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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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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jared Diamond

Read this specially designed new edition of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of what makes us human. 
 
 Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a groundbreaking and humane work of popular science. 
 
PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Guns, Germs and Steel

(Patterns of Life)

Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling phenomenon now in a beautifully packaged new special edition. 
 
 Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? 
 
 In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going. Sapiens is a thrilling account of humankind’s extraordinary history – from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age – and our journey from insignificant apes to rulers of the world. 
 
 'Unbelievably good. Jaw dropping from the first word to the last' Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2 
 
PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Sapiens

A Brief History of Humankind: (Patterns of Life)

Tom Wolfe

A wonderful novel and perfect book club choice, The Right Stuff is a wildly vivid and entertaining chronicle of America's early space programme. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY US ASTRONAUT SCOTT KELLY 
 
‘What is it,’ asks Tom Wolfe, ‘that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle…and wait for someone to light the fuse?’ Arrogance? Stupidity? Courage? Or, simply, that quality we call 'the right stuff'? 
 
A monument to the men who battled to beat the Russians into space, The Right Stuff is a voyage into the mythology of the American space programme, and a dizzying dive into the sweat, fear, beauty and danger of being on the white-hot edge of history in the making. 
 
‘Tom Wolfe at his very best… Learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic...The Right Stuff is superb’ New York Times Book Review

The Right Stuff

Charles Sprawson

A new re-issue of the cult swimming classic, a beautiful read filled with detailed description and powerful prose. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY AMY LIPTROT 
 
‘A luminously romantic history of swimming’ Guardian 
 
Haunts of the Black Masseur is a dazzling introduction to the great swimming heroes, from Byron leaping into the surf at Shelley's funeral to Hart Crane diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico. Bursting with anecdotes, Charles Sprawson leads us into a watery world populated by lithe demi-gods – a world that has obsessed humans from the ancient Greeks and Romans, to Yeats, Woolf, Fitzgerald and Hockney. 
 
Original, enticing and dripping with references to literature, film, art and Olympic history, this cult swimming classic pays sparkling tribute to water and the cultural meanings we attach to it. 
 
‘This splendid and wholly original book is as zestful as a plunge in champagne’ Iris Murdoch

Haunts of the Black Masseur

The Swimmer as Hero

Tom Wolfe's genre-defining magical mystery tour through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversary. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JARVIS COCKER 
 
In the summer of 1964, author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set out on an awesome social experiment like no other. Blazing across America in their day-glo schoolbus, doped up and deep ‘in the pudding’, the Pranksters’ arrival on the scene – anarchic, exuberant and LSD-infused – would turn on an entire counter-culture, and provide Tom Wolfe with the perfect free-wheeling subject for this, his pioneering masterpiece of New Journalism. 
 
'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter' New York Times

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s 
 
In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction. 
 
'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Selected from the books Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari 
 
How did money come to be invented? Why does it now have such significance in our lives? Does it make us happier or unhappier? And what does the future hold for it? With brilliant clarity and insight, Yuval Noah Harari takes the reader on a journey from the very first coins through to 21st century economics and shows us how we are all on the brink of a revolution, whether we like it or not. 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Drinking by John Cheever

Money

Vintage Minis

Raymond Williams

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism, this book delves into the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Surveying two hundred years of history and English literature – from George Eliot to George Orwell – Williams provides insights into the social and economic forces that have shaped British culture and society. Provocative and revolutionary in its day, this work overturned conventional thinking about the development of a common British mentality.

Culture and Society

1780–1950

Coleridge to Orwell

Nik Cohn

Nik Cohn had planned a trip around the world, but when a friend told him that Broadway is 'the world within itself', he started walking up the Great White Way, from Battery Park to Times Square. Escorted by a drum-playing Russian taxi driver, fuelled by duck soup and whiskey and sleeping in crackhouse hotels, Cohn encountered pickpockets, dancers, old  magicians, disgraced politicians, epic storytellers, part-time messiahs, and an unforgettable transvestite called Lush Life. Hallucinogenic history, rogues' gallery, personal odyssey, this extraordinary saga is also an extended love letter to a dream of New York now lost.

The Heart of the World

Nik Cohn began to write this book in the late 1960s with a simple purpose: to catch the feel, the pulse of Rock. Nobody had written a serious book on the subject before, and there were no reference books or research to refer to. The result is an unruly, thrilling and definitive history of an era, from Bill Haley to Jimi Hendrix, full of guts, flash, energy and speed. In vividly describing the music and cutting through the hype, Nik Cohn engendered and perfected a new form: rock criticism.

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

Pop from the Beginning

Owen Chase

DON'T MISS THE MAJOR FILM INSPIRED BY CHASE'S NARRATIVE, IN THE HEART OF THE SEA 
 
On 20 November 1820, just south of the equator, the whaling ship Essex, spotted and pursued a shoal of sperm whales. As the crew started harpooning, the largest whale – some 85 feet long – rammed the Essex twice and 'stove in her bows'. What followed was an epic three-month voyage in open boats across storm-tossed seas. Only eight men survived, sustained by eating those who died. 
 
This edition includes Owen Chases’s famous account, as well as memoirs by two other crew members and a facsimile of Herman Melville's notes on Chase’s narrative.

Shipwreck Of The Whaleship Essex

The true story that inspired the film In the Heart of the Sea

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was a key figure in helping to secure the abolition of slavery in America – discover his Narrative this Black History Month. 
 
 A masterpiece … [Douglass] was not only self-educated, with a love of language which should still be an inspiration; he was also self-created’ New York Times 
 
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. After his escape in 1838 he became an ardent abolitionist, and his autobiography was an instant bestseller upon publication in 1845. In it he describes with harrowing honesty his life as a slave – the cruelty he suffered at the hands of plantation owners; his struggles to educate himself in a world where slaves are deliberately kept ignorant; and ultimately, his fight for his right to freedom. A passionately written, intelligent and highly emotive indictment of slavery, his principle preoccupation was that slavery could be eradicated only through education. This text was key in helping to secure its eventual abolition.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Christopher Isherwood

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Kathleen and Frank

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTON 
 
Subtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London’s Bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood’s contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.

Lions and Shadows

Roland Barthes

'Barthes' purpose is to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals and symbols of the language of mass culture' The Times 
 
In this magnificent and often surprising collection of essays Barthes explores the myths of mass culture. Taking subjects as diverse as wrestling, films, plastic and cars, Barthes elegantly deciphers the symbols and signs embedded deep in familiar aspects of modern life, unmasking the hidden ideologies and meanings which implicitly affect our thought and behaviour. This early classic of semiotics from one of France's greatest thinkers may irrevocably change the way you view the world around you.

Mythologies

Bruce Chatwin

In 1812, Francisco Manoel da Silva, escaping a life of poverty in Brazil, sailed to the African kingdom of Dahomey, determined to make his fortune in the slave trade. Armed with nothing but an iron will, he became a man of substance in Ouidah and the founder of a remarkable dynasty. His one remaining ambition is to return to Brazil in triumph, but his friendship with the mad, mercurial king of Dahomey is fraught with danger and threatens his dream.

The Viceroy of Ouidah

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

Lost Years

A Memoir 1945 - 1951

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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