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 had 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. Here the five-time Grand Slam winner gives us candid insights into her relationship with her father, who gave up his job and life in Russia to dedicate himself to his daughter; the truth behind her famous rivalry with Serena Williams; the injuries and suspension controversy that threatened to end it all; and her recent battle to get back on court. Told with the same combative, no-holds-barred attitude as her game, it's a story of of crazy luck, mistakes, rivalries, sacrifice, survival and, above all, the constant, unwavering determination to win.
