**Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025**

The joyous and electric memoir from beloved music icon Neneh Cherry.

A SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, EVENING STANDARD, UNCUT AND ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

‘Intoxicating . . . Seductive’ SUNDAY TIMES
'Inspiring' ANNIE MACMANUS
‘Fabulous’ VOGUE

Top of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry.

Cherry has always been a creative force to be reckoned with. She spent some of her childhood at the iconic Chelsea Hotel; performed with all-girl punk band the Slits as a teenager; was among the pioneers of nineties pop music; and has inspired wave after wave of musicians and artists.

In this joyous and electric memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy.

'I loved it' ZADIE SMITH
'Enthralling' BERNARDINE EVARISTO
'Thrums with life' GUARDIAN
'A living testament to artistic invention' OBSERVER

WITH A FOREWORD BY JAN MORRIS

'A treasure chest' Spectator

'A masterpiece' William Dalrymple, Financial Times

In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure. Alone, carrying only a rucksack and a small allowance, he travelled through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary.

Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that - despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, great rivers and grand cities - was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change.

'Rightly considered to be among the most beautiful travel books in the language' Independent