Biographies & True Stories Books

Animal life stories
Anthologies: general
Biographies
Diaries, letters and journals
Literary essays
Memoirs
Reportage, journalism or collected columns
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True stories
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    Brainstorm
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    Brainstorm

    Revealing his fight against a diagnosis of 'incurable' brain cancer, this is the remarkable story of 2024 co–Australian of the Year Richard Scolyer. SHORTLISTED, AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEARWINNER, AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY...
    RRP: $34.99
    $34.00

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  • Blake Shelton: Happy Anywhere
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    Blake Shelton: Happy Anywhere

    With fifty personal photos from the author's collection and a close connection to Blake Shelton, Carol Cash Large presents a warm, detailed account of one of country music's biggest stars of all time. Carol Cash Large, longtime friend of Blake Shelton,...
    $56.00

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  • Desert Songs of the Night
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    Desert Songs of the Night

    A unique and extraordinary collection, Desert Songs of the Night presents some of the finest poetry and prose by Arab writers, from the Arab East to Andalusia, over the last 1,500 years. From the mystical imagery of the Qur'an and the colourful stories...
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    Secretive Century
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    Secretive Century

    Monte grew up in a secretive century. She lived in a society where appearances mattered, and keeping them up often involved creating silence around ancestral origins, painful memories and personal desires. Monte Punshon refused to be labelled. She was,...
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  • Field Notes from Death's Door
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    Field Notes from Death's Door

    This Is Going to Hurt meets Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) - a rollicking, smart and self-aware memoir about the extremes of the human experience, the limits to compassion, and what trying to save the world actually entails.In her early...
    $36.00

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  • Daybreak in Gaza
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    Daybreak in Gaza

    'A city so rich in trees it looks like a cloth of brocade spread out upon the land.' Shamsaddin al-Dimashqi, geographer (1256-1327)This is Gaza a place of humanity and creativity, rich in culture and industry. A place now utterly devastated, its entire...
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    An Everyone Story An Everyone Story
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    An Everyone Story

    'It was a disaster from the word go,' Barb Spriggs said when telling the story of her husband Bob's admission to the Oakden Older Persons' Mental Health Service in Adelaide. Barb had no idea that her story would launch a landmark inquiry, The Oakden...
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    Harry Hodgetts Harry Hodgetts
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    Harry Hodgetts

    From 'Big Shot' to 'Swindler'. From 'palatial two-storey Kensington Park home' to 'the cold cells of Adelaide Gaol'. Racier newspapers gloated when Harry Hodgetts was convicted of fraud and false pretences in September 1945.Hodgetts was Adelaide's...
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    $29.00

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    Whispering Wire Whispering Wire
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    Whispering Wire

    The 3200-kilometre-long Overland Telegraph Line from Adelaide to Darwin was completed in 1872. It transformed Adelaide into Australia's communication hub, connecting the continent with the rest of the world and heralding the dawn of instant global...
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    Breakout! Breakout!
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    Breakout!

    The killers were Pevay and Timmy. In 1841 they slew two men and wounded others in an angry rampage through the Victorian countryside. As Tasmanian Aborigines, they had many reasons to be angry. When teenagers they'd been jailed for being black...
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    $39.00

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    Finnenisms Finnenisms
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    Finnenisms

    'I've been told that I'm married to my music, and - fair enough - I have to admit it's the most successful marriage I've had in my life.'For 70 years, Chris Finnen has grooved to the music in his mind - and magically transposed it to the guitar. From...
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    Colonialism and its Aftermath

    The state of South Australia was a British imperial construct, its borders determined by three straight lines, with no reference to the Aboriginal presence.The colonial process in South Australia began decades before formal annexation with unregulated...
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    $48.00

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    Global Marxism Global Marxism
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    Global Marxism

    Arguing against the idea that Marxism is a Eurocentric theory with nothing to teach the Global South, this book explores the lives and ideas of a remarkable set of revolutionaries, from Ho Chi Minh to Ali Shariati.
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    $46.00

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  • Emily Dickinson Face to Face
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    Emily Dickinson Face to Face

    "Emily Dickinson springs to life in this remarkable, long-out-of-print biography written by her niece . . . Though millions of pages have been written about Dickinson . . . few have provided such a thrilling close-up portrait. Readers will be rapt from...
    $33.00

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    The Melting Point

    As the Commander of U.S. Central Command, General Frank McKenzie oversaw some of the most important - and controversial - operations in modern U.S. military history. He had direct operational responsibility for the strikes on Qassem Soleimani and two...
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  • Fake Alibi
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    Fake Alibi

    Brilliant! Another cracking book in this series, done it in a day looking forward to the next one. Charlie When a wheelchair-bound woman is discovered in her home by a neighbour, flat on her back, eyes wide and staring at the ceiling, it soon...
    $24.00

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  • Guilt Edged
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    Guilt Edged

    In a shocking act of violence, an apparently unassuming man is ruthlessly murdered with no discernible motive. Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel and her team find themselves stumped, until a breakthrough occursâ€"the victim's body yields DNA evidence...
    $24.00

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  • No Words for This
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    No Words for This

    The much anticipated memoir by media personality Alison Mau In my family, we never talked about the past...Since the age of twelve, Alison Mau wanted to be a journalist just like her dad. A beer-swilling, straight-talking man who was rough around the...
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  • Griffith Review 88: Culture Vultures
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    Griffith Review 88: Culture Vultures

    There's no escaping the onslaught of content these days. But it seems increasingly tricky to determine what's good and what's not as we stream, tap and swipe our way through our endless entertainment feeds. How can we tell our own taste? Have we reached...
    $28.00

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    Find me at the Jaffa Gate

    'What is the task but to find my way back to the unfragmentation of the world as we knew it; to collect the uncollected, to make the unmade. To refuse victimhood even when annihilation seems to insist on it. To make a thing out of nothing, to make a...
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    Inconvenient Women

    Long before Germaine Greer and Anne Summers, Australia's women writers were pouring their intense political beliefs into their work. Mary Gilmore was a trailblazing feminist journalist and labour movement organiser; Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote...
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    Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: In His Own Words
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    Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: In His Own Words

    A collection of more than 300 quotes from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: pro wrestling phenom, actor, businessman, and cultural icon, providing a unique look into the mind of one of the most recognizable and influential figures of our era. Part of the In...
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  • Reminiscences of a Student's Life
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    Reminiscences of a Student's Life

    The arch, witty, outspoken memoirs of the pioneering archaeologist and scholar Mary Beard has called "my hero."First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, Jane Ellen Harrison's Reminiscences are the irreverent memoirs of a student who declared...
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  • The Mystery Guest
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    The Mystery Guest

    A "frank and wry, mad and graceful" (Slate) true story about getting dumped, and getting over it.When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Gregoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without...
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  • Inner Warrior
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    Inner Warrior

    A redemptive story about second chances. Jaye Pukepuke committed 15 armed robberies before he was caught by police and sent to prison. He tells people that while he spent almost six years inside, he served 16, because it took him another decade simply...
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    Elizabeth Revealed
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    Elizabeth Revealed

    Elizabeth Revealed is a lively and affectionate celebration of The Queen's long and eventful life. This gorgeously illustrated book blends personal and public, frivolous and factual in a tribute to an extraordinary woman and the sweeping social changes...
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  • Lost Love Found/Waiting For Nick/Considering Kate
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    Lost Love Found/Waiting For Nick/Considering Kate

    From No.1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts comes two fan-favorite stories from the Stanislaski siblings! Waiting for NickFrederica Kimball has had a crush on Nicholas LeBeck since they were kids. Once a reckless teenager, Nick has cleaned...
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  • Say Everything
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    Say Everything

    From Gen X IT Girl Ione Skye comes a wild ride of Hollywood thrills, confessions, and desire. Heartfelt and entertaining, Say Everything pulls back the covers on a messy, sexy, defiantly unconventional life. Best known as John Cusack's dream girl in the...
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  • Worthy of the Event
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    Worthy of the Event

    A trans essayist with a checkered past takes on the big questions of human existenceMove over Michel de Montaigne, there's a new girl in townSet against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell...
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    Night Divides The Day: The Doors Anthology
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    Night Divides The Day: The Doors Anthology

    'We were reflecting on our own career as it was happening. It's not that we weretrend-conscious, we were doing exactly what we would have been doing anyway.' - Jim Morrison'We didn't sit down and have a meeting to say, 'Hey, we want to change theminds of...
    RRP: $135.00
    $114.00

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    Lovers’ Lane Murders
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    Lovers’ Lane Murders

    Andy Atkinson and Cheryl Henry met on a blind date arranged by friends and hit it off immediately. On their second date at Bayou Mama’s, they left together to visit a spot known as "Lovers' Lane." Within hours, Andy was found tied to a tree with his...
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    Spawn 2
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    Spawn 2

    Curated by Deborah Sheldon, this second volume follows the multi-award-winning and multi-award-nominated anthology of Australian dread, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. Spawn 2 interprets and reinterprets pregnancy, birth and...
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  • Great at Heart
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    Great at Heart

    In Great at Heart Gavin Long finally gets the biography he richly deserves.While Charles Bean is the subject of several major biographies, this is the first life story of his acolyte, war correspondent and editor and principal author of the official...
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    Running Water Limited Edition 3-Pack

    This limited edition 3-pack of Running Water Community Press titles is a perfect gift for summer reading. It includes three titles from the world's first ever First Nations author run co-operative publisher:Living In Hope: the complete memoirs...
    RRP: $84.99
    $84.00

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  • Code of the Hills
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    Code of the Hills

    FROM AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR CHRIS OFFUTT. 'Excellent Kentucky noir - Offutt's third Mick Hardin novel is the best yet.' - Kirkus An explosive return to the mayhem of the Kentucky hills, Code of the Hills is a harrowing novel of family - of what we're...
    $23.00

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    Searching for Charmian
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    Searching for Charmian

    Thirty years ago, Gina Chick’s mother Suzanne wrote a bestselling memoir after discovering that her birth mother was none other than iconic Australian writer Charmian Clift. That book, Searching for Charmian, is now being rereleased for Mothers’ Day 2025...
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    Ariise
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    Ariise

    Are you living the life you truly want? In Ariise, Zoe Marshall invites you to learn the powerful tools and techniques of manifestation to help you cultivate the life you deserve. This isn't just another self-help book – this is a blueprint for...
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    $36.00

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  • Between the salt and the ash
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    Between the salt and the ash

    A writer's quest to understand the deep past and uncertain future of his homeland.After inheriting the miner's safety lamp that belonged to his great-grandfather, Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage across his homeland...
    $45.00

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  • Meadow's Law
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    Meadow's Law

    For readers of THE TEACHER'S PET and MISSING WILLIAM TYRELL. It's the maxim that every true-crime lover knows: One infant's death in a family is a tragedy. Two is suspicious. And three must be murder. But in 2003 the widely accepted mantra of Meadow's...
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  • The Killing Fields of East New York
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    The Killing Fields of East New York

    In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and true crime, Stacy Horn sheds light on how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly devastated East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that would...
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    panam.captain
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    panam.captain

    Pioneering Spirit, American SuccessIn panam.captain, Tim Mellon, issue of one of America's most illustrious banking dynasties, narrates his journey from the legacy of the Mellon family to his success as an audacious entrepreneur who carved his own path...
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    Protecting Whitney

    David Roberts was Whitney Houston's bodyguard, the real one. Roberts was hired in 1988 for Houston's UK portion of the Moment of Truth world tour. Accustomed to working for diplomats and Fortune 500 clients, Roberts had reservations about working with a...
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  • Country Legacy
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    Country Legacy

    The Lawman Lassoes A Family - Rachel LeeA deputy daddy?After her policeman husband died in the line of duty, Vicki Templeton has sworn off lawmen — both for herself and her four-year-old daughter. Krystal can’t afford to lose another father figure, and...
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  • High Heels and Gumboots
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    High Heels and Gumboots

    For anyone who has dreamed of living in the country. . . here's the brutal, hilarious and heart-warming reality.Rebecca Hayter was a high-profile yachting journalist based in Auckland, when she followed a whim to buy a lifestyle block on the beach at...
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    NHOJ

    With an eye for peculiar detail and meticulous research, John Lazenby takes us on an evocative visit to the Britain of the 1960s, when, aged nine, he saw the Beatles play live in London before he could even hope to read, or write down, the lyrics from...
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Biographies & True Stories | Inspirational Real Life Stories & Books Based on True Events Australia

Discover a powerful collection of inspirational real life stories books and famous Australian biographies to read on BookLoop. Whether you're fascinated by historical figures, inspired by sports legends, or drawn to heroic survival stories, our collection will move you, challenge you, and stay with you.

What's Hot in Biographies & True Stories

Our current bestsellers include gripping true story books for adults, emotionally rich memoirs of survival, and books based on true events Australia. Readers are loving titles that explore abuse survival, war stories, and memoirs of personal growth.

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Use our extensive categories to browse Biographies, Memoirs, True Stories, Diaries, and more.

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Bestselling Books

One Day at a Time

There Must Be More

The Eyes of Gaza

Till Death Do Us Part

Always Home, Always Homesick

Frog

My Next Breath

Your Story, Mum

Behind the Badge

Fahrenheit-182

Australian Political Memoirs

Delve into the lives of Australia’s most influential figures with historical and political biographies, including biographies about world leaders and Australian prime ministers.

Sport Biographies

From tennis courts to footy fields, explore sports biographies that chronicle the triumphs, defeats, and grit behind athletic greatness.

Literary Biographies

Get a peek behind the scenes of your favourite writers’ lives with biographies and autobiographies of writers.

True Stories of Heroism

Experience best non-fiction survival stories that showcase bravery in the face of disaster, violence, and impossible odds. Browse the full collection here.

Australian Stories

Read authentic accounts from everyday Australians and icons alike with true stories and memoirs set in Australia.

Travel Writing

Step into the shoes of global wanderers, explorers, and nomads with adventurer biographies and their tales of lands unknown.

Film and TV Tie Ins

Explore books that inspired major films and series—perfect for fans of adaptations and real-life dramas.

True War and Combat Stories

Relive gripping accounts from the front lines in true war and combat stories that bring history to life.

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