The first definitive biography of basketball legend LeBron James, by the acclaimed author of Tiger Woods.

LeBron is unquestionably the greatest basketball player of the 21st century. Off the court, LeBron’s political activism, outspoken stance on racism and social injustice have helped build a social media presence that includes 117 million followers on Instagram and 51 million followers on Twitter. He is an international brand worth billions of dollars. He doesn’t just have huge endorsement deals with some of the biggest corporations in the world; LeBron sits on boards of directors and has an equity stake in the companies he sponsors. He has forged a close friendship with President Barack Obama and clashed publicly with President Donald Trump.

As a child, LeBron was a lost little boy living in a public housing project in Akron, Ohio. His mother, who had LeBron when she was just sixteen, would disappear for days at a time. Scared and alone, LeBron rarely attended school. He was dirt poor and fatherless. And he had never played organised basketball. Yet he would become the most successful and most popular athlete that the United States has produced this century, bringing success to the Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers.

To tell this epic story, Benedict has done exhaustive research, digging through thousands of pages of primary source documents, articles, books and hundreds of hours of video footage. He’s also conducted hundreds of interviews with the people who were intimately involved with LeBron from the beginning of his life to the present. He shows the initial slow rise of a star that suddenly transformed into a speeding comet during his senior year of high school. It is a unique and unmissable insight into one of the world’s greatest athletes.

Simon & Schuster, 2023

The stories behind the brands, designers, and sneakerheads that transformed athletic footwear into a cultural phenomenon unfold in this epic volume. From its early twentieth-century origins as a sporting shoe; to the thrill of seeing Michael Jordan’s red, white, and black high-tops on the court; to the swagger and style of hip-hop footwear, the sneaker has become a status marker and a coveted cult collectible. This history of the sneaker spans Nike’s famous swish logo and global domination, the saga of the dueling brothers who respectively founded Adidas and Puma, and the enduring popularity of Off-White kicks and Vans.

Thames & Hudson, 2023

Making history visible through one of the most vibrant and distinctive art movements in Australia, this book illuminates the community drive and the individual artistic decisions that have resulted in a body of breathtaking paintings.

The Spinifex people have been living on their ancestral homelands in the Great Victoria Desert, Western Australia since time immemorial. This continuous narrative was interrupted momentously by the Maralinga atomic testing in the mid-20th Century. But after returning to their homelands, Spinifex people began to fight for greater recognition. Painting made their story visible.

Over the past 25 years they have developed unique modes of painting to express their communal identity and history. Born of the need to present evidence in Native Title contexts, Spinifex painting has a unique political history and visual tradition that marks it out as a singular art history in Australia – but one that also sheds light on the broader histories of Aboriginal art.

The history of the Spinifex people and their unique contribution to Australian art history remains largely unheralded.
Featuring stunning reproductions of significant paintings and insightful essays by experts and friends of the artists, this publication positions the Spinifex people as major figures in the Australian historical and art-historical landscape.

GOD. TRUTH. EXISTENCE.

Stella Maris is the story of a mathematician, twenty years old, admitted to the hospital with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag and one request: She does not want to talk about her brother.

Pan Macmillan, 2022

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit – by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series

Pan Macmillan, 2022