The fiercely honest, fearless, darkly funny autobiography of global tennis star Maria Sharapova
In the middle of the night, a father and his daughter step off a Greyhound bus in Florida and head straight to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. They ring the bell, though no one is expecting them and they don’t speak English. They have arrived from Russia with just seven hundred dollars and the conviction that this six-year-old girl will be the world’s next great tennis star. They are right.
This is Maria Sharapova’s gripping and fearless autobiography, telling her story from her roots in the small Siberian town her parents fled to after the Chernobyl disaster, through her arrival in the US with nothing and her phenomenal rise to success – winning Wimbledon aged just seventeen – to the disasters that threatened her career and her fight back.
‘A compelling memoir’ David Shaftel, Financial Times
‘An illuminating account … This is the bildungsroman of a controversial champion, a portrait of the athlete as an uncommonly driven young woman’ Julia Felsenthal, Vogue
Related Listens
- The Boys In The Boat : An Epic Journey to the Heart of Hitler’s Berlin – Daniel James Brown (Abridged)
- Eleven Rings : The Soul of Success – Phil Jackson
- Ali: A Life : Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2017 – Jonathan Eig (Abridged)
- Wild Embers : Poems of rebellion, fire and beauty – Nikita Gill
- What Do Women Want? : Adventures in the Science of Female Desire – Daniel Bergner (Abridged)
- We Are Displaced : My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World – From Nobel Peace Prize Winner Malala Yousafzai – Malala Yousafzai (Abridged)
- Uncanny Valley : Seduction and Disillusionment in San Francisco’s Startup Scene – Anna Wiener (Abridged)
- Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas : Festive hospital diaries from the author of multi-million-copy hit This is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay (Abridged)