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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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Tamsin Calidas

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Memoir of the year' - Vogue 
 
'A wondrous, sensuous memoir of salt-stung survival . . . clear-eyed and poetic prose' Sunday Times 
 
'A fascinating memoir' - Daily Mail 
 
When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. 
 
Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of rebirth and renewal. Tamsin begins the slow journey back from the brink. 
 
Startling, raw and extremely moving, I Am An Island is a story about the incredible ability of the natural world to provide when everything else has fallen away - a stunning book about solitude, friendship, resilience and self-discovery.

I Am An Island

The Sunday Times bestselling memoir of one woman’s search for belonging

Sophy Roberts

Siberia's history is traditionally one of exiles, bitter cold and suffering. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote landscape are pianos created during the boom years of the nineteenth century. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos travelled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is remarkable. That they might still be capable of making music in such a hostile landscape is nothing less than a miracle. 
 
The Lost Pianos of Siberia is an absorbing story about a piano hunt - a quixotic journey through two centuries of Russian history and eight time zones stretching across an eleventh of the world's land surface. It reveals not only an unexpected musical legacy, but profound humanity in the last place on earth you might expect to find it.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia

A Sunday Times Paperback of 2021

A Sunday Times Book of 2020

Stephanie Rosenbloom

'Full of heart.' Michael Harris, author of Solitude 
 
Being alone isn't something to endure - it's something to relish. 
________ 
 
The average adult spends about a third of his or her waking time alone. 
 
Yet research suggests we aren't very good at using, never mind enjoying, alone time. 
 
Rising to the challenge, travel writer Stephanie Rosenbloom explores the joys and benefits of being alone in four mouth-watering journeys to the cities of Paris, Istanbul, Florence and New York, in four seasons. 
 
This is a book about the pleasures and benefits of savouring the moment, examining things closely, using all your senses to take in your surroundings, whether travelling to faraway places or walking the streets of your own city. Through on-the-ground observations and anecdotes, and drawing on the thinking of artists, writers and innovators who have cherished solitude, Alone Time illuminates the psychological arguments for alone time and lays bare the magic of going solo.

Alone Time

Four seasons, four cities and the pleasures of solitude

Simon Thurley

'Excellent . . . Fresh, learned, readable and full of life' Dan Jones, Mail on Sunday 
 
Houses of Power is the result of Simon Thurley's thirty years of research, picking through architectural digs, and examining financial accounts, original plans and drawings to reconstruct the great Tudor houses and understand how these monarchs shaped their lives. 
________ 
 
What was it like to live as a royal Tudor? 
Why were their residences built as they were and what went on inside their walls? 
Who slept where and with who? 
Who chose the furnishings? 
And what were their passions? 
________ 
 
The Tudors ruled through the day, throughout the night, in the bath, in bed and in the saddle. Their palaces were genuine power houses - the nerve-centre of military operations, the boardroom for all executive decisions and the core of international politics. 
 
Far more than simply an architectural history - a study of private life as well as politics, diplomacy and court - it gives an entirely new and remarkable insight into the Tudor world.

Houses of Power

The Places that Shaped the Tudor World

Miranda Innes

STEP INTO THE DREAMLIKE CITY OF MARRAKECH 
 
Where passionate music, magic potions and the drama of Africa are cooled by the intuitive genius of Arabic culture. 
 
Miranda Innes and her partner were lured into buying a beautiful long-neglected riad in the heart of this pink-walled city. Only after they'd begun their restoration work did they find that nothing in this place of smoke and mirrors was quite what it seemed. 
 
In Cinnamon City Miranda Innes takes you beyond the tourist track, behind the bolted doors and deep inside the romance that is Marrakech. With lyrical and evocative descriptions of the swirling colours, flavours and aromas, this glorious book will open your eyes to this most exotic of North African cities.

Cinnamon City

Christopher Somerville

'Evocatively written and charming' - Countryfile 
'The January Man is a book that makes you want to pull on your boots, grab a map and get out there' - Country Life 
 
The January Man is the story of a year of walks that was inspired by a song, Dave Goulder's 'The January Man'. Month by month, season by season and region by region, Christopher Somerville walks the British Isles, following routes that continually bring his father to mind. 
 
As he travels the country - from the winter floodlands of the River Severn to the lambing pastures of Nidderdale, the towering seabird cliffs on the Shetland Isle of Foula in June and the ancient oaks of Sherwood Forest in autumn - he describes the history, wildlife, landscapes and people he encounters, down back lanes and old paths, in rain and fair weather. 
 
This exquisitely written account of the British countryside not only inspires us to don our boots and explore the 140,000 miles of footpaths across the British Isles, but also illustrates how, on long-distance walks, we can come to an understanding of ourselves and our fellow walkers. 
 
Over the hills and along the byways, Christopher Somerville examines what moulded the men of his father's generation - so reticent about their wartime experiences, so self-effacing, upright and dutiful - as he searches for 'the man inside the man' that his own father really was.

The January Man

A Year of Walking Britain

Bill Bryson

‘Funny, wise, learned and compulsive’ - GQ 
 
 Bill Bryson turns away from travelling the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and Notes from a Big Country, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture. 
 
In Made in America, Bryson tells the story of how American arose out of the English language, and along the way, de-mythologizes his native land - explaining how a dusty desert hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood, how the Wild West wasn’t won, why Americans say ‘lootenant’ and ‘Toosday’, how they were eating junk food long before the word itself was cooked up - as well as exposing the true origins of the words G-string, blockbuster, poker and snafu. 
 
‘A tremendously sassy work, full of zip, pizzazz and all those other great American qualities’ 
Will Self, Independent on Sunday

Made In America

An Informal History of American English

WINNER: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER READER AWARD FOR BEST TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 
WINNER: BOOKS ARE MY BAG READER AWARD FOR BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR BIOGRAPHY 2016 
 
Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country. The hilarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation’s heart and became the bestselling travel book ever, and was also voted in a BBC poll the book that best represents Britain.Now, to mark the twentieth anniversary of that modern classic, Bryson makes a brand-new journey round Britain to see what has changed. 
 
Following (but not too closely) a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places that many people never get to at all, Bryson sets out to rediscover the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn’t altogether recognize any more. Yet, despite Britain’s occasional failings and more or less eternal bewilderments, Bill Bryson is still pleased to call our rainy island home. And not just because of the cream teas, a noble history, and an extra day off at Christmas. 
 
Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.

The Road to Little Dribbling

More Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson has the rare knack of being out of his depth wherever he goes - even (perhaps especially) in the land of his birth. This became all too apparent when, after nearly two decades in England, the world's best-loved travel writer upped sticks with Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. and returned to live in the country he had left as a youth. 
 
Of course there were things Bryson missed about Blighty but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood: the glories of a New England autumn; the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts; and motel rooms where you can generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek and the sound of a female voice pleading, 'Put the gun down, Vinnie, I'll do anything you say.' 
 
Whether discussing the strange appeal of breakfast pizza or the jaw-slackening direness of American TV, Bill Bryson brings his inimitable brand of bemused wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena - the American way of life.

Notes From A Big Country

Journey into the American Dream

It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life – a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else. 
 
Ignoring such dangers – and yet curiously obsessed by them – Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. Life doesn’t get much better than this…

Down Under

Travels in a Sunburned Country

Bill Bryson’s first travel book, The Lost Continent, was unanimously acclaimed as one of the funniest books in years. In Neither Here nor There he brings his unique brand of humour to bear on Europe as he shoulders his backpack, keeps a tight hold on his wallet, and journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the continent, to Istanbul on the cusp of Asia. Fluent in, oh, at least one language, he retraces his travels as a student twenty years before. 
 
Whether braving the homicidal motorists of Paris, being robbed by gypsies in Florence, attempting not to order tripe and eyeballs in a German restaurant or window-shopping in the sex shops of the Reeperbahn, Bryson takes in the sights, dissects the culture and illuminates each place and person with his hilariously caustic observations. He even goes to Liechtenstein.

Neither Here, Nor There

Travels in Europe

‘I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to’ 
 
And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn’t hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. 
 
Bryson’s acclaimed first success, The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature – hilariously, stomach-achingly, funny, yet tinged with heartache – and the book that first staked Bill Bryson’s claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.

The Lost Continent

Travels in Small-Town America

In the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack. 
 
Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors.

A Walk In The Woods

The World's Funniest Travel Writer Takes a Hike

In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite; a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy; place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey and Shellow Bowells; people who said 'Mustn't grumble', and ‘Ooh lovely’ at the sight of a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits; and Gardeners' Question Time. Notes from a Small Island was a huge number-one bestseller when it was first published, and has become the nation's most loved book about Britain, going on to sell over two million copies.

Notes From A Small Island

Journey Through Britain

In 1996, former Country Living garden editor Miranda Innes decided to change her life completely. 
 
Tired of urban living, bored of her career, out of love with her long-standing partner, she and her son spied a romantic ruin in Andalusia amid its own olive groves, and made an offer. What happened next - selling her London house, and handing in her notice at the magazine - was going to be straightforward, or so she thought. She had not counted on the sudden emergence of a New Man in her life, the plans of Arsenal football ground to purchase her back garden, a badly slipped disc and the logistics involved in moving a lifetime's possessions. Nor had she realised what a struggle re-building the house, room by room, or planting a garden in the hostile terrain of southern Spain would be. But helped by her new husband, Dan, and an assortment of eccentric locals, not least by the worldly wisdom of Juan the builder, she made it, and over the ensuing four years, the house and pool were built and the garden began to take shape. 
 
This is the story of how Miranda got to mañana, of her love affair with Spain, and a countryside where 'great jagged peaks range above little fields, white villages tumble like sugar cubes down the sides of hills, and white houses grow room by room in a puzzle of rectangles, topped by corrugated cinnamon-brown terracotta tiles moulded on a man's thigh'. 
 
Illustrated throughout with line-drawings by Dan Pearce, Getting to Mañana is a book to read and treasure.

Getting To Manana

Tom Cox

Peter's mum and dad are worried. Over the last twelve months they've noticed ferocious changes taking place in their son. It's not just the mumbling and the cloud of melancholy that seems to hover permanently over his ever-more-militant mop of curly hair. It's not even the oversized trousers or the numerous metal chains that hang off them. The problem is that Peter, who is fourteen, wants to be a musician - a rock star preferably, but anything else that involves a guitar, gets him bags of money and free CDs, and gives him access to unlimited scantily clad groupies will suffice (as long as it's not classical). Uncoincidentally, ever since the advent of this new ambition, Peter's grades at school have plummeted from very good to somewhere below mediocre. What is to be done? 
In the spirit of intellectual enquiry, Peter and music-critic, Tom Cox, set off in a Ford Focus on a journey to the dark heart of Britain's musical heritage, to get the inside track on whether being a musician really is a sensible career choice for a teenager. They hunt the streets of Cambridge for former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett and have numerous encounters with folkies in tights. They explore the wilder shores of prog rock and get up close and personal in a lift with Brian Wilson. Tom gives a masterclass in second-hand-record-shop etiquette and finds that Peter is something of a child prodigy. Most of all, they drive around, talk about stuff and Peter eats crisps. 
 
Part coming-of-age story and part urban travelogue, this brilliantly funny book is a must for anyone who has ever been baffled by a teenage boy.

Educating Peter

Jason Webster

As Islam and the West prepare to clash once again, Jason Webster embarks on a quest to discover Spain's hidden Moorish legacy and lift the lid on a country once forged by both Muslims and Christians. He meets Zine, a young illegal immigrant from Morocco, a twenty-first century Moor, lured over with the promise of a job but exploited as a slave labourer on a fruit farm. Jason's life is threatened as he investigates the agricultural gulag, Zine rescues him, and the unlikely pair of writer and desperado take off on a rollercoaster ride through Andalucía. 
 
While Jason unveils the neglected Arab ancestry of modern Spain - apparent in its food, language, people and culture - Zine sets out on his own parallel quest, a one-man peace mission to resolve Muslim-Christian tensions by proving irresistible to Spanish señoritas.

Andalus

Unlocking The Secrets Of Moorish Spain

John McCarthy

“Fascinating and timely” Jeremy Bowen 
 
 
Held hostage for many years by terrorists in Lebanon, John McCarthy is all too familiar with the pain and injustice of being denied your home. Determined to understand the day-to-day complexities of being a Palestian-Arab in modern-day Israel, he embarks on a deeply personal journey from the shores of the Mediterranean to the desert landscape of the Negev. He discovers the hidden stories of the ordinary people who must live out their lives in the shadow of a brutal conflict, and asks the vital question – how does humanity endure under such great oppression?

You Can't Hide the Sun

A Journey through Palestine

Tim Cahill

Tim Cahill has clambered up Mount Roraima in the Guyana highlands, searching for the site of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World. He's dined on baked turtle lung in the desolate northeast of Australia and harvested poisonous sea snakes in the Philippines. He's watched a wrestling match between a shark and an "underwater zombie" during a horror movie shoot off the coast of Mexico. 
 
In this classic collection of adventure travel writing, Tim Cahill writes evocatively and often hilariously about these close encounters. He also briefs us on gorilla etiquette, porcupine vendettas, and the loathsome fate awaiting those who disturb ruins in the jungles of the Amazon. JAGUARS RIPPED MY FLESH is an exhilarating roller-coaster of a book, by a writer who gives new meaning to the expression "going to extremes".

Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

Stephen Clarke

PARIS - one of the most visited cities in the world. 
 
BUT do you know ... 
 
Which is the most romantic spot to say 'je't'aime'? And the sexiest? 
Where to see fantastic art, away from all the crowds? 
Why Parisian men feel compelled to pee in the street? 
How to choose a hotel room where you might actually get a good night's sleep? 
 
 
Stephen Clarke goes behind the scenes to reveal everything Parisians know about their city - but don't want to tell you.

Paris Revealed

The Secret Life of a City

Edward Lewine

An immoral spectacle or a metaphor of life? Bullfighting never fails to provoke a reaction. In this unusual travel memoir, Edward Lewine embarks on an eye-opening journey around Spain to track a typical season for the country's biggest bullfighter, Francisco Rivera Ordonez. 
Fighting bulls while fleeing celebrity, Spain's most infamous matador lives both his public and his private life on the edge. The last in a distinguished bloodline, he is plagued by the legacies of his great-grandfather, the greatest matador of his day and revered by Hemingway, and by his late father, who was gored to death in the arena. With sixty-two fights and a hundred and twenty bulls to confront in the coming season, Francisco must also endure the aggressive attention of the paparazzi who pursue him for news of his colourful private life and breakdown of his marriage to a Spanish duchess. 
LEWINE witnesses at first hand the thrilling routine of a top bullfighter - the rituals, the risks, the stage fright - and assesses the significance of bulffighting in the context of Spanish identity. This national obsession encapsulates the uniqueness of Spanish culture.

Death And The Sun

A Matador's Season In The Heart Of Spain

Brendon Burns

In early October 2004, Brendon Burns - a delusional, god-fearing, drug addict, manic depressive and award-winning comedian - has a vision of happiness. He imagines himself sitting with two friends in a convertible in the middle of a desert, and for once he feels totally in control of his life. With the (slightly inebriated) voices in his head assuring him that he can recreate this perfect moment, he clearly has no choice but to gather the troops and head out to the US of A in pursuit his dream... 
 
Fear of Hat Loss in Las Vegas is the true story of four men - Brendon and his friends Barry Castagnola (the everyman), Paul Provenza (an Italian New Yorker, devout atheist, actor and movie director), and Keith (Barry's dad and best friend) - and their search for happiness and redemption in the heart of the Nevada desert. Demented, depraved, dangerously addictive and yet with a deep heart, soul and spirit, it is a tale of debauchery, mushrooms, fate, hookers, coincidence, stand-up comedy, aliens, Vegas and, ultimately, friendship. Rude, insane, in your face (and off their faces), it is the story of the perfect road trip. 
 
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas - unless of course it's really funny. Then Brendon will write a f**king book about it...

Fear of Hat Loss in Las Vegas

Helen Stevenson

If you are lucky enough to find your place, you should never actually live in it, never make it your home. And never live with the man you think you cannot live without. 
 
Le Village is a small town at the southwestern-most tip of France. Here a young Englishwoman fell in love with France, the French and one Frenchman in particular. 
 
In her seductive, lyrical and witty memoir Helen Stevenson writes about life in Le Village, not as an expat, but as someone adopted by her neighbours as one of their own. By Stefan, the Maoist tennis fanatic, who lives off his lover in solidarity with the unemployed; by Gigi, the chic Parisian who dresses her ex-lovers' girlfriends from the stock of her exquisite boutique; and by Luc, the crumpled cowboy painter and part-time dentist, who, overcoming an aversion to blondes, takes the Englishwoman up to his remote mas, shows her his paintings and teaches her to ride. 
 
Describing the colour and light of the landscape with lyrical intensity, and savouring the languid and sexy flavour of the Mediterranean lifestyle, Helen Stevenson lays bare a romantic but potentially disastrous love affair with the man 'who seems like the only man alive to me, the one with the halo round his head in a crowd, if I should ever see him in a crowd'. INSTRUCTIONS FOR VISITORS may start as an objective guide for tenants arriving at her village house, but it ends as a very personal revelation of how difficult it can be to transplant oneself into someone else's country, someone else's culture, someone else's heart.

Instructions For Visitors

Candida Lycett Green

From her early childhood, when her inspirational mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of green lanes and tracks, of moving along at horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door. Her insatiable appetite for exploring unknown territory has led her to travel all over the country by horse for weeks at a time, and often these journeys have come at important turning points in her life. 
 
Lyrical yet down-to-earth, framed by a recent 150-mile journey through Yorkshire and Northumberland with a friend, Over the Hills and Far Away dips back into past journeys by horse that also reflect her idyllic childhood in the bohemian Betjeman household, a charmed youth in the Swinging Sixties, a year-long honeymoon journey overland to India, early days at Private Eye, and the ups and downs of thirty-nine years of marriage and motherhood. Her story is made all the more poignant by her recent fight with breast cancer.

Over The Hills And Far Away

Mirabel Osler

In years gone by, the traveller in France could rely on coming across a restaurant where the tables were ready-laid with heavy cotton napkins, a carafe of wine and a basket of freshly baked bread, and where the ensuing meal would encompass recipes of remarkable local dishes handed down from generation to generation. But no longer. 
 
In an inspiring quest for this rapidly disappearing traditional cuisine and culture, Mirabel Osler travels the length and breadth of France, focusing on individual chefs and restaurants, exploring producers and suppliers such the travelling butchers and bakers, and the local markets where much of the produce is bought. It is an enticing and evocative picture of a way of life which is fast being eroded by the modern world, but also an affirmation that, for some, the old traditions will always survive.

The Elusive Truffle: Travels In Search Of The Legendary Food Of France

Tim Cahill sleeps with grizzly bears. He also treks with llamas, inches his way through the deepest cave in America, and assesses the cuteness quotient of giant clams in the South Pacific - all in the service of some of the most lively, nerve-wracking, and outrageous travel writing of our time. 
 
From the wastes of Antarctica to the blazing oil fields of Kuwait, and from an evening of demonic possession in Bali to a session on Guatemala's Throne of Terror, PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS is a grand tour of the earth's remote, exotic, and dismal places, conducted with irresistible aplomb by a master of high (and low) adventure.

Pecked To Death By Ducks

We all have a need to belong, to have a place and people we feel tied to: our family, our house, our hometown, our nation. Ever since he first visited Ireland with his family twenty years ago, John McCarthy has felt a strong affinity with its people and landscape. Yet in spite of his Irish name, he never thought of himself as remotely Irish. 
 
When McCarthy sets up home in a wild and isolated corner of County Kerry where his ancestors were living a thousand years before, he realises that he is about to undertake not only a journey into that small rural community but also into his own history and his family. What he discovers there reveals a curious sense of belonging to a place he has never before lived in and peels back the emotional layers of his own fractured past.

A Ghost Upon Your Path

In Hold the Enlightenment, one of America's favourite and funniest adventure writers returns with his most entertaining collection of essays yet as he travels the globe and faces down challenges that are animal, topographical - and human. Hold the Enlightenment takes Cahill to sites as far-flung as Saharan salt mines, the Congolese jungle, and Hanford, Washington, home of the largest toxic waste dump in the Western Hemisphere. With trademark wit and insight, Cahill describes stalking the legendary Caspian tiger in the mountains bordering Iraq, slogging through a pitch-black Australian Eucalyptus forest to find the nocturnal platypus, diving with great white sharks in South Africa, staving off enlightenment at a yoga retreat in Negril, Jamaica, and much, much more. In these essays, vivid and masterly storytelling combine with outrageously sly humour and jolts of real emotion to show one of the most popular journalists of our time at the peak of his game.

Hold The Enlightenment

Andrew Eames

The Danube is Europe's Amazon. It flows through more countries than any other river on Earth - from the Black Forest in Germany to Europe's farthest fringes, where it joins the Black Sea in Romania. Andrew Eames' journey along its length brings us face to face with the Continent's bloodiest history and its most pressing issues of race and identity. 
 
As he travels - by bicycle, horse, boat and on foot - Eames finds himself seeking a bed for the night with minor royalty, hitching a ride on a Serbian barge captained by a man called Attila and getting up close and personal with a bull in rural Romania. He meets would-be kings and walks with gypsies, and finally rows his way beyond the borders of Europe entirely...

Blue River, Black Sea

James Hider

The bloodshed perpetrated in the name of religion in the world today is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East. Whether we are talking about hardcore Zionist settlers still fighting ancient Biblical battles in the hills of the West Bank or Shiite death squads roaming the lawless streets of Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam; whether it's the misappropriation and martyrdom of Mickey Mouse by Gaza's Islamists, or a US president acting on God's orders, James Hider sees the hallucinatory effect of what he calls the 'crack cocaine of fanatical fundamentalism' all around him. 
 
As James Hider travels around the Middle East, from Israel to Gaza, to Iraq &shy;and then back to Jerusalem, he takes his doubts about religious beliefs to the very heart of the world's holy wars. He meets terrorists and their victims, soldiers and clerics, ordinary people and extraordinary people. The question in the back of his mind is: how can people not only believe in all this madness, but die and kill for it too? 
 
This timely book casts an unflinching yet compassionate eye on the very worst and most violent crimes committed in the name of religion and asks questions that the world needs to answer if we are to stand a chance of facing our own worst demons.

The Spiders of Allah

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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