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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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Han Kang

In this light-filled and multi-faceted book, her first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs and diaries. 
 
A book of reflections, of words and light, it has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden at her home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of the mirrors which she must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis. 
 
In a poem written at eight years old, Han Kang imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection – an idea which she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader. 
 
Both intimate and illuminating, Light and Thread is a book for all readers of Han Kang’s unique body of work.

Light and Thread

Isabel Waidner

Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams. 
 
Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has. 
 
As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman: a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.

As If

Ali Smith

Ghosts don't exist. 
They don't. End of. 
Story, however. 
It is haunting. 
Everything tells it. 
 
It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. 
Is it imaginary? Is it real? 
 
Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom. 
What to do? She phones her sister. 
 
In a chiaroscuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. 
 
This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world. 
 
A standalone novel, it’s family to Gliff (2024).

Glyph

Adam Phillips

Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do – and fail to do – about actually getting them? 
 
In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. 
 
Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying – and fashioning – our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.

The Life You Want

John Updike

In the words of his contemporary, Philip Roth, John Updike was ‘Our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer’. 
 
Over the course of his long and immensely productive career, he also proved himself a brilliant correspondent, his letters filled with comic observations, opinions and personal news, told in his characteristically elegant and exquisitely fluid style. 
 
In this sparkling selection of his letters, edited by James Schiff, we can see Updike in real time, capturing every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Pulitzer prizewinner; and from young father negotiating his first book contract to the bestselling writer he became, following the international success of his novels Couples and the ‘Rabbit ‘sequence. 
 
Here are letters to family, friends, editors and lovers, a remarkable outpouring over six decades – including, most movingly perhaps, the letters of his final year bidding farewell to children, colleagues and friends. 
 
Taken together, these missives make a page-turning ‘life in letters’ like no other – an intimate testament to one of the greatest of all American writers.

A Life in Letters

Olivia Laing

‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.’ 
 
It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs. 
 
He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism. 
 
But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend. 
 
The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

The Silver Book

Zadie Smith

In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years. 
 
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of ‘the commons’ in all our lives. 
 
Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.

Dead and Alive

Kiran Desai

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. 
 
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. 
 
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’. 
 
Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi. 
 
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

Mother Mary Comes To Me

Mathelinda Nabugodi

Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats – the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their work is associated with sublime passions, violent stormscapes and a questing search for the inner self. It is rarely associated with the racial politics of the transatlantic slave economy. 
 
But these literary icons lived through a period when individual and collective resistance by Black people in Britain and her overseas colonies was making it increasingly difficult – and increasingly costly – to ignore their demands for freedom. A time when popular support for the abolition movement exploded across the country – and was met by a vehement, reactionary campaign from the establishment. A time when white supremacist ideologies were fomented to justify the abuse and exploitation of non-white 'races'. This cultural context is not immediately obvious in the canon of Romantic poetry. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. 
 
The Trembling Hand turns an urgent critical gaze onto six major Romantic authors, examining how their lives and works were entangled with the racist realities of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi pores over carefully preserved manuscripts, travels to the houses where these writers lived and died, examines the personal objects which survived them: a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair. Amid this archive, she searches for traces of Black figures whose lives crossed paths with the great Romantics. And she grapples with the opposing forces of reverence and horror as her fascination with literary relics collides with feelings of sorrow and rage.

The Trembling Hand

Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive

Nicola Williams

When the Head Clerk at her Chambers is murdered, Lee Mitchell doesn’t know who she can trust. 
 
One of the last people to see him alive, the crime is pinned on Junior Clerk Dean who ‘seems like the type’. Working-class and still living on the estate where he grew up, he has the most to gain from Tom’s death. 
 
But Lee knows how easily prejudices can snowball into convictions – and steps in to defend him. As the trial progresses, people Lee has worked with for years become suspects as her Chambers crumbles into a world of chaos and deceit. 
 
And, what of the diary, whispered about by those at Chambers? The one Tom used to blackmail Lee’s friends and enemies alike to do his bidding? The one containing secrets some might kill to keep hidden? 
 
Maybe finding it will be the key to solving his murder. Or maybe some secrets are better left buried . . .

Killer Instinct

Jay Griffiths

Pet-owners and animal-lovers instinctively know that animals heal. This book offers the evidence, drawing widely on scientific discoveries, history, and Indigenous knowledge. 
 
We meet a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner's life, lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers, dolphins and whales rescuing people in danger, and dogs who can smell cancer and phone the Emergency Services. 
 
Animal sounds, from insects to birdsong and the purring of cats, are directly medicinal and their presence can heal the pain of loneliness. Animals, including donkeys, can be natural therapists for the hurt psyche, alleviating trauma, fear and depression. 
 
In this original, revelatory and exuberant book, Jay Griffiths explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. Wolves may be teachers of ethics; monkeys and dogs can object to unfairness and bees take collective decisions. Animals are irresistible medicine for a healthy culture, animating the arts with spectacular vitality and verve, as poetry knows. 
 
Open-hearted, playful and wise, How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.

How Animals Heal Us

Linn Ullmann

‘By writing down what happened, by telling the story as truthfully as I can, I’m trying to bring them together into one body – the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don’t know if it can be done' 
 
Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. 
Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, Unquiet, Linn Ullmann continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. 
 
Girl, 1983 is a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.

Girl, 1983

Oliver Lovrenski

Last night i got woke up by marco ringing, and he was crying, he said, he died ivor, he died, and i didnt need to hear who to know, i just hung up. 
 
Ivor and Marco have been getting high since they were thirteen, started dealing at fourteen, by fifteen they were carrying knives. At sixteen years old, they hurtle from one trip to the next, one fight to the next, always watching their backs. Ivor dreams of getting out - finishing school, becoming a lawyer, marrying the girl he loves from the corner shop - but the path he's on only leads one way. 
 
In flashes of firecracker prose, shot through with rare empathy, irrepressible wit and gut-punch pathos, Oliver Lovrenski gives voice to young men growing up in a brutal and chaotic world.

Back in the Day

Joe Dunthorne

Joe Dunthorne’s great-grandfather was a family legend: the eccentric pre-war inventor of radioactive toothpaste and the Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. 
 
Joe always knew he would write a book about this one day. The only problem was that the old man had already written the book of his life – an unpublished memoir so dense and rambling that none of his living descendants had attempted to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally cracked open the manuscript, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew…

Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

Liliane Lijn

In 1958, talented and fearless and eighteen years old, Liliane Lijn left her family home and moved to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. 
 
In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And as her profile steadily grew, she was told again and again that there are no great women artists: ‘There never have been.’ 
 
Liquid Reflections is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure – years when Lijn was constantly in motion, from Paris to New York to Venice to Athens, from paper and canvas to wax and Perspex to oil and water. In love, she became pregnant but rebelled against the idea that a woman could not be both a great artist and a mother. 
 
And she sought – and found – radical pleasure in the act of creative expression and in the living, sensuous world around her. 
 
Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman. 
 
'I wrote LIQUID REFLECTIONS because I wanted to take my readers on the journey I made to become an artist. It's the story of an idealistic, inspired young woman who refuses to accept the prejudices of her time. Becoming an artist was also a search for my own identity…’ Liliane Lijn

Liquid Reflections

Ta-Nehisi Coates

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell – as well as the ones we don’t – work to shape us. 
 
The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground. 
 
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

The Message

Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire's groundbreaking comic strip Here was published under Art Spiegelman's editorship at RAW in 1989. 
 
Built in six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it collapsed time and space to tell the story of the corner of a room - and its inhabitants - between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2033 AD. 
 
The strip remains one of the most influential and widely discussed contributions to the medium, and it has now been developed, expanded and reimagined by the artist into this full-length, full-colour graphic novel - a must for any fan of the genre.

Here

Zach Williams

A young family are trapped in a time loop in an idyllic holiday cabin. A middle-aged man becomes convinced that his disappointing son is an impostor. Two brothers take a midnight ride in a golf cart and run into trouble. The elderly tour guide at an alien contact site loses control of his guests. Meanwhile, all around them, America is dissolving, fragmenting, distorting beyond recognition. 
 
The antiheroes of Beautiful Days are chronic underachievers, lost in their own lives and plagued by loneliness, self-doubt, toxic rage. They gaze on the world with both wonder and horror, longing for transcendence or salvation. They tune in to the faint buzz of anxiety which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. And when the worst happens, they take to the road - criss-crossing the wilderness in stolen cars, riding trains to the end of the line, or cruising along ruined monorails as the skyline burns. 
 
Zach Williams' stories are haunted by the ghosts of America - its lost illusions, its dark aspirations, its boundless, disquieting potential. They leak through the fabric of reality and out into the void beyond. And they reach, ever-hopeful, towards a moment of connection that might pull a body back from the brink.

Beautiful Days

Puk Qvortrup

'Three in the bed. One not yet born, another dead, and I'm alive.' 
 
Puk is 26 years old, preparing for the birth of her second child, when her husband has a heart attack on his morning run. She leaves their toddler with a friend and dashes to the hospital, where Lasse lies unresponsive in a coma. He dies a few hours later. 
 
Into a Star follows Puk and her young family for one year after this tragedy, which has shattered the ordinary life she thought she would live, as she finds her way slowly through the enormous grief and, eventually, out the other side. With remarkable dignity, candour and attention to the domestic details that make us human, Puk Qvortrup invites us into the hardest moments of her life. And she reveals, amid the devastation, a powerful thread of hope.

Into a Star

ABC Merriman-Labor

In Britons Through Negro Spectacles Merriman-Labor takes us on a joyous, intoxicating tour of London at the turn of the 20th century. Slyly subverting the colonial gaze usually placed on Africa, he introduces us to the citizens, culture and customs of Britain with a mischievous glint in his eye. This incredible work of social commentary feels a century ahead of its time, and provides unique insights into the intersection between empire, race and community at this important moment in history.

Britons Through Negro Spectacles

Robert Macfarlane

Jackie Morris

Chris Watson

Woodland, moorland, sea... Great Britain is home to vast array of beautiful natural settings, each with its own unique sounds. 
 
The award-winning audiobook for The Lost Words and its sister, The Lost Spells, showcased the immersive power of a natural soundscape. Compiled by renowned wildlife recordist, Chris Watson, these soundscapes acted as the backdrop and setting for beautiful spells, whilst possessing an energy and life of their own. 
 
Now, these aural glimpses into the natural world, be it an adder in grass or an egret submerging into the swell of the ocean, are brought together to star in their own right. Complemented by a foreword from renowned writer Robert Macfarlane, beautiful artwork by Jackie Morris and a fascinating 'making of' interview with sound recordist Chris Watson, The Lost Sounds is an immersive natural listening experience, taking reader across the UK through the sounds of nature.

The Lost Sounds

Lydia Davis

'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust'(Ali Smith) 
Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays. Now, she continues the project with Essays Two, focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles. 
Every essay in this book is a revelation.

Essays Two

'Married five times. Mother. Lover. Aunt. Friend. 
She plays many roles round here. And never 
Scared to tell the whole of her truth, whether 
Or not anyone wants to hear it. Wife 
Of Willesden: pissed enough to tell her life 
Story to whoever has ears and eyes...' 
 
Zadie Smith's first play is a joyous re-imagining of Chaucer's classic, The Wife of Bath's Tale. As the crowd in a small pub on the Kilburn High Road stand up to share their stories, the Wife of Willesden is not afraid to bare it all...

The Wife of Willesden

In 2017 Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris broke the mould with The Lost Words, a book of paintings in watercolour and gold leaf accompanied by acrostic spell-poems, capturing the unique essence of common but underappreciated species like Otter, Acorn, Ivy and Heron, Willow and Kingfisher. The response from readers was truly extraordinary: an instant bestseller, it inspired people of all ages all over the world, prompting mass fundraising campaigns to donate copies, and adaptations into folksong, symphony, theatre, puppetry, dance and mural. Three years later the creative duo delighted fans with a second title, The Lost Spells, celebrating the spirit of Red Fox, Silver Birch, Swallow, Jackdaw, and more. 
 
The Wild Cards draws together 100 pieces of artwork from The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Every named species from the books is pictured at least once; many appear several times, though each postcard image is unique. The series also depicts many plants and animals not named in the original books - hidden details for the keen-eyed aficionado to discover - such as Blackbird, Stag and Rowan. On the reverse of the cards is an accompanying line of spell-text along with an identification of the depicted species. They have been otherwise left blank, their space waiting to be filled in by pen, pencil or paint and sent out into the world to make and renew connections.

The Wild Cards

A 100 Postcard Box Set

Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visited her father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. 
 
Years later, when she is grown with children of her own and he's in his eighties, they plan to write a book together. It will be about age and time, language and memory. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the man is gone, only memories - both remembered and recorded - remain. 
 
Heart-breaking and spellbinding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.

Unquiet

Noam Chomsky

Marv Waterstone

Is there an alternative to capitalism? In this landmark text Chomsky and Waterstone chart a critical map for a more just and sustainable society. 
 
'Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents both a crisis and an opportunity. Everything depends on the actions that people take into their own hands.' 
 
How does politics shape our world, our lives and our perceptions? How much of 'common sense' is actually driven by the ruling classes' needs and interests? And how are we to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet? 
 
Consequences of Capitalism exposes the deep, often unseen connections between neoliberal 'common sense' and structural power. In making these linkages, we see how the current hegemony keeps social justice movements divided and marginalized. And, most importantly, we see how we can fight to overcome these divisions.

Consequences of Capitalism

Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

Kindred in spirit to The Lost Words but new in form, The Lost Spells is a pocket-sized treasure, a new collection of 'spells' - acrostic poetry and artwork - by beloved creative duo Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. 
 
Written to be read aloud, calling to forest, field, riverbank, ocean, and also to the heart, these 'spells' summon back what is often lost from sight and care, and inspire protection and action on behalf of the natural world. From Jay to Jackdaw, Oak to Barn Owl, Silver Birch to Grey Seal, they capture the special, individual spirit of each plant and creature. Above all, they celebrate a sense of wonder, bearing witness to nature's power to amaze, console and bring joy.

The Lost Spells

An enchanting, beautiful book for lovers of the natural world

Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control: wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction. Ranging across her many creative influences, including Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin and Joan Mitchell, she returns again and again to her own writing process, joyfully interrogating the limits of literature and the ways in which we can challenge and reinvent it.

Essays

My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, the essays speak in a uniquely spirited voice, marked by compassion, clarity and courage. Radical and superbly readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites. 
 
In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from 'The End of Imagination', which begins this book, to 'My Seditious Heart', with which it ends.

My Seditious Heart

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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