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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Maggie Nelson

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide – from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Kara Walker to Bjork – but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. 
 
The collection is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Like Love is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Like Love

Essays and Conversations

Elena Kostyuchenko

**WINNER OF THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2024** 
 
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. Here is Russia as it really is. 
 
'Important ... this is the Russia we need to understand' TIMOTHY SNYDER 
'A haunting book of rare courage' CLARISSA WARD 
'Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIVICH 
 
Part memoir, part collection of Elena Kostyuchenko’s fearless reporting, I Love Russia introduces us to places we’ve never seen and to people who’ve been systematically, brutally erased from view by Putin’s regime. We enter secretive state-run facilities for disabled people, abandoned buildings haunted by suicide and violence, and a schoolyard marked by unacknowledged massacre. We meet village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, and patients and doctors on a Ukrainian maternity ward. 
 
The result is a singular, uncompromising, and profoundly humane portrait of a nation – and of an extraordinary woman who refuses to be silenced. 
 
'Shocking and moving ... [a] gritty insider's take on Russia' SUNDAY TIMES 
'Reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER 
'Deeply personal, beautifully written' IPAPER 
 
*A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*

I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

Sabrina Imbler

Join science journalist Sabrina Imbler on an astonishing journey which will completely redefine the way you think about nature and the ocean 
 
'An astonishing debut' GUARDIAN 
'Reveals just as much about our fascinating, mysterious world as it does about our fascinating, mysterious selves' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
In My Life in Sea Creatures we encounter: the mother octopus, starving herself while watching over her eggs; the yeti crab, thriving in crushing pressure and oppressive darkness; the cuttlefish, able to change its appearance in a fraction of a second; and many other creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean. 
 
Imbler's work weaves the wonders of marine biology with their own identity as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer. They implicitly connect endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and shatter our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive. 
 
'A miraculous, transcendental book' ED YONG 
'Profound, surprising and thrillingly strange. I love it' SY MONTGOMERY 
'Astounding' PHILIP HOARE 
'A revelation' ISABELLA TREE 
 
***LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER***

My Life in Sea Creatures

A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean

Haruki Murakami

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles. 
 
'You end this collection…vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again' Guardian 
 
Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his beautifully surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing. 
 
In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. 
 
'Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers' New York Times Book Review 
 
'A fascinating glimpse of the peculiar writerly life' Sunday Times 
 
** A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES and NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR**

Novelist as a Vocation

Margaret Atwood

The Sunday Times bestselling collection of funny, endlessly curious and uncannily prescient essays from cultural icon Margaret Atwood. 
 
In it she seeks answers to Burning Questions such as: 
 
Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? 
How can we live on our planet? 
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? 
 
In Burning Questions Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe. 
 
 
INCLUDES NEW ESSAYS FOR PAPERBACK 
 
'Brilliant and funny' Joan Didion 
 
'She's taken our times and made us wise to them' Ali Smith 
 
'Lights a fire from the fears of our age . . . Miraculously balances humor, outrage, and beauty' New York Times Book Review 
 
'All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood's name is written at the top of it' Anne Enright, Guardian 
 
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times

Burning Questions

The Sunday Times bestseller from Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood

Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004–2021

Édouard Louis

Édouard Louis is one of the most important literary voices of his generation' Guardian 
 
One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago: a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. But growing up, Édouard only knew his mother's sadness - what happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, Édouard's mother frees herself from this oppression, to start a new life in Paris. 
 
A Woman's Battles and Transformations reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives - and with the possibility of escape. It is a tender portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery as she chooses to live on her own terms. 
 
 
'Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'A tenderness of observation' New York Times 
 
'Incandescent...Louis's most hopeful book to date' Los Angeles Times 
 
Translated from the French by Tash Aw

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Salman Rushdie

From 'Best of the Booker' winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture. 
 
'One of the greatest writers of our age' Neil Gaiman 
 
Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, he shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Rushdie considers, too, the nature of truth and looks afresh at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. 
 
'Essential reading... Powerful' Financial Times 
 
'Rushdie is vital, expansive, the critic as storyteller, championing his subjects with gusto' TLS

Languages of Truth

Essays 2003-2020

Filled with empathy and wisdom, personal experiences and creative inspiration, this is a vital collection of essays on the power of literature and the craft of writing from an international array of writers of colour. 
 
'Electric essays that speak to the experience of writing from the periphery . . . a guide, a comfort, and a call all at once' Laila Lalami, author of Conditional Citizens 
 
'A whip-smart collection' Kamila Shamsie, author of Best of Friends 
 
What if we reconsidered our assumptions about how fiction should be written? And can we then apply our discoveries to both what we read and how we read? This book explores these questions and encourages us into a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, featuring: 
 
• Taymour Soomro on resisting rigid stories about who you are 
• Madeleine Thien on how writing builds the room in which it can exist 
• Amitava Kumar on why authenticity isn't a license we carry in our wallets 
• Tahmima Anam on giving herself permission to be funny 
• Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the bodily challenge of writing about trauma 
• Zeyn Joukhadar on queering English and the power of refusing to translate ourselves 
• Kiese Laymon on hearing that no one wants to read the story that you want to write 
• Deepa Anappara on writing even through conditions that impede the creation of art 
 
Plus essays from Tiphanie Yanique, Xiaolu Guo, Jamil Jan Kochai, Vida Cruz-Borja, Femi Kayode, Nadifa Mohamed in conversation with Leila Aboulela, Myriam Gurba, Mohammed Hanif and Sharlene Teo. 
 
'This book is essential' Nikesh Shukla 
 
'Bracing and moving . . . No one interested in how we read and should read fiction can afford to miss this' Pankaj Mishra, author of Run And Hide

Letters to a Writer of Colour

Karl Ove Knausgaard

A brilliantly wide-ranging essay collection from the author of My Struggle, spanning literature, philosophy, art and how our daily and creative lives intertwine. 
 
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English, and these brilliant and wide-ranging pieces meditate on themes familiar from his groundbreaking fiction. 
 
Here, Knausgaard discusses Madame Bovary, the Northern Lights, Ingmar Bergman, and the work of an array of writers and visual artists, including Knut Hamsun, Michel Houellebecq, Anselm Kiefer and Cindy Sherman. 
 
These essays beautifully capture Knausgaard's ability to mediate between the deeply personal and the universal, demonstrating his trademark self-scrutiny and his deep longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world. 
 
'Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive' New York Times

In the Land of the Cyclops

Essays

Jeanette Winterson

'Joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' Observer 
 
How is artificial intelligence changing the way we live and love? Now with a new chapter, this is the eye-opening new book from Sunday Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson. 
 
Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about AI, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now. 
 
With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points - from the weirdness of backing up your brain and the connections between humans and non-human helpers to whether it's time to leave planet Earth. 
 
'Very funny... A kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories' Spectator 
 
'Refreshingly optimistic' Guardian 
 
A 'Books of 2021' Pick in the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard

12 Bytes

How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

How do we shape a better world for LGBTQ+ people? Olly Alexander, Peppermint, Owen Jones, Beth Ditto, Shon Faye and more share their stories and visions for the future. 
 
'A vital addition to your bookshelf' Stylist, 5 Books for Summer 
 
'Captivating... A must-read' Gay Times, Books of the Year 
 
In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices - actors, musicians, writers, artists and activists - answer this vital question, at a time when the queer community continues to suffer discrimination and extreme violence. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they present a powerful manifesto for how - together - we can change lives everywhere. 
 
'Powerful, inspiring...urgent' Attitude 
 
'Read and be inspired' Peter Tatchell 
 
'Illuminating' Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk 
 
'Friendly and fierce' Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

We Can Do Better Than This

An urgent manifesto for how we can shape a better world for LGBTQ+ people

Rachel Kushner

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000–2020

Anselm Kiefer

Knausgaard Seasons Quartet Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Summer is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter, with stunning artwork by Anselm Kiefer. 
 
'Knausgaard unearths the mysteries of the commonplace' Observer 
 
 In Summer, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about long days full of sunlight, eating ice cream with his children, lawn sprinklers and ladybirds. He experiments with the beginnings of a novel and keeps a diary in which the small events of his family's life are recorded. Against a canvas of memories, longings, and experiences of art and literature, he searches for the meaning of moments as they pass us by. 
 
'Wondrous... There are blissful glimpses of nature's mystery and balance' Financial Times

Summer

Ibram X. Kendi

Keisha N. Blain

*THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* 
 
Four Hundred Souls is an epoch-defining history of African America, the first to appear in a generation, told by ninety leading Black voices -- co-curated by Ibram X. Kendi, author of the million-copy bestseller How To Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. 
 
In chronological chapters, each by a different author and spanning five years, the book charts the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans to the present - a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles and stunning achievements. 
 
Contributors include some of today's leading writers, historians, journalists, lawyers, poets and activists. Together - through essays and short stories, personal vignettes and fiery polemics - they redefine America and the way its history can be told. 
 
'A vital addition to the curriculum on race in America... Compelling' Washington Post 
 
'A resounding history...that challenges the myths of America's past... Fresh and engaging' Colin Grant, Guardian

Four Hundred Souls

A Community History of African America 1619-2019

Lars Lerin

From global literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard, an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and love letters addressed directly to Knausgaard’s unborn daughter 
 
In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as the birth of his daughter draws near. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it anew. While new life is on the horizon, the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about everything from the moon, winter boots and messiness, to owls and birthdays. Taking nothing for granted, he fills these everyday familiar objects and ideas with new meaning. 
 
Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.

Winter

From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author (Seasons Quartet 2)

Vanessa Baird

The Sunday Times bestseller from literary phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard, a love letter about the world written by a father to his unborn daughter. 
 
'Inspiring, surprising... Autumn will warm and enlighten anyone who opens their eyes to it' The Times 
 
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece each day, describing the material and natural world - from twilight to the migration of birds, from Van Gogh to forgiveness - with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. 
 
With artwork by Vanessa Baird 
 
'This book is full of wonders... The world feels repainted' New York Times

Autumn

From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author (Seasons Quartet 1)

Emmanuel Carrère

Read the definitive essay collection from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Adversary, dubbed 'France's greatest writer of non-fiction' (New York Times) 
 
'The most exciting living writer' Karl Ove Knausgaard 
 
Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: theology, historiography, reportage and memoir - among many others - are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today. 
 
97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own. 
 
* A New York Times Notable Book *

97,196 Words

Zahra Hankir

‘Determination, grit and humour shine through’ Lindsey Hilsum, Observer 
 
Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it’s like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection. 
 
A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat – female journalists – are working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. 
 
Here, nineteen of these women tell us, in their own words, about what it’s like to report on conflicts that (quite literally) hit close to home. Their daring and heartfelt stories, told here for the first time, shatter stereotypes about the region’s women and provide an urgently needed perspective on a part of the world that is frequently misunderstood. 
 
With a foreword by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. 
 
INCLUDING ESSAYS BY: Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam, Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim, Asmaa al-Ghoul, Hind Hassan, Eman Helal, Zeina Karam, Roula Khalaf, Nour Malas, Hwaida Saad, Amira Al-Sharif, Heba Shibani, Lina Sinjab, and Natacha Yazbeck

Our Women on the Ground

Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World

Toni Morrison

“She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words.” - Oprah Winfrey 
 
A vital non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered American writers 
 
Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence. 
 
The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. 
 
She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisitsThe Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers. 
 
Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all. It celebrates Morrison’s extraordinary contribution to the literary world.

Mouth Full of Blood

Essays, Speeches, Meditations

James Wood

Rediscover this deep, practical anatomy of the novel from 'the strongest ... literary critic we have' (New York Review of Books) in this new revised 10th anniversary edition. 
 
What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? 
 
What constitutes a 'telling' detail? 
 
When is a metaphor successful? 
 
Is realism realistic? 
 
Why do most endings of novels disappoint? 
 
In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions. 
 
Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page. 
 
'Should find a place on every novel-lover's shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it' Financial Times

How Fiction Works

The selected essays of James Wood - our greatest living literary critic and author of How Fiction Works 
 
'James Wood is a close reader of genius... By turns luscious and muscular, committed and disdaining, passionate and minutely considered' John Banville 
 
James Wood is one of the leading critics of the age, and here, for the first time, are his selected essays. From the career-defining 'Hysterical Realism' to his more personal reflections on family, religion and sensibility, Serious Noticing offers a comprehensive overview of his writing over the last twenty years. These essays offer more than a viewpoint - they show how to bring the eye of critical reading to life as a whole. 
 
'James Wood is one of literature’s true lovers, and his deeply felt, contentious essays are thrilling in their reach and moral seriousness' Susan Sontag

Serious Noticing

Selected Essays

Tim Dee

The essential and defining new collection of the best British nature writing 
 
‘Tim Dee has brought together a wonderous array of talent for this life-affirming, often magical anthology’ Observer 
 
We are living in the anthropocene – an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species. 
 
How do we make our way through the ruins that we have made? 
 
This anthology tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O’Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley’s hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn. 
 
 
Helen Macdonald, in her remarkable piece on growing up in a 50-acre walled estate, reflects on our failed stewardship of the planet: ‘I take stock.’ she says, ‘During this sixth extinction, we who may not have time to do anything else must write now what we can, to take stock.’ 
 
This is an important, necessary book.

Ground Work

Writings on People and Places

Nick Coleman

***ONE OF BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN MUSIC BOOKS OF 2018*** 
 
‘A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it’ Nick Hornby in The Believer 
 
What happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing? 
 
 The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences – as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself. 
 
 Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn. Above all, it is a story of what it means to feel.

Voices

How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life

Ann Wroe

'She's a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches.' Hilary Mantel 
 
A Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Goethe claimed to know what light was. Galileo and Einstein both confessed they didn't. On the essential nature of light, and how it operates, the scientific jury is still out. There is still time, therefore, to listen to painters and poets on the subject. They, after all, spend their lives pursuing light and trying to tie it down. 
 
Six Facets of Light is a series of meditations on this most elusive and alluring feature of human life. Set mostly on the Downs and coastline of East Sussex, the most luminous part of England, it interweaves a walker's experiences of light in Nature with the observations, jottings and thoughts of a dozen writers and painters - and some scientists - who have wrestled to define and understand light. From Hopkins to Turner, Coleridge to Whitman, Fra Angelico to Newton, Ravilious to Dante, the mystery of light is teased out and pondered on. Some of the results are surprising. 
 
By using mostly notebooks and sketchbooks, this book becomes a portrait of the transitoriness, randomness, swiftness, frustrations and quicksilver beauty that are the essence of light. It is a work to be enjoyed, pondered over, engaged with, provoked by; to be packed in the rucksack of every walker heading for the sea or the hills, or to be opened to bring that outside radiance within four dark town walls. 
 
Lifescapes by Ann Wroe is coming in August 2023.

Six Facets Of Light

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. A celebrated essayist as well as novelist, in this, his last collection, he explores many aspects of the modern world with irrepressible curiosity and wisdom written in his uniquely ironic voice. 
 
Written by Eco as articles for his regular column in l’Espresso magazine, he brings his dazzling erudition, incisiveness and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, unbridled individualism, conspiracies, the old and the young, mobile phones, mass media, racism, good manners and the crisis in ideological values. It is a final gift to his readers – astute, witty and illuminating.

Chronicles of a Liquid Society

Mary Wesley

Before her death in 2002, Mary Wesley told her biographer Patrick Marnham: 'after I met Eric I never looked at anyone else again. We lived our ups and downs but life was never boring'. Eric Siepmann was her second husband and their correspondence charted their life together (and apart) with unusual candour and spirit. 
 
These remarkable letters, which were inspired by Mary's great love story with Eric, were also the means by which the novelist found her voice. Entrusted to Marnham in two size -5 shoe boxes, this is one of the great surviving post-war correspondences.

Darling Pol

Letters of Mary Wesley and Eric Siepmann 1944-1967

Martin Amis

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction – his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. 
 
The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis’s heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump’s rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

The Rub of Time

Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016

J M Coetzee

A fascinating collection of essays on literary subjects ranging from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Beckett by a Nobel and Booker Prize-winning writer 
 
Late Essays gathers together J.M. Coetzee’s literary essays from 2006 to 2017. The subjects covered in this stunning collection range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto.

Late Essays

2006 - 2017

A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit. Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War. 
 
Diaries, letters and memories, testaments from ordinary people whose lives were transformed, are set alongside extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered.

A Broken World

Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

David Lodge

'The professor, the critic and the novelist work in harmony to provide a valuable tutorial on modern fiction' Observer 
 
How does the novel represent human consciousness on the page? 
In eleven sparkling essays on some of the great novelists of the last 200 years – from Charles Dickens to Martin Amis, Henry James to Philip Roth – David Lodge pursues this question with characteristic verve and wit. One of the best novelists and critics of his generation, Lodge is the perfect guide to look afresh at the mysterious workings of the creative mind.

Consciousness and the Novel

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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