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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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Michael Symmons Roberts

An inviting and poignant new collection exploring our increasingly turbulent relationship with nature, from award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts 
 
'I love Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry... His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world' Jeanette Winterson 
 
'An outstanding writer' Sunday Times 
 
Dog Star is a book of linked poems rooted in encounters with real, imagined or mythical birds, trees, fish, flowers, bacteria, chimeras – ancient connections reshaped by technological and political change and critically endangered by species and habitat loss. 
 
In Roberts’ previous work, his poems are attentive to glimpses of grace and presence, but always embodied and grounded. In this new book, that attention is sharper and more urgent than ever, at a time when the essential spiritual relationship between humanity and other forms of life is broken or lost. In a line from his collection Drysalter – ‘there is no way to the soul but through the body’ – he sets out the bearings for these new poems as attempts to tap into what D.H. Lawrence called ‘heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity.’ 
 
Some encounters in Dog Star are head-on, face-to-face, some are more slant, distant, missed connections. There’s an elegiac sequence for the poet’s mother with each step measured in animals, an extended riff on the world as an aquarium and our lives seen through water – creatures dead and living, met in the flesh or mediated via film or stories. This is a profound, remarkable book by one of our major poets.

Dog Star

Ben Passmore

A whirlwind graphic history of Black life in America, from the award-winning political cartoonist Ben Passmore 
 
It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.” 
 
So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and the aughts, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic. 
 
What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.

Black Arms to Hold You Up

A History of Black Resistance

Julian Barnes

The new book from the Booker Prize-winning Julian Barnes, about looking back, facing the future, and coming to the end of life 
 
Departure(s) is a work of fiction – but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. 
 
It is the story of a man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. It is the story of an elderly Jack Russell called Jimmy, enviably oblivious to his own mortality. 
 
It is also the story of how the body fails us, whether through age, illness, accident or intent. And it is the story of how experiences fade into anecdotes, and then into memory. Does it matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it just matter that it mattered enough to be remembered? 
 
It begins at the end of life – but it doesn’t end there. Ultimately, it’s about the only things that ever really mattered: how we find happiness in this life, and when it is time to say goodbye. 
 
'There's no one quite like Julian Barnes' GUARDIAN 
 
'Everything Julian Barnes writes changes everything' FRANCES WILSON

Departure(s)

Astrid Goldsmith

'Brilliant, witty and endlessly inventive' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine 
 
A road-trip across Europe and back in time: the debut graphic memoir from the prize-winning author of A Funeral In Freiburg. 
 
When her imperious, chain-smoking German Jewish grandmother dies, it falls to Astrid and her father to drive a hire van to the Black Forest and collect the family heirlooms from Gisela's nicotine-stained apartment. 
 
In Freiburg, they are faced with several lifetimes’ worth of belongings to sort through - infested Persian rugs, mysterious photographs, a toy monkey that started a marriage - and a grasping landlord, impatient to renovate. 
 
As the list of demands from uncles, sisters and cousins grows longer, the rabbit-holes of history and memory grow deeper. Long-buried secrets and tales of survival are revealed - from Nazi Germany to colonial Africa - and old feuds are reignited, as father and daughter struggle with the responsibility of preserving the family legacy. More importantly, will they be able to fit everything into a medium wheel-base transit van? 
 
Funny, bittersweet and beautifully drawn, The Crystal Vase is an odyssey of family arguments, identity crises, and late discoveries.

The Crystal Vase

Elizabeth McCracken

Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal guide for writers old and new 
 
‘A cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business’ Yiyun Li 
 
Write every day 
Show, don’t tell 
Write what you know 
Kill Your Darlings 
 
These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true. They are all pieces of writing advice that Elizabeth McCracken expertly and persuasively shoots down in A Long Game. 
 
McCracken has been writing for most of her life. For over thirty-five years, she has also taught creative writing to generations of students, including at Iowa, guiding many writers towards their own answers to the question of how to write fiction. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, deconstructing received wisdom whilst playfully tackling the mysteries that are inherent to writing and creativity. 
 
A book about the life of an artist and a guide to fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource and will lead all writers, at any stage of their career, back to the page. 
 
'Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers' Garth Greenwell 
 
'An irreverent, thought-provoking and ultimately inspiring book about making art' Rumaan Alam 
 
'A world class writer and a world class writing teacher' Paul Harding 
 
'I would encourage every writer to read it' Rebecca Ivory

A Long Game

How to Write Fiction

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

Joe Sacco

From the ground-breaking graphics journalist and author of Palestine, a revelatory investigation of the deadly sectarian riots in 2013 Uttar Pradesh, India, and their urgent global significance today 
 
Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath. 
 
Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs, and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds, rather than leaders, to influence the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the accounts that perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed. 
 
Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, the award winning cartoonist turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for us all. 
 
* 
 
PRAISE FOR JOE SACCO: 
 
'One of the masters of his craft' New Statesman 
 
'A pioneer of the genre' TLS 
 
'Formidably talented.' Independent 
 
'The hands-down boss of his particular corner of contemporary literature' Dazed & Confused 
 
'Sacco's brilliant, excruciating books of war reportage are potent territory... He shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold' New York Times Book Review

The Once and Future Riot

Jean Sprackland

'Elegant and deeply sensory' Katherine May, author of Wintering 
 
An exhilarating leap into darkness in all its forms, enchantments and history: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean Sprackland 
 
Darkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous. Open a door and step through it. You can’t see a thing: you could be anywhere. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way. 
 
We humans have a complicated relationship with the dark. We fear it, and make great efforts to blot it out. But we also long for it, especially if we live in cities, or remember the starry skies of our childhoods. Darkness opens us up to risk, delight and transformation. Is it possible to prise it free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself? 
 
In her quest for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland finds herself confronting some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world. Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.

Night Vision

In search of the true dark

Anne Enright

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life 
 
'Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer' THE TIMES 
 
'A joy to read' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. 
 
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices. 
 
'One of the best essayists alive' MEGAN NOLAN, OBSERVER 
 
'Confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels' INDEPENDENT 
 
'A glorious antidote to the mad, sad world' EIMEAR MCBRIDE 
 
'So alert, so attuned, so alive' LUCY CALDWELL

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

Rory Stewart

From the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller Politics on the Edge and co-host of The Rest is Politics 
 
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. 
 
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an urgent and inspiring portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria. 
 
These are stories of beauty and ingenuity, which also show us what a better politics might look like.

Middleland

Dispatches from the Borders

Sarah Perry

'Please read this book. It may very well change how you live' Rachel Clarke 
 
'I was spellbound' Kathryn Mannix 
 
Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. 
 
Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. 
 
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. 
 
'By the end I was left shaken, deeply moved' Christos Tsiolkas 
 
'This book will be a lifeline for so many people' Seán Hewitt 
 
'To read this book is a privilege, a gift on the craft of dying' Amy Key

Death of an Ordinary Man

Mimi Pond

'A total treat - bravo' Sunday Times 
 
'A spectacular, dizzying romp' Alison Bechdel, Fun Home 
 
Outrageous, passionate and glamourous - a stunning graphic biography of the six sisters who blazed their way through the 20th century, beguiling their peers, the press and then the rest of the world 
 
As a young girl living in sun-bleached 1960s suburban California, Mimi Pond fell in love with the Mitford sisters. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Mitford brought society glitz, pageantry, scandal, and real (rainy) weather to her own prosaic life. 
 
High society debutantes known for rubbing shoulders with some of history’s most infamous fascists and communists, the sisters were also, in turn, gifted writers, inveterate nicknamers, chicken-raising homebodies, scathing wits, and passionate adventurers in the maelstrom of the 20th century. 
 
Drawn with inimitable artistic flair and a mischievous affinity for the decadent and grandly declining aristocracy, Mimi Pond brings the Mitfords to life in this glittering and lovingly researched family biography. 
 
 
**Delight your loved ones with this perfect festive gift**

Do Admit

The Mitford Sisters and Me

Alison Weir

Triumph and tragedy, love and loss, murder and malice in the lives of five fifteenth-century queens, from 'the queen of history writing' (Sunday Express) 
 
The fifteenth century was a turbulent age: the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the Wars of the Roses dominated the lives of people both inside and out of the royal courts. 
 
Joan of Navarre, Katherine of Valois, Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Wydeville and Anne Neville were the queens who stood by England's sovereigns, caught up in wars that changed the course of their lives, and the course of history. 
 
They were also formidable women who defied the limitations of their times, often living out the brutal consequences of their determination. 
 
Alison Weir uncovers their stories in this final volume of her ground-breaking series on the queens of medieval England. Queens at War is a stunning culmination of research by a historian at the full extent of her powers and gripping account of five women on the throne. 
 
* 
PRAISE FOR ALISON WEIR: 
 
‘A meticulous scholar’ New York Times 
‘She is an excellent storyteller: descriptions are vivid and her knowledge of the sources is extensive’ Spectator 
‘Weir’s hugely popular history books are as gripping as novels’ The Times 
‘[Weir] writes in a pacy, vivid style, engaging the heart as well as the mind’ Independent 
‘Alison Weir has the rare gift of being able to bring history vividly to life’ Choice

Queens at War

England's Medieval Queens

Ian McEwan

'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday Times 
 
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 
 
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. 
 
Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. 
 
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately. 
 
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost. 
 
'A true master' Daily Telegraph 
 
'McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose' New York Times

What We Can Know

Tim Spector

**AS SEEN ON ITV THIS MORNING** 
 
‘A super healthy and tasty gift for you and your gut microbiome – discover the joy of fermenting’ Dr Clare Bailey Mosley 
 
From the world-leading gut scientist and no. 1 bestselling author of Food for Life, comes an introduction to the life-changing benefits of fermentation. 
 
Of all the ways to prepare food, fermenting is surely the most mysterious, miraculous and misunderstood. As Tim Spector shows in this groundbreaking book, the science is now clear that adding fermented foods to our diets brings an astonishing range of benefits for our health. 
 
Drawing on his own cutting-edge research, and including practical tips for buying and making fermented foods, Tim demystifies the world of ferments, and introduces us to some of his favourites – from homemade kombucha and kefir, to sourdough, miso and coffee. 
 
He explores the extraordinary science of fermentation and the transformative role of microbes, in our kitchens and in our guts – and reveals why fermenting is the key to good food and good health. 
 
Ferment is the ultimate gift for anyone who wants to eat better and feel better. 
 
Praise for Tim Spector: 
 
‘One of the visionaries leading the way. His writing is illuminating and so incredibly timely.’ Yotam Ottolenghi 
 
‘No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ DAILY MAIL 
 
‘Tim Spector has been exploding the myths around food and health for years’ THE TIMES 
 
‘The man changing how we eat’ TELEGRAPH

Ferment

The Life-Changing Power of Microbes

Anna Trench

The story of female footballer Florrie and the amazing hidden history of the women’s game come to life in this debut graphic novel about football, friendship and falling in love. 
 
'Beautifully drawn and very well written' ALISON BECHDEL 
 
'If you put Alison Bechdel's Fun Home in football kit, you might come up with something like Florrie' ZING TSJENG 
 
When Florrie’s great-niece discovers Florrie was a footballer in the early twentieth century, she unearths a secret history both on and off the pitch. 
 
Boxes from the attic contain photos, objects and letters, revealing football games and love affairs in Norfolk, London and Paris. Florrie’s adventures touch on both invented and real events: huge crowds at matches in London and Preston, international fixtures, dances at lesbian club Le Monocle in Paris, and the devastating consequences of the FA's 1921 ban on women's football. 
 
This is a story of self-discovery, friendship and queer love, alongside huge (and little known) historical moments for the women’s game. In Florrie, Anna Trench brings readers a beautifully drawn, evocative and warm-hearted love-song to an unforgettable woman and sport. 
 
'Bright with the feeling of liberation, and the risks and joys of following your heart' SEÁN HEWITT 
 
Charming and incredibly moving' RACHEL RAMSAY

Florrie

A football love story

Helen Lewis

**Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award** 
 
*A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and GQ Book for 2025 * 
*From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Difficult Women* 
 
'Brilliant, timely and compulsively readable. Helen Lewis shows how the idea of genius has warped our understanding of human creativity – and why people of vast accomplishment in one domain can prove so destructively clueless in others.' OLIVER BURKEMAN 
 
The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor. 
 
You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. 
 
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use — without really questioning what it means. 
 
Along the way, she uncovers the secret of the Beatles’ success, asks how biographers should solve the Austen Problem, and reveals why Stephen Hawking thought IQ tests were for losers (before taking one herself). And she asks if the modern idea of genius — a class of special people — is distorting our view of the world. 
 
'Lucid, funny and fascinating' ADAM BUXTON 
 
'An indispensable companion to our times' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ 
 
**A smart-thinking gift for curious minds**

The Genius Myth

The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers

Heather Clark

A debut novel about a life-changing romance in the long shadow of European history, inspired by the author's real discovery. 
 
'A singular portrait of intoxicating young love' AUBE REY LESCURE 
 
'You wouldn't be able to put it down' SAMANTHA ROSE HILL 
 
For years after I tried to tell myself that what happened between us was hardly worth remembering. 
 
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she meets Christoph, a German student visiting campus. They only spend a week together – discussing art, ideas and history – but it is long enough for Anna to fall desperately in love. Anna begins to visit Christoph in Germany. As she tries to understand the young, elegant man who fascinates her, he reveals his country to her. 
 
Germany is still reckoning with the Holocaust and its pretty new squares and grand facades belie its recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains vague about the part his own grandparents played. Anna’s grandfather, meanwhile, was an American GI who took photos of the end of the war, photos that capture its horror, preserved in a scrapbook only Anna has seen. 
 
Anna wants to believe in Christoph and the future he promises her but as their relationship becomes increasingly unsettling, she must face up to everything she has been unwilling to see, and everything Christoph has chosen to ignore. 
 
'An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love' Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots 
 
'Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy' Times Literary Supplement

The Scrapbook

Akshi Singh

The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner invented new ways of thinking about leisure. A hundred years on, Akshi Singh follows her methods, with life-changing consequences. 
 
'Illuminating and thought-provoking' Darian Leader'Astounding, generous, and quietly exhilarating' Daisy LaFarge 
 
Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life. 
 
Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own. 
 
In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach - from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea - she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. 
 
'An exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived' Marianne Brooker, author of Intervals 
 
'Singh's verve and intelligence radiate from every page' Hannah Zeavin

In Defence of Leisure

Experiments in Living with Marion Milner

Fiona Benson

The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches – from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet 
 
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE 
 
In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft. 
 
Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation. The poet looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution. 
 
In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with dark humour, insight and real herbal knowledge. Reckoning with middle age, marginalisation, perimenopause and a steady, unstoppable vanishing, this troubled codex of remedies, spells and stories speaks to human fear in the face of the unknown, and a drive to protect our loved ones that transcends all rational thought. At play in the language of archival accounts of witchcraft, this is a dark, eclectic spell-book that witnesses the end-days of magic. 
 
‘Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today’ Blake Morrison 
 
‘No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless’ Daisy Johnson 
 
A new collection of Benson’s wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted’ Guardian

Midden Witch

Seán Hewitt

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. As he contends with the expectations of his family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior. 
 
Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, but underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. 
 
With the passing seasons, the two teenagers grow closer and the bond that emerges between them transforms their lives. James falls deeply for Luke, yet he is never sure of Luke’s true feelings. And as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make – will he risk everything for the possibility of love?

Open, Heaven

Kay Sohini

At once heartrending and enlivening, this phenomenal graphic memoir is not another ode to New York but a meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love 
 
*AN OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH* 
 
'This is such a rich book, both visually and narratively' - Isabel Greenberg, author of Young Hag 
 
'A ravishing new take on a storied city' - Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of, Wintering and Enchantment 
 
On her first night in New York, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK airport making an inventory of all she’s left behind in India. Kay realises two things: she's finally made it to the city that made her in celluloid and prose from across the Pacific – Kerouac, Friends, Plath – and that trauma she’s endured in her relationship has left gaping holes in her memory. 
 
In New York, at last, Kay has room to begin the work of piecing herself back together through art and food. But as her personal story becomes a window onto a mystifying metropolis both inhospitable and inspiring to the many who call it home, Kay embarks on an electric exploration of how to forge the self and a life of one’s own today. 
 
At once heartrending and enlivening, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is not another ode to New York but a phenomenal meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love with places – and indeed people – that do not always love us back but somehow still save us in weird, unexpected ways. 
 
'A stunning graphic memoir… a praise-song to her adopted home… with its glorious, candy-coloured drawings' - FINANCIAL TIMES

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City

A Graphic Memoir

** THE ONLY GUT-HEALTH COOKBOOK YOU NEED FROM THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOOD FOR LIFE AND ITV LORRAINE’S GUT-HEALTH EXPERT ** 
 
In: 30 plants a week. Out: Calorie counting. 
In: Fermenting. Out: Ultra-processed foods. 
But, how? 
 
The Food For Life Cookbook takes the ground-breaking guidance in Tim Spector's #1 bestselling guide to the new science of eating well and, in over 100 delicious and achievable recipes created in collaboration with ZOE, shows just how simple and enjoyable it can be to adapt to a gut-friendly way of eating. 
 
Shaped by Tim's own experience of transforming the way he eats, as well as common requests from readers and ZOE members, chapters include 15-minute meals, ideas for eating well when the fridge looks bare, and generous feasts and sweet treats for special moments with friends. 
 
Packed with inspiration for delicious meals to feed you, your family and your microbiome, as well as tips for increasing plant diversity and science-based explanations for the nutritional benefits of the ingredients and recipes included, The Food For Life Cookbook is a must-have for every gut-loving home and kitchen and the perfect gift for anyone who wants to embrace a new way of eating. 
 
Go with your gut. Join the food revolution.

The Food For Life Cookbook

100+ Recipes Created with ZOE

Adrian Tinniswood

'Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.' 
LUCY WORSLEY 
 
Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country house 
 
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. 
 
This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. 
 
The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all. 
 
'A wonderful book.' 
JUDITH FLANDERS 
 
'Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.' 
GARETH RUSSELL 
 
**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR**

The Power and the Glory

The Country House Before the Great War

David Grossman

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

The Thinking Heart

On Israel and Palestine

Charles Burns

‘An instant classic from a master of the form’ 
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 
 
'Unsettling and beautifully executed' 
GUARDIAN 
 
An arresting story of an artist's obsessions, from the beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole. 
 
As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie – his reluctant muse – set off to a remote cabin in the woods. 
 
Armed with an old camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, in homage to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams – both his damsel in distress and his saviour. 
 
Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art. 
 
**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, THE NEW YORKER AND THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
Charles Burns, Eisner Award-Winner, 2006

Final Cut

Miriam Gold

This is the story of the ordinary extraordinary life of Dr Elena Zadik. 
 
Lives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Elena Zadik was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Elena ran through the twentieth century without looking back. 
 
A refugee twice before she was 17, she broke glass ceilings to become a doctor during World War 2. She was as brilliant a doctor as she was terrible a driver (she never took a test). Finding community, falling in love and starting a family in Sheffield while her parents were imprisoned and killed in Auschwitz, she swam against the odds with courage and tenacity. 
 
Miriam gathers the threads of her Granny’s story, reflecting on their unconventional relationship and how trauma travels down through the generations in this gorgeous brocade of illustration and collage. 
 
Granny was an unintentionally hilarious woman, often difficult, always opinionated and deeply resourceful. Her hands were always busy and form the heart of this timely, irresistible graphic story of the ordinary extraordinary resilience of women. 
 
A heartfelt and charming graphic memoir of love, family and fearless women.

Elena: A Hand Made Life

Howard Jacobson

A provocatively entertaining, savagely funny satire on Donald Trump by Britain’s greatest comic novelist. 
 
Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers. He is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic; has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no ideas and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again? 
 
'Deliciously laugh-aloud nasty about not just the making of this rough beast but what in the American character enabled it to go slouching into the White House' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Undigested rage, whip-smart wit devastating fluency and an aim as straight as an arrow… This is the story, savagely well told by our greatest comic novelist, of how we got in the state we’re in' Oldie

Pussy

Amelia Loulli

One in three women in Britain have an abortion. For such a common procedure, it has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now. 
 
*Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025* 
 
'Painful, brave and steadfastly honest' ANDREW MCMILLAN 
 
'Original, essential... An unforgettable collection' FIONA BENSON 
 
Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience of abortion and surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world. 
 
Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.

Slip

Carol Adlam

A stunning detective story from the winner of the World Illustration Award 
 
**OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH Pick for March** 
 
'Could not be more rich or more beautiful if it tried' 
OBSERVER 
 
In this stunning reimagining of a nineteenth-century Russian crime thriller from the world of Dostoevsky, Carol Adlam presents Charlie Fox, stunt journalist, magician, liar and thief, who reluctantly returns to her hometown of Nowheregrad to investigate the murder of Elena Ruslanova, daughter of a fabulously wealthy glass manufacturer. 
 
In Nowheregrad Charlie finds herself caught up in a multi-layered story that is told through the richly varied visual devices of the time. With the unwitting assistance of her lover, Netochka, Charlie unravels the mystery of the Bobrov family, only to face the truth about herself. 
 
Exquisitely drawn and compellingly told, Adlam's complex, elegant narrative brings to life the lost legacies of early crime fiction and the first women journalists and detectives. 
 
**A GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR**

The Russian Detective

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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