fees. Cloyne Court by Dodie Katague is a student ‘coming of age’ novel set in one of the wildest times and settings. As California turned on, tuned in and dropped out in the mid-1970s Berkeley students benefited from the widespread availability of drugs (many of them not yet illegal), access to the pill and plenty of alcohol and made the most of what life had to offer. It was a time before the shadow of AIDS fell across promiscuity and drug use when the sense of ‘anything goes’ was on the increase. At that time there was surely no place wilder or more easy-going than Cloyne Court – a co-ed (i.e, mixed gender) student co-operative.

Dodie Katague

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Those moments in life when you feel a genuine connection with another person are few and far between; I’m talking about that moment you realise that there’s someone thinks the same as you, has the same values and ideas. Often it can come from books, for me it came through music and the person who made everything make sense was Andy Kershaw. As a teenager I did not follow the crowd; I had my own firm ideas about what made good music and those ideas were fueled by Kershaw’s Radio 1 broadcasts. You might say I grew up with Kershaw; as the content of his shows grew wider and his travels took him all over the world so too did my musical (and often political) horizons expand. Did I mention I also had an enormous crush on the man too?

“No Off Switch” is an autobiography I’ve been eagerly awaiting for a long time. The shelves of bookstores real and virtual teem with so-called celebrity autobiographies but few of them can offer the stories that Kershaw has to tell.

Andy Kershaw

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“My name is Paul Rusesabagina. I am a hotel manager.” So begins An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda. This is the story of an ordinary man, a hotel manager, who saved 1268 lives during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Over the course of 100 days between April and July 1994, over 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered by the Interahamwe militia, because of their racial background. The Interahamwe were Hutus, and the build up to the genocide was filled with words of hate against the Tutsi “cockroaches” and the moderate Hutus who lived in peace with them. The UN soldiers in Rwanda had orders only to fire if fired upon, and so many stood by and watched the murder of children in front of them.

Paul Rusesabagina

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The blogosphere is well suited to the coverage of extended journeys or endurance achievements; there have, in recent years, been several excellent blogs written by cyclists (Tom Kevill-Davies’s The Hungry Cyclist and currently Alastair Humphreys’s terrifically entertaining blog covering his round the world cycle ride are just two of them) and a few of these have been the catalyst for full length books, proving not only the enduring popularity of cycling but just how much the public’s imagination i-s fired by tales of such feats of strength, daring and will to succeed.

Following on from “The Man Who Cycled the World”, an account of his record breaking trip of 2008, “The Man Who Cycled the Americas” is Mark Beaumont’s next major undertaking, cycling down the back bone of the continents of North and South America.

Mark Beaumont

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The title stops you with its combination of two logos. You look at it and, if you’re a person in the know about Jagdish Suraiya’s life you wince at the puniness of it all. Perhaps if the logos had not been force-fed, it could have been accepted as a subtle tribute. But those are among the rare things to cavil about in this book.

Jug Suraiya is one of India’s best known journalists, with a name insightful tongue in cheek pieces. And, for taking digs at himself. The opening chapter sets the tone – the journalist who rarely watched television missed the news about Diana’s death and so ran an opinion piece a day late. But then, he goes on to say, he became a journalist quite by accident, preferring to try odd business ventures like marketing paint spraying devices or selling tendu leaves.

Jug Suraiya

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Signs of Life by Natalie Taylor is an autobiographical account of sixteen months of the authors life, starting on the day her husband Josh died, and ending on their sons first birthday. At the age of 24, Natalie suddenly found herself widowed and pregnant.

When I was offered the chance to read and review Signs of Life, my initial reaction was that Natalie’s story is similar to that of a former colleague who lost her partner shortly after their daughter’s birth. I remember the grief that struck the office at that time, and I felt drawn to Signs of Life, to find out just how someone could cope with such a tragedy.

Natalie’s account is based on what she wrote every day during this period.

Natalie Taylor

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To her fans and readers she’s Joyce Carol Oates, a highly respected writer with a bucket-load of writing awards and over 50 novels to her name. To others she’s Rosamund Smith or Lauren Kelly, two of her pen names. To students at Princeton University where she’s taught since 1978, she’s Professor Oates. To family and friends, she was Joyce Smith, loving wife of Raymond J Smith. In February 2008 when Ray died suddenly and unexpectedly of a hospital acquired infection, she took on her latest role and identity – that of ‘the Widow’. Her latest book is the entirely autobiographical and deeply personal ‘A Widow’s Story’ and it is Oates’ account of the aftermath of Ray’s death and its impact on her.

Joyce Carol Oates

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When I was around ten, my dad gave his battered old copy of If Only They Could Talk by James Herriot and told me I would love it. He was right. The tales of a vet’s life in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s were beautifully told, charming, hilarious and rather special. I went on to read all Herriot’s memoirs (James Herriot is a pseudonym), and truly loved the characters (human and animal) which he wrote about. Every so often I still take the (now very) battered paperbacks off my bookshelf and curl up on the sofa to lose myself in Herriot’s world.

So when I was offered the chance to read and review The Vet: My Wild and Wonderful Friends by Luke Gamble, billed as a 21st century James Herriot, I thought it was my lucky day.

Luke Gamble

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I’ve read very little travel writing on Australia, but then very little has grabbed my attention. We feel like we know Australia even if we haven’t been there ourselves; from Ramsey Street to the late Steve Irwin and the Australia Zoo we’re familiar with Aussie culture without having to spend twenty-four hours stuck on a plane to experience it. In his book “Ten Pound Pom”, however, Welshman Niall Griffiths turns all that on its head and makes sure that, in no uncertain terms, we learn the truth about what this faraway bastion of equality and opportunity is really like.

Back in 1976, Griffiths was, along with his family a “Ten Pound Pom”, emigrating to Brisbane under a scheme sponsored by the Australian government. Griffiths was nine at the time, twelve when the family returned to Liverpool.

Niall Griffiths

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