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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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Peter Jones

What can a twelfth-century monk teach us about burnout, envy, or despair? Far more than we might imagine. In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, historian Peter Jones travels through Europe’s archives and libraries to uncover a lost psychology: a world where confession was therapy, sin was diagnosis, and the Seven Deadly Sins served as a map of the human mind. 
 
From the deserts of Egypt to the Vatican Library, from Dante’s Florence to Catherine of Siena’s cell, Jones introduces the thinkers, mystics and rebels who wrestled with the same questions that preoccupy us now: how to live with our flaws, forgive ourselves, and find meaning amid confusion. 
 
Medieval lives and landscapes come vividly alive: Siberian winters and Parisian manuscripts, lustful saints and anxious scholars, candlelit abbeys and vaults of forgotten books. Wise, surprising, and deeply humane, Self-Help from the Middle Ages reveals that the remedies we seek for our 21st-century anxieties may have been with us all along—written in brown Gothic ink on lambskin seven hundred years ago.

Self-Help From the Middle Ages

A Journey Into the Medieval Mind

Amber Husain

If you are what you eat, what does that make you? Virtuous, cool, immortal? Or deviant, pitiful, ill? Is it useful to make these judgements? Do they help us improve our lives? 
 
In a world where it feels as though the value of your life can be gauged by the goodness in your dinner, it is possible, even easy, to lose the will to live. This became particularly obvious to writer Amber Husain when suddenly, despite almost thirty years of practice, it seemed she had forgotten how to eat. 
 
Medical wisdom tries fix the problem non-eater by teaching them the rules of Good Diet. But what if the problem is precisely the narrowing of life to questions of personal goodness? Suspecting there might be more to her stand-off with food than matters of identity and diet, Husain embarked on an enquiry into the special role of eating in our relationship with the world. 
 
Combining a personal account of modern eating-disorder treatments, from the disturbing to the sublime, with a sprawling collective history of eating in hard times, Tell Me How You Eat unearths the astonishing effect of how we feed ourselves and others, not just on who we are, but on how we perceive our own political power. In doing so, it marks a bold and inspiring confrontation with our very understanding of food.

Tell Me How You Eat

Food, Power and the Will to Live

Tim Benson

Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2025 offers a superbly sharp and wickedly witty visual record of a year of Labour tribulations, Trumpian endeavours, economic tremors, and almost ubiquitous political gaffes and missteps. This collection features the work of Peter Brookes, Morten Morland, Nicola Jennings, Christian Adams, Dave Brown, Ella Baron and many more of the nation’s finest cartoonists, alongside captions from Britain's leading cartoon expert. It’s a magnificent record of twelve months of political pandemonium and savage satire, and the perfect gift for friends, family, or just for yourself.

Britain's Best Political Cartoons 2025

Michael Palin

In February 2025, Michael Palin travelled to Venezuela to get a sense of what life is like in one of South America's most culturally rich, vibrant but also troubled nations. In the journal he kept during his trip he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited, the landscapes he travelled through, and the people he met. 
 
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

Michael Palin in Venezuela

Lyse Doucet

'Ingenious' KAMILA SHAMSIE 
'Incredible' PETER FRANKOPAN 
'Beautiful' RORY STEWART 
 
In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan’s hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world. 
 
Lyse Doucet first checked into the Inter-Continental on Christmas Eve 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors. 
 
Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country. It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper, of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy – only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021. 
 
Through these intimate portraits of Afghan life, the story of a hotel becomes the story of a people.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul

A People’s History of Afghanistan

Eleanor Doughty

There are fewer than 5000 people who can genuinely claim to be members of the British aristocracy, and yet they loom large in the popular consciousness. We're fascinated by their houses and estates, their lives and loves, their foibles and eccentricities. And we entertain the strong suspicion that, while they may be fellow citizens, they are very far from being People Like Us. 
 
In Heirs and Graces Eleanor Doughty draws on her unparalleled access to a bewildering range of dukes, duchesses, earls and others to create a vivid picture of who they are and how they tick. En route she traces their progress from a post-war era when they and their like were described by one future Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer as 'selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent' to their diverse current roles as guardians of vast ancestral mansions, farmers, financiers and much else beside. She looks at key rites of passage, from cradle, via boarding school to grave. And she tells stories of their ups and downs, and of the doings of the heroes and villains who fill their ranks. 
 
The result is a wonderfully rich, often amusing, always revealing account of the fortunes of the aristocracy over the past century and a series of fascinating glimpses into what it is like to be an aristocrat in Britain today.

Heirs and Graces

A History of the Modern British Aristocracy

Harry Sidebottom

Bestselling author Harry Sidebottom takes readers on a thrilling journey through a day in the life of the most iconic figure of the ancient world: the Roman gladiator 
 
‘Magnificent… Was I not entertained? I absolutely was’ 
Dominic Sandbrook, Times Books of the Year 
 
'Wonderfully panoramic … endlessly informative, rich with unexpected detail but never heavy to read' Literary Review 
 
'Grippingly original' 
Tom Holland 
 
'Blends extensive research with a talent for vivid storytelling to distil 700 years of gladiator history into the 24 hours around match day' 
The Times 
 
*A TIMES AND ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
Dressed in armour and clutching a bloody sword, the Roman gladiator is the most iconic figure of the ancient world. Both fascinating and repulsive to us now, he was in his own time a deeply controversial character, by turns hated and idealized – and always at the heart of Roman culture. But what did he really mean to the Romans? What did they see in the gladiator and the spectacle of the games? And what does he reveal to us today about the Roman way of life? 
 
Brilliantly written and meticulously researched, this book tells the stories of the gladiators and those who observed them – from grand emperors to lowly slaves – illuminating and analysing the all-consuming passion of the Roman Empire for the spectacle of mortal combat. In doing so, it reveals Roman ideas about everything from freedom and servitude to sex and desire, from courage and cowardice to death and the afterlife. 
 
Taking readers on an unforgettable twenty-four-hour adventure – beginning the night before the games and ending the evening after – Those Who Are About To Die gives a blow-by-blow account of what life was really like in the brutally unforgiving arena of the ancient world.

Those Who Are About To Die

Gladiators and the Roman Mind

Jonathan Mahler

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt and reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets – and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions were boiling over. 
 
Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events – involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters – would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Larry Kramer. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. The Tompkins Square Riots. Jimmy Breslin. Ivan Boesky. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, Black Monday and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire – the tabloids. 
 
In The Gods of New York, bestselling author Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these outsized characters and of these convulsive, defining years. It’s an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city, drawing in and lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture — a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker — when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems that were intended to protect them? New York was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

The Gods of New York

The Tumultuous Eighties, from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots

Andrea Long Chu

This highly anticipated book by the Pulitzer Prize winning critic Andrea Long Chu asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything? 
 
'A rigorous thinker armed with a killer turn of phrase' 
Observer 
 
'Her writing is razor-sharp, personal, and vociferous in its proclamations, but it’s also fun – it’s got bite' 
New Statesman 
 
'Fun reading' 
Guardian 
 
'A galaxy-brain-level thinker' Torrey Peters 
 
'One of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today' Brandon Taylor 
 
'Thrilling... Authority reminds us we haven't yet felt all there is to feel' Kaveh Akbar 
'A pure joy to read' Claire Dederer 
Since her canonical 2017 essay ‘On Liking Women’, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as one of the most provocative, funny, brilliant and stylish critics at work today. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers.Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton’s (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism. 
 
The unifying theme of the book is authority and taste in literature, art, culture and politics: how do we decide what's good, and how do we convince others that our judgement is correct?

Authority

Essays on Being Right

Simon Pollock

From stations that wouldn't be out of place in Miami Beach to cinemas converted to megachurches, I Love Suburbia brings to life the joys of living outside Zone 1. Step back in time and revisit simpler days in the suburbs to discover the pioneering interwar architects who brought modernism to Britain, or delight in the elegance of Art Deco buildings given a new lease of life. Filled with stories of the people who live, work and play in the outskirts of London, this full-colour book is an exploration of the capital’s overlooked everyday treasures. Brought together by Simon Pollock, the creator of Instagram’s heartwarming @LondonSuburbia, with over 200 original photos of unusual charm from Chingford to Leatherhead, Beaconsfield to Becontree, this is the suburbs as you've never seen them before.

I Love Suburbia

The Joys of Life on London’s Outskirts

Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2026 offers a superbly sharp and wickedly witty visual record of a year of Labour tribulations, Trumpian endeavours, economic tremors, and almost ubiquitous political gaffes and missteps. This collection features the work of Peter Brookes, Morten Morland, Nicola Jennings, Christian Adams, Dave Brown, Ella Baron and many more of the nation’s finest cartoonists, alongside captions from Britain's leading cartoon expert. It’s a magnificent record of twelve months of political pandemonium and savage satire, and the perfect gift for friends, family, or just for yourself.

Britain's Best Political Cartoons 2026

Catharine Edwards

When the Roman statesman Cicero was murdered in 43 BCE, his head was cut off and his tongue pierced with pins – a final, brutal act of revenge against a man whose words had shaped a generation and made him many enemies. Rising from provincial obscurity to the highest elected office in Rome, Cicero became the greatest orator of his age, a figure who believed that speech itself could defend a republic. 
 
Yet Cicero was far more than a master of rhetoric. His long and turbulent life unfolded alongside the collapse of the Roman Republic, and often at its very centre. He moved among Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, crushed a conspiracy that threatened the foundations of Rome and cast himself as the republic’s last hope. His writings on politics, philosophy and society would prove enormously influential, while his uneasy response to the rise of autocratic power continues to provoke admiration and debate. 
 
In this gripping new biography, the distinguished classicist Catharine Edwards brings Cicero vividly to life, revealing both the brilliance and the contradictions of a man caught between principle and ambition. At a moment when democratic institutions feel fragile, and the power of persuasion is once again under scrutiny, Cicero’s life speaks to us with renewed urgency.

Orator

The Life of Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic

Bojan Pancevski

'One of the most significant and riveting journalistic scoops of the twenty-first century... an absolute page-turner' 
Richard Kerbaj, author of The Secret History of The Five Eyes 
 
'It reads like a bestselling thriller' 
Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander 
 
In September 2022, Scandinavian seismologists detected what seemed to be a huge undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption. These signals were caused by several devastating explosions that destroyed Nord Stream, the $20 billion pipeline carrying cheap Russian gas to Europe under the Baltic Sea. The mysterious blasts shifted global geopolitics, disrupted European economies and triggered a manhunt that strained relations within the NATO alliance. 
 
Despite capturing the imagination of millions, the mystery of who blew up the pipeline has so far gone unsolved – was it the CIA? Was it part of the shadow war between Russia and the West? Could Putin himself have been behind it? Drawing on years of first-hand reporting and exclusive access to key players – including the saboteurs, the investigators and high-level intelligence – this deeply reported non-fiction thriller by an award-winning Wall Street Journal correspondent reveals the true story behind one of the most remarkable geopolitical mysteries of our time.

The Nord Stream Conspiracy

The Greatest Sabotage in History

Turi Munthe

'Fizzing with insights and ideas... I loved it' 
Jenny Kleeman, author of The Price of Life 
 
‘Fascinating, incredibly valuable and accessible – a compelling view of why we see the world and each other the way we do’ 
Bobby Duffy, author of The Perils of Perception 
 
Without knowing it, almost all our opinions – whether we believe in God or in ghosts, our views on sex or animal rights or immigration, our basic sense of what’s right – are shaped by an astounding web of hidden forces. The age-old idea that our views are forged by reason and evidence alone is wrong: we are influenced by everything from the quirks of distant history, through the lines of our genetic code, to the geology of where we grew up. 
 
This eye-opening book takes us through culture, biology, geography, history, psychology and much more to uncover the hidden DNA of our opinions. It reveals: 
<ul><li>Why the descendants of rice farmers have fundamentally different social values to the descendants of grain farmers</li><li>How our physical appearance shapes the way we see the world – and why conventionally attractive people tend to support the free market</li><li>Why liberals are more likely than conservatives to think pineapple should go on pizza – and why conservatives prefer smooth peanut butter to crunchy</li><li>Why hot and humid countries favour authoritarian leaders</li></ul> 
Packed with surprising stories and counterintuitive discoveries, Why We Think What We Think does more than reveal how our beliefs are formed. By showing where our beliefs really come from, it invites us to step outside our own assumptions – and learn how to think more clearly, and more generously, about the world we all share.

Why We Think What We Think

The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs

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.

A Dance to the Music of Time

A Fairy Tale Revolution

A Frank Grasby Mystery

A Guide For the Curious

A Horatio Hornblower Tale of the Sea

A Jo Birmingham Thriller

A Jon Roscoe Thriller

A Ladybird Book

A Ladybird Magic Windows Book

A Look Back at

A Luke Carlton Thriller

A Max Mingus Thriller

A Michael Bennett Thriller

A Midge McGowan Mystery

A Mitchum Thriller

A Moneybunny Book

A Murder Most Unladylike Collection

A Murder Most Unladylike Mini Mystery

A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery

A Nigel Strangeways Mystery

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Where to start reading James Patterson

A guide to the great love stories in Vintage Classics fiction

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