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The Sunday Times bestseller‘Delivering my first baby is a memory that will stay with me forever. Just feeling the warmth of a newborn head in your hands, that new life, there’s honestly nothing like it… I’ve since brought more than 2,200 babies into the world, and I still tingle with excitement every time.’It’s the summer of 1968 and St Mary’s Maternity Hospital in Manchester is a place from a bygone age. It is filled with starched white hats and full skirts, steaming laundries and milk kitchens, strict curfews and bellowed commands. It is a time of homebirths, swaddling and dangerous anaesthetics. It was this world that Linda Fairley entered as a trainee midwife aged just 19 years old.From the moment Linda delivered her first baby – racing across rain-splattered Manchester street on her trusty moped in the dead of night – Linda knew she’d found her vocation. ‘The midwife’s here!’ they always exclaimed, joined in their joyful chorus by relieved husbands, mothers, grandmothers and whoever else had found themselves in close proximity to a woman about to give birth.Under the strict supervision of community midwife Mrs Tattershall, Linda’s gruellingly long days were spent on overcrowded wards pinning Terry nappies, making up bottles and sterilizing bedpans – and above all helping women in need. Her life was a succession of emergencies, successes and tragedies: a never-ending chain of actions which made all the difference between life and death.There was Mrs Petty who gave birth in heartbreaking poverty; Mrs Drew who confided to Linda that the triplets she was carrying were not in fact her husband’s; and Muriel Turner, whose dangerously premature baby boy survived – against all the odds. Forty years later Linda’s passion for midwifery burns as bright as ever as she is now celebrated as one of Britain’s longest-serving midwives, still holding the lives of mothers and children in her own two hands.Rich in period detail and told with a good dose of Manchester humour, The Midwife’s Here! is the extraordinary, heartwarming tale of a truly inspiring woman.

As Britain's most successful and high profile make-up artist, for the past 15 years Gary Cockerill has glossed the lips, curled the lashes and shared the secrets of the famous and fabulous.With his unique style of super-sexy, uber-glamorous make-up, Gary has been responsible for helping to launch the careers and keep the secrets of a host of famous names, including his best friend Katie Price.But behind the glitz and glamour is a heart-warming and at times hilarious story of how a former Yorkshire coal miner with no training or contacts fought his way up to become the celebrity world's make-up artist of choice. In From Coal Dust to Star Dust, Gary reveals how a job spray-painting the faces of shop mannequins in a grimy West London factory led him to America and a hair-raising stint working with the superstars of the adult film industry. He explains how he landed his first celebrity client and within a few years was back in Los Angeles again, only this time working with true Hollywood movie legends. Today, with a star-studded client list that reads like a copy of Vanity Fair magazine, Gary has become a loyal friend and confidante to many of his regular clients. In his role at the heart of the celebrity circus, he reveals what it was like to have a ringside seat for some of the most notorious tabloid scandals of the Noughties.Running alongside Gary's rise to fame is his candid and moving account of coming to terms with his sexuality and meeting his first boyfriend – now husband, Phil Turner – while in the middle of planning a wedding to his glamour model fiancée Tracey. He also lays bare his own struggles with shopping addiction, his dabbles with drugs and how his newfound celebrity lifestyle threatened to spiral out of control and destroy everything he had worked for.Gary's fairytale journey from the mines of Doncaster to the VIP rooms of London and LA is a moving and funny tale in the mould of Billy Elliot – if, that is, Billy ended up pole-dancing in a strip joint at the start of Act Two. Entertainingly gossipy but never bitchy or cruel, Coal Dust to Stardust will be a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary celebrity culture.