A Bit of a Stretch by Chris Atkins & Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr - 2 Book Memoir Set - Mixed Format - New UK Editions

Titles in This Set A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr Condition: New Format: Mixed Format (Paperback & Hardback) ISBN: 9781838950170 (A Bit of a Stretch, Paperback) / 9781474611459 (Motherwell, Hardback) Publisher: Atlantic Books / Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) Age Range: Adult Overview This two-book collection brings together a pair of acclaimed memoirs about confinement of very different kinds. Chris Atkins' A Bit of a Stretch is a darkly funny, unflinching diary of life inside HMP Wandsworth, while Deborah Orr's Motherwell: A Girlhood is a luminous account of growing up in a Scottish steel town under the shadow of a complicated mother. Together they offer powerful true-life storytelling, sharp social observation, and moving personal history in one bookshelf-worthy set. About the Books Documentary-maker Chris Atkins turns the lens on himself in A Bit of a Stretch, chronicling the year he spent in HMP Wandsworth after a financing scheme for one of his films went wrong. He records the everyday absurdities and injustices of the British prison system with journalistic precision and dark, disarming humour, from the strange economics of prison life to the shockingly casual availability of drugs compared with basic medication. It became a Sunday Times bestseller, praised for exposing a system in crisis. Deborah Orr's Motherwell: A Girlhood, published shortly before her death in 2019, is an equally candid but very different memoir. Orr grew up in the steel town of Motherwell in the 1970s, in a house dominated by her fierce, complicated mother Win. Leaving at almost eighteen for university became a decision that shaped the rest of her life, fuelling years of guilt, love and resentment. Written with the wit and intelligence that made Orr one of Britain's most admired columnists, it is a tender, unsentimental portrait of family, class and the pull of home. Key Benefits Two celebrated memoirs in one great-value se