82ASK

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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Vee Kativhu

'Dynamic and transformative... a roadmap for following your dreams.' 
Malala Yousafzai 
 
'Touching, deeply inspiring and thought-provoking.' 
Jack Edwards, YouTuber and author of The Uni-Verse: The Ultimate University Survival Guide 
 
 
From experiencing grief and leaving her home country of Zimbabwe for the UK, to attending disruptive state schools and working long hours to support herself and her mother, Vee Kativhu has faced much adversity. 
 
But through personal hardship, she has triumphed, using her experience to help people from all over the world recognise their own talent and achieve their goals. From attaining a bachelor's degree from Oxford and a Master's from Harvard to spreading her message of education, equal access and opportunity and empowerment to a global audience of over 300,000, Vee's incredible journey has inspired young people around the world in need of a boost of confidence, motivation and practical life advice. 
 
In Empowered, Vee draws from her own journey to teach you how to: 
 
- Set your life goals, career aspirations and actually achieve them 
- Stay motivated in the face of rejection and hardship 
- Learn from your mistakes 
- Take chances, live your best life and don't let hardship define you 
- Cultivate feelings of self-love and self-empowerment 
 
This book will inspire you how to live a more fulfilled, motivated and empowered life in everything you do.

Empowered

Live Your Life with Passion and Purpose

Claire Eastham

"An electric, warm, comforting and funny handbook on panic and how to cope and live alongside it. Accessible, reassuring, practical and relieving." Laura Dockrill 
 
"I wish I had this book when I was 18 and having panic attacks. It's smart, witty, informative and importantly, it lets you know that if you have panic attacks too... you are not alone." Dr Sophie Mort 
 
 
An uplifting, personal account on living with panic and how to stop it defining you. 
 
'You're dying. F**k, you're having a heart attack, or is this a stroke? You're going crazy, you are right this second losing your mind. It's game over. Get out' All the work I'd put into preparing for this interview, my job, my career, money, future - it all seemed insignificant next to the burning desire to get out of the room and run. 
 
Award-winning blogger and author of We're All Mad Here, Claire Eastham is an expert on panic. She's not a doctor or an academic, but over a seven-year period, she has experienced 371 panic attacks (and counting), and learnt a thing or two along the way. 
 
Part memoir, part guide, F**k I Think I'm Dying is an intimate, honest and ultimately uplifting exploration into panic attacks. In practical thematic chapters Claire covers the crisis points where panic can hit: job interviews, social situations, attacks at night. She interviews a host of people - scientists, professors, dieticians, psychologists and people who struggle with panic - to anatomise how panic works and how it can be managed. 
 
Frank, funny and blazing, Claire's story will speak to all those seeking to reclaim their power. With a little work and understanding, panic attacks do not have to control you.

F**k, I think I'm Dying

How I Learned to Live With Panic

Philippa Rice

Baby: A Soppy Story is a collection of comics by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Philippa Rice, based on real-life moments with her baby. 
 
It is a collection about the small, intimate, heart-warming experiences of a couple expecting their first baby. From planning and pregnancy to childbirth and raising a newborn, Baby focuses on the everyday moments of parenthood. 
 
Easily read between naps, it is the perfect gift for new or expectant parents.

Baby

A Soppy Story

Marc Hamer

Longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize 2019 
 
A calming, life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude and contentment, by a brilliant new nature writer who spent time homeless as a young man, sleeping in the hedgerows he now knows so well. 
 
Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy. 
 
Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us, and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face. In this beautiful and meditative book, Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment. 
 
How to Catch a Mole is a gem of nature writing, beautifully illustrated by Joe McLaren, which celebrates living peacefully and finding wonder in the world around us.

How to Catch a Mole

And Find Yourself in Nature

Richard Beard

'Feeling the way I do now, it's not a feeling I ever want to have again.' Andrew Flintoff speaks for a nation. 
 
The Ashes, 2006/07: Australia 5 England 0. The nightmare returns. 
 
For twenty years, Australia has produced competitors so gritty they order sandwiches with sand in, and not just at cricket. Fourth in the medals table at the Athens Olympics, Tour de France contenders, Davis Cup champions, and the Socceroos 3--1 winners over England. For Richard Beard, the football was the last straw. 
 
So, on the well-established principle that if you want something doing ..., he travelled down to Australia for seven rounds of hand-to-hand sporting combat, to find out just what makes the Australians so good, and how to beat them.

How to Beat the Australians

Margaret Forster

23 February 
Results rolling in! Algebra, 6th = 74%. Not bad. Latin = 55% Thrilled! History top = 85% smashing! Geography, disgusting, 2nd = 67%. 
 
In 1954 in Carlisle lived an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl called Margaret. She would go on to become an acclaimed writer, the author of the novels Georgy Girl and Diary of an Ordinary Woman as well as biographies and memoirs. But this is her diary from that year; her life. Hers might be a lost world, but her daily observations bring it back in vivid, irresistible detail. 
 
7 May 
Wonderful feat accomplished yesterday by Roger Bannister! At last, the 4 minute mile. Glad an Englishman got it before anyone else. 
 
24 July 
Bought a pair of shorts – white, very short with two pockets. Super but rather daring! 
 
2 September 
Mum’s coming back on Saturday. Miss her every minute! I'll never marry and have a family -- housekeeping for two for a week is bad enough -- but for life!

Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl

Farida Khalaf

Andrea C. Hoffmann

In August 2014, Farida, like any ordinary teenage girl, was enjoying the summer holidays before her last year at school. But Farida lived in the mountains of northern Iraq — and what happened next was unimaginable. Her village was an ISIS target. 
 
ISIS jihadists murdered the men and boys, including her father and brother, before taking Farida and the other women prisoner. This is the story of what happened to Farida after she was captured: the beatings, the rapes, the markets where ISIS sold women like cattle, and Farida's realisation that the more resistant she became, the harder it was for her captors to continue their atrocities against her. So she struggled, she bit, she kicked, she accused her captors of going against their religion, until, one day, the door to her room was left unlocked. She took her chance and, with five younger girls in her charge, fled into the Syrian desert. 
 
Farida showed incredible courage in the face of the unthinkable, and now with The Girl Who Beat ISIS she bravely relives her story to bear witness. Searing and immediate, this is the first memoir by a young woman that shows first-hand what life is like for innocents caught up in the maelstrom of day-to-day life with ISIS.

The Girl Who Beat ISIS

Farida's Story

Peter France

Peter France looks at the various stages of his own spiritual odyssey and talks intimately of his long search for knowledge and enlightenment. Warm, lucid, humorous, Journey is grounded in France's own life and experience. He takes us from the beginning of his journey in a small Methodist chapel in Yorkshire, and his first perception of Christianity, through Oxford where he rejected Christianity and became a humanist and a career as a colonial administrative officer in Fiji, to his later position as an investigative reporter for BBC religious television. Finally-and movingly-he writes about his conversion to the Greek Orthodox Church, and describes his baptism at the age of 57 on the Greek island of Patmos by total immersion in a 44 gallon oil drum of lukewarm water. Illuminated by personal anecdote and information by a broad knowledge of different religions and religious experiences, Journey is both immensely engaging, and studded with powerful spiritual insight.

Journey

A Spiritual Odyssey

Philippa Rice's relatable comic strips that prove true love isn't always about the big romantic gestures make the perfect gift this Valentine's day. 
 
 Sometimes it's about sympathising with someone whose tea has gone cold, watching TV and sharing a quilt, or allowing your partner to order take-away pizza again. When two people move in together, it soon becomes apparent that the little things mean an awful lot. The throwaway moments in life become meaningful when you spend them in the company of someone you love. 
 
 Soppy is Philippa Rice's collection of comics based on real-life moments with her boyfriend. From grocery shopping to silly arguments and snuggling in front of the television, Soppy captures the universal experience of sharing a life together. 
 
 'Intimate, sweet, and oh so relatable' Metro

Soppy

Adnan Sarwar

It isn't nice but you're an animal, so you can do it, dressed in green and brown and black waiting to be attacked and smiling because you had bullets for teeth. 
 
 Adnan Sarwar, a Pakistani boy from Burnley, joined the British Army – the White Man’s Army. Why did he do it? To prove he was as white as his friends? For Queen and Country? Or to work out who he was – British, Muslim or a Soldier? Perhaps he could be all three. 
 
 ‘British Muslim Soldier’ is Adnan’s journey through the battlegrounds of war, race and identity, facing up to the often brutal realities of these fraught warzones. There is racism, family ties, tedious routine, enemies and torture. But what Adnan’s story really comes down to is love – love for his family, for his fellow squaddies – and a deep-rooted sense of identity and belonging. 
 
 …when did these clothes fit so well? When did Corporal become an older brother and when did the army become a mother? When did I become a British soldier?

British Muslim Soldier

Geordie Greig

For ten years Geordie Greig was among a very small group of friends who regularly met Lucian Freud for breakfast at Clarke’s restaurant on Kensington Church Street. Over tea and the morning papers, Freud would recount stories of his past and discuss art. It was, in effect, Freud’s private salon. 
 
In this kaleidoscopic memoir, Greig remembers Freud’s stories: of death threats; escaping from Nazi Germany; falling out with his brother Clement; loathing his mother; painting David Hockney; sleeping with horses; escaping the Krays; painting the Queen; his controversial role as a father; and why Velázquez was the greatest painter. It is revelatory about his art, his lovers, his children, his enemies and his love of gambling. Freud dared never to do dull, speaking candidly of dancing with Garbo as well as painting Kate Moss naked. 
 
Those closest to him, after decades of silence and secrecy, have spoken frankly about what life was like living, loving or sitting for the greatest figurative portraitist of the twentieth century. Partly based on hours of taped conversations with the artist and his circle, and drawing on interviews with those who knew Freud intimately – including many girlfriends, models, dealers and bookmakers – Breakfast with Lucian is an intimate portrait of the artist as a young and old man. Illustrated with many unseen photographs of Freud, it is a uniquely fascinating, personal and authoritative account of one of the greatest British painters of this century and the last, and a profile of a man who makes everyone else's life seem less lived.

Breakfast with Lucian

Guido Mina di Sospiro

LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK AWARD 2013 
 
To spin or not to spin? – that is the metaphysical question. 
 
When a mortifying defeat to his teenage son rekindles his lifelong passion for table tennis, keen philosopher Guido Mina di Sospiro sets out to learn the game properly. 
 
Guido’s love for spinning a feather-weight ball takes him from his local ping-pong club, populated by idiosyncratic players with extraordinary stories to tell, to training drills with a world-class coach. This seemingly harmless game also leads him into sticky situations in the CIA headquarters and the ganglands of Washington, D.C. Woven throughout his ping-pong epiphany are philosophical ruminations on Plato and Aristotle, metaphysicians and empiricists, Jung’s dark shadow, Sun Tzu’s war tactics, the I Ching, and much more. 
 
As Guido’s journey takes him from Big Sur to a nail-biting showdown in China against a string of elite players, he finds ping-pong can teach us a surprising amount about life.

The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong

Paolo Parisi

'My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being...' 
 
John Coltrane rose from a hard and impoverished childhood in North Carolina to become one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. From session musician to band member of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, his raw talent and passion for experimentation inaugurated a new movement in music. Positioned at the beating heart of the 50s and 60s jazz world, Coltrane and his quartet created some of the most innovative and expressive music of the age, including the hit album My Favorite Things and the landmark work A Love Supreme. 
 
Juxtaposing scenes from Coltrane's personal life - his military career, addictions, political activism and love affairs - against snapshots of his major recordings, Coltrane evokes an extraordinary life and the momentous historical events that formed its backdrop. It is a graphic novel that echoes his work in its structure and style, and forms a testament to a pioneer and legend, whose music continues to inspire to this day.

Coltrane

Grace Coddington

For decades, Grace Coddington’s personal touch has steered wildly imaginative fashion spreads in Vogue magazine. Then came The September Issue, the behind-the-scenes documentary that turned the spotlight on a woman with a no-nonsense attitude and an unerring visual instinct. Overnight, the flame-haired Grace became a heroine for fashion insiders and the general public alike. 
 
Witty and forthright, and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs and exclusive line-drawings, Grace: A Memoir shares the excitement and vision that go into producing so many unforgettable fashion images. Here are the designers, models, photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists and celebrities with whom Grace has created her ‘stories in pictures’ – whether it be Jerry Hall conquering the USSR or Tom Ford falling down a rabbit hole in Annie Leibovitz’s version of Alice in Wonderland. 
 
Grace’s own life has been as dreamlike as one of her madcap fashion spreads. Brought up in windswept wartime Anglesey, she arrived in London, aged eighteen, and quickly became a face of the Sixties. The muse behind Vidal Sassoon’s Five Point Cut, she posed for Bailey, Donovan, Duffy and Norman Parkinson in Swinging London and jumped into a pool in Saint-Tropez for Helmut Newton. Surviving a serious car-crash, she later became a fashion editor at British Vogue and during the Seventies and the Eighties started to create the fantasy travelogues that would become her trademark. 
 
Friendships bloomed – with Bruce Weber and Calvin Klein, whose offer of a job took Grace to New York. While two early marriages to restaurateur Michael Chow and photographer Willie Christie were brief, her romance with the hairstylist Didier Malige has endured. And her professional partnership with Anna Wintour – with whom she has collaborated for over twenty years – continues to have an astonishing influence on modern style.

Grace

A Memoir

Mary Talbot

Bryan Talbot

Part personal history, part biography, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes contrasts two coming-of-age narratives: that of Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, and that of author Mary Talbot, daughter of the eminent Joycean scholar James S. Atherton. Social expectations and gender politics, thwarted ambitions and personal tragedy are played out against two contrasting historical backgrounds, poignantly evoked by the atmospheric visual storytelling of award winning comic artist and graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot. Produced through an intense collaboration seldom seen between writers and artists, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes is intelligent, funny and sad - a fine addition to the evolving genre of graphic memoir.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes

David Godwin

Forget the Ryder Cup, forget Rory McIlroy, forget keeping your head still and correcting your putting stance. Forget eagles and albatrosses and definitely forget holes-in-one. David Godwin has a dream, the same dream held by millions of amateur golfers. He's not aiming to break on to the pro circuit, he's not aiming to break par. David Godwin is going to break 80. Or it's going to break him. 
 
Written with humour and charm, Breaking 80 is a book for those who recognise all too well the pleasure of a sweetly struck seven iron to within a few feet of the pin, followed by the agonizing fury of a three-putt back and forth across the cup.

Breaking 80

Julie Myerson

P.E. You either loved it or hated it, looked forward to it or dreaded it, but we've all been forced to do it. Sometimes a note could get you out of it, but the following week there you'd be again, writhing on a cold and dusty gym floor in your underwear. 
 
Skinny, timid, knock-kneed Julie Myerson was 'not a games person', according to her teachers. In this touching, funny and occasionally devastating exploration of her childhood, she now asks the question: why not?

Not A Games Person

Elizabeth McCracken

'This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.' 
 
A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, Elizabeth McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. Then she fell in love, got married, and continued her life of writing, travelling, and teaching with her husband.Two years ago, she found herself in a remote part of France, waiting for the birth of her first child. 
 
This book is about what happens next. In the ninth month of her pregnancy, a baby is lost.Just over a year later, a baby is born. In a profoundly moving display of humour, heart, and unfailing generosity, McCracken tenderly presents her story: a story of true love and unfathomable sadness, of courageous recovery and bittersweet moments, of steadfast memories and deep affection.Grief walks through these pages of this remarkable book, but so do happiness and hope.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Laurens Van Der Post

Presented together now for the first time, Laurens van der Post's collected writings will reveal as never before the fullness of his perceptive, wise and remarkably consistent vision. In all of them his inspiration has been that of an adventurous pioneer exploring not just the outward aspects of a turbulent and troubled world but, at a deeper level, the patterns and paradoxes of human life, the myths and dreams of the human mind, the values and cultures of different peoples, the elusive springs of our own people.

A Mantis Carol

Soumya Bhattacharya

The great C L R James once asked: 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' For some of us answering that can keep you awake at night. 
 
Soumya Bhattacharya knows this: he has a steady job, a loving wife, a daughter he dotes on. But most of all he has cricket. Or perhaps more accurately: cricket has him. Ever since he can remember, he's loved the game. From his first knockabouts on the living-room carpet - with his mother's paper bats and balls - he progressed to Test Match Special on short-wave, then to the whole panoply of obsession: one-dayers, Test matches, TV highlights, re-runs of TV highlights, always following one team - India. When you come from a country where the game is more than a religion, you must like cricket, right? 
 
In this sparkling memoir of a lifetime spent in the company of eleven men, a green field and a billion other worshippers, Soumya Bhattacharya gives us a guided tour of the soul of a cricket obsessive. Part reportage, part travelogue, part cultural politics, You Must Like Cricket? takes us from his home in Kolkata to Lord's and back again as Bhattacharya explores the joys and the lows (mostly the lows) of a thirty-year love affair, how one game has become so closely tied to a nation's identity, and the troubling hold cricket has over him. But if your home ground was called Eden Gardens, where else would you rather be?

You Must Like Cricket?

Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan

Bill Clegg

What makes one of the most gifted, charismatic and successful literary agents in New York fall into full-blown crack-addiction: a collapse that would cost him his business, his home, many of his friends and - very nearly - his life? 
 
In his utterly compulsive narrative, Bill Clegg leads us through the grimiest back-rooms of Manhattan's underbelly, through scenes of blank-eyed sex and squalor, into the febrile paranoia of a mind gone out of control.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

Catherine Fox

Catherine Fox is not your typical martial artist. Her initiation into the sacred rites of judo began not in a dojo in Tokyo but in the Tunnel Cement Works in Pitstone, Buckinghamshire. And her dedication to the sport has been questionable: a thirty-year sabbatical, two children and a life spent writing books does not necessarily prepare one for enlightenment. Determined not to let these details stand in her way, Catherine has set herself a challenge: before she turns forty-five she will become a black belt. After all, how many other opportunities do vicars' wives get to roll around the floor with sweaty blokes? 
 
Fight the Good Fight asks what lessons judo can teach you about life. It's touching surprising, gripping (in every sense) - and the funniest take on spiritual struggle since the last Lions vs. Christians fixture.

Fight the Good Fight

From Vicar's Wife to Killing Machine

Hephzibah Anderson

For the last year Hephzibah Anderson has flirted, dated, swooned, and sighed. She has been tantalized by intense conversations, lingering looks and clinches in the back of taxis. She has watched dawn break cradled in the arms of a dangerous ex, sipped cocktails against the Manhattan skyline with a dark-eyed companion, and dined al fresco in the English countryside with a man who promises to be more than just a friend. She has talked, embraced, kissed. But she has not had sex. 
 
Turning on its head the maxim that declares romance dead, journalist Hephzibah Anderson has thrown herself headfirst into finding romance in an age obsessed with sex. Chastened: Adventures in Abstinence is the story of her personal quest to stay chaste for a year, fusing a candid and pithy month-by-month account of her personal challenge with an exploration of what sex means in the twenty-first-century western world. In a welcome antidote to the pole-dancing hen night, Anderson elegantly unpicks our attitudes to relationships; and reconnects with the much undervalued values of courtship and intimate friendship in our lives.

Chastened

No More Sex in the City

Michael Holroyd

As read on BBC Radio 4 
 
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography for A Strange Eventful History and winner of the Lifetime Services to Biography Award. 
 
Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own family's history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives. 
 
Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences. 
 
These two volumes - published together for the first time here - form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.

Basil Street Blues and Mosaic

Jane Juska

As a result of what she calls 'the only stroke of genius I've ever had', Jane Juska placed a personal ad in a newspaper, that began: 'Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.' The response was overwhelming, and it changed Jane's life. She told all in A Round-Heeled Woman, which Lynne Truss called 'the best book about sex I have read', and which shocked some, amused many and became a bestseller. 
 
Five years later, Jane has, like it or not, become a kind of icon for the post-menopause generation. She's a friend and confessor to women of all ages with poignant, tragic or enchanting stories - unaccompanied women, alone for now but searching for sex and romance. And despite her success, Jane herself is still looking for a man to keep her company - not a husband, not even a partner, but the perfect lover, described by Katharine Hepburn as one who 'lives nearby and visits often'. 
 
So the story continues, looking around at her generation, back to her youth, and forward to... whatever grabs her fancy. And like many unaccompanied women, Jane's also in search of a better place to live. Her current tiny apartment doesn't allow for much in the way of romance, let alone the giant toy box she wants to fill for her granddaughter, born on her birthday and now just two, who's brought another kind of love to her life. But as a sporadic earner on a teacher's pension, she can never afford the dream house. 
 
So the search continues, for love, friendship, sex, a roof over her head - it's what keeps this seventy-two year old author young, and will keep readers wonderfully entertained in this funny, deft and touching memoir.

Unaccompanied Women

Leslie Garis

Leslie Garis's grandparents, Howard and Lillian Garis, were, from the turn of the century to the 1950s, phenomenally productive (and incredibly popular) authors of books for children. Every American child grew up reading the Uncle Wiggily stories, The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift. House of Happy Endings tells how in a large romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, her parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created. But inside the Dell all was not right. 
 
Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist and magazine writer led him to believe that he was a failure as father, husband and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterised by raging mood swings, drug abuse and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. House of Happy Endings is Leslie Garis's mesmerising, tender and harrowing account of growing up in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

The House of Happy Endings

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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