John Sutherland

Manjit Kumar

Jim Baggott

Patricia Fara

Cordelia Fine

Greg Grandin

Stephen Fender

John Waller

Michael Steen

Mark Hughes

James Hannam

Tommy Byrne

Maryanne Woolf

Icon Books is an independent British publisher which publishes popular and engaging non-fiction for adults. We’re proud to be part of the Independent Alliance in the UK, publishing companies who share a common vision of editorial excellence and original, diverse publishing. This ebook sampler – available free on Kindle, in EPUB and as a PDF download from our website – covers subjects from popular science to sports biography to philosophy. The sampler includes extracts from: Atomic by Jim Baggott; Crashed & Byrned by Tommy Byrne; Fordlandia by Greg Grandin; God’s Philosophers by James Hannam; The Lives and Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen; Love, Sex, Death and Words by John Sutherland and Stephen Fender; A Mind of Its Own by Cordelia Fine; Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Woolf; Quantum by Manjit Kumar; Sex, Botany and Empire by Patricia Fara; The Real Oliver Twist and A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller. From Proust and the Squid, a fascinating exploration of the science of the reading brain – ‘We were never born to read,’ begins Maryanne Wolf – to Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia, the riveting story of the American town Henry Ford tried to build in the Brazilian Amazon and Manjit Kumar’s BBC Samuel Johnson prizewinning Quantum, these books represent the best of over 20 years of non‐fiction publishing from Icon Books.

FREE Icon Books eBook Sampler

This is the thrilling, warts-engine-oil-and-all autobiography of the only racing driver Ayrton Senna ever feared - the 200mph flawed genius of Tommy Byrne.It tells the surreal tale of a poverty-stricken Dundalk kid's rise to become the only racing driver the great Ayrton Senna ever feared - and how it all went wrong from there. For a brief moment Tommy Byrne was arguably the world's greatest driver, the motor racing equivalent of George Best and Muhammad Ali rolled into one - A racer, a thief, a raconteur.This is the story of his improbable escape, his rapid rise and his spectacular and bizarre fall from grace. Peppered with dark humour and a cast of ridiculous characters, it is the antithesis of a fairytale - and it's all true. Hold on tight, the tale of Tommy Byrne is quite a ride - from fending for himself as the runt of a big Catholic litter in the '60s, running the gauntlet of the sectarian violence in the '70s, troubling Ayrton Senna and making it to F1 in the '80s, resorting to drugs in the aftermath and driving for a deluded billionaire madman and then gun-toting Mexicans in the '90s. It's raw, passionate, and - with Byrne's ability to tell it like it is - not for the faint-hearted.

The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw

Crashed and Byrned

Tommy Byrne

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