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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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Josephine Baker

This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words. 
 
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. 
 
Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance and was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the war she became a civil rights activist, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl of mixed heritage, born in Missouri to a poor mother and a father she did not know. 
 
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century. 
 
‘Translated gorgeously into English… A delightful, nourishing read’ Guardian 
 
‘She was a beacon of joy and fellowship and her smile…reaches out to us across the years’ Financial Times 
 
‘Josephine Baker certainly shook things up. This memoir demonstrates - vividly - the pleasure she took in doing it’ Washington Post 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IJEOMA OLUO 
 
TRANSLATED BY ANAM ZAFAR AND SOPHIE LEWIS

Fearless and Free

A Memoir

Patrick Modiano

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15. 
 
One winter night in 1941, a Jewish girl runs away from her Paris boarding school. Stumbling across her disappearance listed in an old newspaper, Patrick Modiano finds himself propelled on a quest to exhume her fate. 
 
His search will go on to last a decade. Little more will be found, just fragments of a lost family history, a sense of the dark streets of occupied Paris, Dora’s name on a list of those sent to Auschwitz. And the spectre of Modiano’s own troubled past, from which he can no longer look away. 
 
‘One of France’s most important novelists’ The New York Times 
 
'[A] spokesman for the disappeared’ Guardian

The Search Warrant

Dora Bruder

Julio Cortázar

In 1970s Paris, a group of revolutionaries plot the daring kidnapping of a powerful Latin American official. But among them is Andrés, a man adrift in a world of high-stakes politics. 
 
As Andrés spirals into a crisis of identity, Cortázar intersects the group’s story with real-life documents, newspaper clippings, and personal reflections to construct a compelling mosaic that explores the complexities of revolution, commitment, and the human spirit.

A Manual for Manuel

Simone de Beauvoir

In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir took a road trip across America. 
 
She travelled from coast to coast, from New York to Hollywood, taking in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Washington DC. She rode a pony through the Grand Canyon, listened to jazz in New Orleans and visited the nightclubs of Chicago. And she captured the entire experience in her journal. 
 
This captivating book is that journal and an immersive portrait of postwar America. Beauvoir was disturbed by the poverty and segregation she encountered and at the same time delighted by American energy and friendliness. 
 
Intimate, warm, and compulsively readable, this is travel writing from the iconic feminist and thinker, Simone de Beauvoir. 
 
On New York: 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome.' 
 
On Los Angeles: 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chilli con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure.'

America Day by Day

Takashi Nagai

‘A book that everyone should read’ The Times 
 
A harrowing, heart-rending first-hand account of the bombing of Nagasaki – and the acts of human kindness left in its wake. 
 
On 9th August 1945, the Japanese city of Nagasaki is hit by an atomic bomb. Forty thousand people are killed instantly. Doctor Takashi Nagai is not one of them. 
 
Pulling himself, broken and bloodied, from the wreckage that was once the city’s university hospital, Takashi bundles together a tattered group of survivors. Doctors, nurses, students, each with their own losses, their own fears for the future: they work tirelessly at the impossible task of aiding the countless wounded and easing the deaths of those they cannot save. They remain determined to heal their fallen city, to find solace and hope among the rubble, even as a strange and growing sickness begins to claim them. 
 
Eyewitness to one of the most fatal events in human history, this is Takashi’s record, written from his sickbed – a chilling historical document, and undeniable evidence of the capacity for human kindness. 
 
Published now in the UK to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

The Bells of Nagasaki

Various

This is dub poetry: bold and musical, funny and furious. 
 
This collection brings together the work of nine inventive and brilliant poets who defined and drove the dub poetry genre. From the Caribbean, Canada and the UK, the poetry in this collection spans forty years, as dub became a powerful cultural and creative force. 
 
With roots in the reggae culture of 1970s Kingston, dub poetry uses the vivid expressions of everyday spoken language to describe and challenge the experience of life on the margins. Early dub poetry took on police violence, slums and poverty. Later, as Caribbean migrants arrived in countries like Britain and Canada, dub poets faced new issues: racism, discrimination and hostility. Over four difficult decades, dub gave marginalised people a voice for their anger, defiance and creativity. It was the soundtrack to post-Windrush culture. 
 
Serious and humorous, alive and urgent, here is the very best of dub poetry. 
 
The poets included in this collection are: Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, James Berry, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, Lillian Allen and Afua Cooper.

Verbal Riddim

Dub Poetry

Jack Hilton

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell 
'Magnificent' W H Auden 
 
A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature. 
 
Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years. 
 
A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Caliban Shrieks

George Orwell

'You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business' 
 
As a struggling writer in his twenties, Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this, his early memoir, Orwell recalls with vivid clarity his time working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day's worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London's workhouse spikes for a few hours' sleep and tea. With all of the sensitivity and compassion that Orwell is known and loved for, he exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society. 
 
This vivid account is an enduring call to support the world's most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that 'The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.' 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KERRY HUDSON

Down and Out in Paris and London

This is Orwell's memoir of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War - a groundbreaking work of dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. 
 
There are occasions where it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all... 
 
This is dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, was near-fatally wounded and survived to write this book about the experience. Written with all the deep human understanding that defines Orwell’s writing, he vividly recounts the battles that were faced by ordinary working people as they fought for both their lives and their ideologies. Using first-hand experience, his capacity for observation and the clarity and conviction of his writing, Orwell reveals the real-world effects of totalitarianism. 
 
'The finest model of how to write about a foreign conflict, a war or a revolution... Brilliant reportage' Timothy Garten-Ash 
 
'[Orwell] describes what is happening in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War in such a way that we are able to see why he’s so upset about Soviet power. His argument is not one of category and concept but of irresistible observation' Timothy Snyder 
 
'When he went to Spain, [Orwell] was an unknown. He wasn’t Hemingway. He wasn’t a well-connected intellectual. He just had this amazing eye for detail. He was an amazing observer, and he could write so powerfully. This book, to me, is just one of the classics of foreign reporting' Guy Raz

Homage to Catalonia

József Debreczeni

This lost classic, a crystal clear eyewitness account of the Holocaust, has been translated into English for the first time, 70 years after it was first published. 
 
'A literary diamond... A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi' The Times 
 
'A masterpiece' New Statesman 
 
**SELECTED AS ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES** 
 
For many years this powerful classic of Holocaust literature was forgotten. József Debreczeni was a journalist and poet who arrived in Auschwitz in 1944. He survived the initial selection and endured twelve months of incarceration and slave labour in a series of camps. He ended up in the ‘Cold Crematorium’, the so-called hospital of the forced labour camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die. Debreczeni beat the odds and survived. This is his story, written in haunting, lyrical prose, compelling us to imagine the unimaginable. 
 
Although published in Hungarian in 1950, the book was then lost for the next seventy years. Now, finally, this important eyewitness account takes its place among the great works of Holocaust literature. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JONATHAN FREEDLAND

Cold Crematorium

Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

Edward W Said

‘Readers accustomed to the precision and elegance of Edward Said's analytical prowess will not be disappointed . . . Those discovering Said for the first time will be profoundly impressed’ Toni MorrisonFollowing his profoundly influential study Orientalism, Edward W. Said turned his attention to the Western world, tracing the connections between imperialism and European art, literature and music. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism initiates a dialogue between culture and the political and economic fabric of its time. Vast in its scope and stunning in its erudition, this collection of essays remains as urgent today as it was on first publication. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Culture and Imperialism

Richard Flanagan

This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. 
 
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 
 
*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014* 
 
'An unforgettable story of men at war' The Times 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Discover the Booker prize-winning masterpiece

Toni Morrison

Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home, the farm where she was kept as a slave. 
 
Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, &lsquo;Beloved&rsquo;. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison&rsquo;s enduring masterpiece and best-known work. 
 
&lsquo;Dazzling. . . Magical. . . An extraordinary work&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours&hellip; Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all&rsquo; Margaret Atwood 
 
&lsquo;An American masterpiece&rsquo; A. S. Byatt 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 
 
**One of the BBC&rsquo;s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Beloved

A special edition of the award-winning classic

THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL

Christy Brown

My Left Foot is Christy Brown's inspirational story of his early life, his battle against the restraints of cerebral palsy and his determination to learn to read, write, and paint, all with the aid of his left foot. 
 
This autobiography, published in 1954 when he was twenty-two, recounts his early life in Dublin &ndash; the poverty of his childhood, the support of his mother and his hope for a better life. Above all it describes his struggle to learn to read, write, paint and finally type, all with the toe of his left foot. Warm, honest and inspiring, this is a unique and captivating story of disability told by an extraordinary man. 
 
'Riveting, funny and inspiring' Irish Times 
 
'His book, over and above the extraordinary achievement it reveals, is a testament to one man&rsquo;s courage, a hope for others' Kirkus Reviews

My Left Foot

Marjane Satrapi

The brilliant graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. 
 
Marjane Satrapi lived through the Iranian Revolution as a little girl. This is her classic memoir-in-comic-strips, the story of a child entangled in the history and politics of her country. It paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up in revolutionary and war-torn Iran, in a family that was both outrageous and ordinary, beset by tragedy and yet buffered by love. Funny, wise, ultimately heartbreaking and told with unforgettable pictures. 
 
&lsquo;A revelation...you will remember it for a very long time&rsquo; Mark Haddon 
 
&lsquo;The magic of Marjane Satrapi&rsquo;s work is that it can condense a whole country&rsquo;s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another&rsquo; Independent on Sunday 
 
THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS VOLUMES I &amp; II: Includes The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return 
 
TRANSLATED BY ANJALI SINGH 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Persepolis I & II

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile. 
 
This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author. 
 
'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Solzhenitsyn&rsquo;s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum 
 
WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON 
 
THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II &amp; III

The Gulag Archipelago

(Abridged edition)

50th Anniversary Abridged Edition

This gripping story of Kyiv during the Second World War told by a young boy who saw it all. 
 
'Rightly hailed a masterpiece' Daily Mail 
 
'So here is my invitation: enter into my fate, imagine that you are twelve, that the world is at war and that nobody knows what is going to happen next...' 
 
When the German army rolled into Kyiv in 1941 the young Anatoli was just twelve years old. He began writing down what he saw in his journals. 
 
Within ten days of the invasion, the Nazis had begun their campaign of fear and murder in Ukraine. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) was the place where the executions of Jews and many others took place. It was one of the largest massacres in the history of the Holocaust. Anatoli could hear the machine guns from his house. 
 
Anatoli’s clear, compelling voice, honesty and determination guide us through the horrors of that time. Babi Yar has the compulsion and narration of fiction but everything recounted here is true. 
 
'Extraordinary' Orlando Figes, Guardian 
 
'A vivid first-hand account of life under one of the most savage of occupation regimes... A book which must be read and never forgotten' The Times 
 
This is the complete, uncensored version of Babi Yar - its history written into the text. Parts shown in bold are those cut by the Russian censors, parts in brackets show later additions.

Babi Yar

The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

'A compelling novel about the tragedy of corrupting power, set in post-independence Kenya... Ngugi writes with passion about every form, shape and colour which power can take' Sunday Times 
 
 After decades of British rule Kenya has declared its independence, but drought and poor harvests still govern the village of Ilmorog. Undeterred, Munira, Karega, Wanja and Abdulla each move to Ilmorog in search of a more provincial life, only to find themselves suspects in a crime that signals a dark turning of the times. 
 
A classic of modern African literature, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's damning satire of politics and corruption in Kenya would prove the catalyst for his imprisonment by the Kenyan government.

Petals of Blood

Konstantin Paustovsky

Discover one of Twentieth-Century Russia's most lauded lost classics, now in a remarkable new translation. 
 
'Outstanding... A sparkling, supremely precious literary achievement' Telegraph 
 
'One of the great Russian autobiographies, as fresh now as the day it was written - and the day it was lived' Julian Barnes 
 
In 1943, Konstantin Paustovsky, the Soviet Union's most revered author, started out on his masterwork - The Story of a Life; a grand, novelistic memoir of a life lived on the fast-unfurling frontiers of Russian history. Eventually published over six volumes, it would cement Paustovsky's reputation as the voice of Russia around the world, and see him nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 
 
Taking its reader from Paustovsky's Ukrainian youth, struggling with a family on the verge of collapse and the first flourishes of creative ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on Russia's frontlines and then as a journalist covering the country's violent spiral into revolution, The Story of a Life offers a portrait of an artistic journey like no other.

The Story of a Life

Volumes 1–3

Michael Ondaatje

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.' 
 
Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society. 
 
In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Running in the Family

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

One of the world's greatest works of travel and adventure writing, reissued on its 100th birthday. 
 
This is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Scott's team, recorded the experience of his adventure and in doing so created a masterpiece of travel writing. Despite the horrors that Scott and his men faced, Cherry's account is filled with details of scientific discovery, unforgettable descriptions of landscape and a belief in the spirit of human beings. A celebrated and compelling book on Antarctic exploration. 
 
INTRODUCED BY SARA WHEELER 
 
'The Worst Journey in the World is to travel what War and Peace is to the novel... a masterpiece' New York Review of Books 
 
* Voted Number 1 in National Geographic's 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time *

The Worst Journey in the World

Ranked number 1 in National Geographic’s 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time

Stella Gibbons

Ticky

Richard Wright

Richard Wright's memoir of his childhood as a young black boy in the American south of the 1920s and 30s is a stark depiction of African-American life and a powerful exploration of racial tension. 
 
‘A compelling indictment of life in the Deep South between the wars’ Daily Telegraph 
 
 At four years old, Richard Wright set fire to his home in a moment of boredom; at five his father deserted the family; by six Richard was - temporarily - an alcoholic. It was in saloons, railroad yards and streets that he learned the facts about life, about fear, hunger and hatred, while his mother's long illness taught him about suffering. In a world of white hostility and subjugation it would be his love of books and pursuit of knowledge that would propel him to follow his dream of justice and opportunity in the north. 
 
A chronicle of coming of age under the racial prejudices of the American south, as much the story of a writer finding his voice, Black Boy remains one of the great, impassioned memoirs of the twentieth century.

Black Boy

William Still

Discover a powerful collection of the hardships, hairbreadth escapes, and mortal struggles of enslaved people seeking freedom: These are the true stories of the Underground Railroad. 
 
A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of over 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network. 
 
Abridged from William Still's The Underground Railroad Records - an epic historical document that chronicles the first-hand stories of American slaves who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad - Passengers tells of the secret methods, risks and covert sacrifices that were made to liberate so many from slavery. From tales of men murdered in cold blood for their part in helping assist runaways and terrifyingly tense descriptions of stowaways and dramatic escape plans, to stories of families reunited and the moments of absurdity that the Underground Railroad forced its 'passengers' to sometimes endure, Still's narratives testify to the humanity of this vast enterprise. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM TA-NEHISI COATES, AUTHOR OF THE WATER DANCER 
 
ABRIDGED FROM WILLIAM STILL'S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RECORDS

Passengers

True Stories of the Underground Railroad

Margaret Mitchell

'My dear, I don't give a damn.' 
 
Margaret Mitchell’s page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope and loss set against the tense historical background of the American Civil War. 
 
The lovers at the novel’s centre – the selfish, privileged Scarlett O’Hara and rakish Rhett Butler – are magnetic: pulling readers into the tangled narrative of a struggle to survive that cannot be forgotten. 
 
WINNER OF NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND PULITZER PRIZE 
 
'For sheer readability I can think of nothing it must give way before' The New Yorker 
 
'What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under?’ Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind

‘Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not? 
 
Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger...to assess soberly the worldwide menace that threatens to swallow the whole world? 
 
I was swallowed myself. I have been in the dragon’s belly, in its red-hot innards. It was unable to digest me and threw me up. I have come to you as a witness to what it is like there, in the dragon’s belly’ 
 
During 1975 and 1976, Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn embarked on a series of speeches across America and Britain that would shock and scandalise both countries. His message: the West was veering towards moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and with it the world’s one hope against tyranny and totalitarianism. 
 
From Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about the allure of communism, to his rebuke that the West should not abandon its age-old concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the speeches collected in Warning to the West provide insight into Solzhenitsyn’s uncompromising moral vision. Read today, their message remains as powerfully urgent as when Solzhenitsyn first delivered them.

Warning to the West

Aldous Huxley

A gripping biography by the author of Brave New World 
 
The life of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's aide, was a shocking paradox. After spending his days directing operations on the battlefield, Father Joseph would pass the night in prayer, or in composing spiritual guidance for the nuns in his care. He was an aspirant to sainthood and a practising mystic, yet his ruthless exercise of power succeeded in prolonging the unspeakable horrors of the Thirty Years' War. In his masterful biography, Huxley explores how an intensely religious man could lead such a life and how he reconciled the seemingly opposing moral systems of religion and politics.

Grey Eminence

Francis Kilvert

Few have written more beautifully about the British countryside than Francis Kilvert. A country clergyman born in 1840, Kilvert spent much of his time visiting parishioners, walking the lanes and fields of Herefordshire and writing in his diary. Full of passionate delight in the natural world and the glory of the changing seasons, his diaries are as generous, spontaneous and vivacious as Kilvert himself. He is an irresistible companion. 
 
This new edition of William Plomer’s original selection contains new archival material as well as a fascinating introduction illuminating Kilvert’s world and the history of the diaries. 
 
‘One of the best books in English’ Sunday Times 
 
'Kilvert has touched and delighted (and mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. New readers are in for a treat' Alan Bennett

Kilvert's Diary

A gripping biography by the author of Brave New World 
 
In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns. 
 
Grandier maintained his innocence to the end but four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

The Devils of Loudun

Arthur Koestler

The first volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. 
 
In 1931, Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party, an event he felt to be second only in importance to his birth in shaping his destiny. Before that point, he lived a tumultuous and varied existence. He was a member of the duelling fraternity at the University of Vienna; a collective farm worker in Galilee; a tramp and street vendor in Haifa; the editor of a weekly paper in Cairo; the foreign correspondent of the biggest continental newspaper chain in Paris and the Middle East; a science editor in Berlin; and a member of the North Pole expedition of the Graf Zeppelin. 
 
Written with enormous zest, joie de vivre and frankness, Arrow in the Blue is a fascinating self-portrait of a remarkable young man at the heart of the events that shaped the twentieth century. 
 
The second volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography is The Invisible Writing.

Arrow in the Blue

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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