About A. Igoni Barrett / A. Igoni Barrett: 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

About A. J. A. Symons / A. J. A. Symons: 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

About A. J. Liebling / A. J. Liebling: A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

About A. J. Rosen / A. J. Rosen: A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

About A. M. Ellis / A. M. Ellis: A. M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A. M. Ellis

About A. O. Scott / A. O. Scott: A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

About A. S. Byatt / A. S. Byatt: A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

About A. T. Williams / A. T. Williams: A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

About A.C. Glass / AC. Glass: Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

About A.E. Waite / AE. Waite: Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

About A.E. Warren / AE. Warren: A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

About A.K.Benedict / AKBenedict: A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

About A.L. Kennedy / AL. Kennedy: A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

About A.N. Wilson / AN. Wilson: A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

About A.T. Emerald / AT. Emerald: A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

About ABC Merriman-Labor: A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

About Aabria Iyengar: Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

About Aaliya Jaleel: Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

About Aaron Balick: After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Posy Simmonds

In May 1977 Posy Simmonds, an unknown young illustrator, started drawing a weekly comic strip for the Guardian. It began as a silly parody of girls' adventure stories, making satirical comments about contemporary life. The strip soon focused on three 1950s school friends in their later middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope and with a young baby. The strip, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as 'Posy', ran until the late 1980s. 
 
Collected here for the first time are the complete strips. Although celebrated for pinpointing the concerns of Guardian readers in the 1980s and their constant struggle to remain true to the ideals of the 1960s, they are in fact remarkably undated. They show one of Britain's favourite cartoonists, celebrated for Literary Life and Tamara Drewe, maturing into genius.

Mrs Weber's Omnibus

Philippa Rice

Baby: A Soppy Story is a collection of comics by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Philippa Rice, based on real-life moments with her baby. 
 
It is a collection about the small, intimate, heart-warming experiences of a couple expecting their first baby. From planning and pregnancy to childbirth and raising a newborn, Baby focuses on the everyday moments of parenthood. 
 
Easily read between naps, it is the perfect gift for new or expectant parents.

Baby

A Soppy Story

E. S. Batchelor

2019 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
‘Where are you going? 
 
The voice came again, and two figures appeared … It was clear that these men were not working for the government. They wore green uniforms, with the small red logo of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army. As they walked, their rifles flopped from side to side.’ 
 
In Myanmar, E. S. Batchelor travels the highland road leading out of Burma to China. Encounters with other travellers unveil political tensions and military history, posing questions about the borderlands between past and present, peace and conflict, person and state.

Highway Three

On the road through Burma’s opium fields

Thomas Graham

2019 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
‘In the Andean cultural context, the mouth of the mine is a portal between worlds. Outside, the miners are Catholic. Inside, the human soul has escaped the jurisdiction of God.’ 
 
In this searing investigation, Thomas Graham crosses the Bolivian altiplano and ventures into Siglo XX, once the world’s richest tin mine. Describing the historical and political landscape of this near post-apocalyptic world, he is invited into the local mining community where he uncovers the true costs it has exacted on their lives.

The Sacrifice

How Bolivian miners extract their wealth

Dur e Aziz Amna

2019 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
'Surkh gulaaban day mausam vich, 
Phulaan de rang kaalay. 
 
(In the season of red roses, 
These flowers are turning black.)' 
 
Your Tongue Is Still Yours is a poetic meditation on language, regional cultures and how identity exists in the many layers between the two. Punjabi. Urdu. English. Arabic. Balti. Shina. Khowar. Wakhi. 
 
Dur e Aziz Amna goes back to Pakistan, traversing its different regions before returning to New York, considering how language has shaped her past and how it might do the same for her children’s future.

Your Tongue Is Still Yours

Reflections On Language

Richard Powers

An enthralling story about desire, new love and the mysteries of science from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory 
 
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes – social, moral, musical, spiritual – and he falls in love with a member of his research team. 
 
Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different mystery – why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? 
 
Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. 
 
‘A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth’ Sunday Telegraph

The Gold Bug Variations

Umberto Eco

The final collection from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture. 
 
In this collection of essays we find Umberto Eco’s perennial areas of interest explored in a lively and engaging style, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. In these wide-ranging pieces he explores the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies and the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics. 
 
Umberto Eco was one of the most influential, and entertaining, intellectuals of the last century, as well as being a critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Susan Hill

An effigy in the woods. A message written in fear. 
 
 
Simon Serrailler is awoken into a hazy dawn by the insistent ringing of his phone. He’s being called out: there’s a body strung up in tranquil Harnham Woods. But on closer inspection it’s an effigy – a carefully made dummy, stirring in the breeze. This is no practical joke, it’s a message. And the next death is only a matter of time. 
 
 
Hill’s elegant prose conceals a blade of menace. Revenge is a compact masterclass in tension: haunted soldiers, buried guilt and the detective who must see through the lies before the next life is lost. 
 
 
‘A case like no other… gripping and humane’ Sunday Times

Revenge

Edward Posnett

‘An exceptional first book; Harvest is a subtle, fascinating braiding of travel, cultural and natural history … It is a pleasure and an education to journey with him in these pages’ Robert Macfarlane 
 
In a centuries-old tradition, farmers in northwestern Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducks. 
 
High inside a vast cave in Borneo, men perched atop rickety ladders collect swiftlets’ nests, a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anything. 
 
Eiderdown and edible birds’ nests: both are luxury products, ultimately destined for the super-rich. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities but to the harvesters they are all imbued with myth, tradition, folklore and ritual, and form part of a shared identity and history. 
 
These objects are two of the seven natural wonders whose stories Harvest tells: eiderdown, vicuña wool, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano and edible birds’ nests. Harvest follows their journey from the wildest parts of the planet, traversing Iceland, Indonesia, and Peru, to its urban centres, drawing on the voices of the gatherers, shearers and entrepreneurs who harvest, process and trade them. 
 
Blending interviews, history and travel writing, Harvest sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape. What do they tell us about capitalism, global market forces and overharvesting? How does a local micro-economy survive in a hyper-connected world? 
 
Harvest makes us see the world with wonder, curiosity and new concern. It is an original and magical new map of our world and its riches.

Harvest

The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects

Nik Cohn

There will always be an England, no doubt, but what sort of England will it be? Cohn takes a long wild ride through a country he calls the Republic - a nation within a nation, populated by the many millions who have either fallen out of the Britannic mainstream, or chosen to jump. He meets the rising stars of a new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has ever existed before. It is a land made up, among others, of outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives, second-generation immigrants, visionaries, born-agains, football fans, fetishists, New Age travellers, anarchists, DJs, street-fighters, graffiti artists, Rastas, Odinists, Elvis impersonators, fire-swallowers and even the Antichrist. Loud and angry, and charged with furious energy, their voices define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. Nik Cohn's republic may not be the only England out there. But it's the most vivid.

Yes We Have No

Selahattin Demirtas

A vital and eloquent portrait of modern Turkey drawn from the lives of its ordinary citizens 
 
Written in prison, the stories in Dawn offer an unfamiliar glimpse of Turkey and the Middle East. They capture the experiences of the people behind the headlines, the voices that so often go unheard. 
 
The young cleaning woman whose bus to work gets caught in a violent protest; the little girl fleeing across the Mediterranean from Syria with her mother; the illegal underage workers building jails; the victim of an ‘honour killing’. Tragedy collides vividly with sharp humour and political satire as inmates have their letters vetted by committee and a bus driver tricks a young idealist. 
 
The first fiction from the imprisoned progressive politician, former leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party and presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas, this collection is essential reading. With warmth, wit and brutal insight, he illuminates everyday existence in Turkey and brings his characters to startling life.

Dawn

Marc Hamer

Longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize 2019 
 
A calming, life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude and contentment, by a brilliant new nature writer who spent time homeless as a young man, sleeping in the hedgerows he now knows so well. 
 
Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy. 
 
Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us, and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face. In this beautiful and meditative book, Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment. 
 
How to Catch a Mole is a gem of nature writing, beautifully illustrated by Joe McLaren, which celebrates living peacefully and finding wonder in the world around us.

How to Catch a Mole

And Find Yourself in Nature

D. J. Enright

The distinguished poet, essayist and critic D. J. Enright died on the last day of December 2002. He had just put the finishing touches to Injury Time, a memoir and his third commonplace book in which the dying writer muses upon his own condition and that of the world he knows he is leaving. 
 
Comparing himself to the Chinese scholar Sima Qian, who chose an 'ignoble punishment' (in Dennis Enright's case, treatment for his cancer; in Qian's, castration) over respectable death in order to finish a book, he contemplates literature, manners, morals, people and, especially, the English language in all its glories and eccentricities - while recording his battle against cancer and his hospital experiences. 
 
Moving, and at times deeply poignant, imbued with its author's legendary humanity and wit, Injury Time is, nevertheless, funny, bracing and, above all, positive.

Injury Time

A Memoir

What lunacy would cause a 55-year-old white male to embroil himself in the world of New Orleans rap - as ideas man, talent-spotter, lyricist, and would-be producer? Nik Cohn has loved (and hated) hip-hop since its birth and loved (and hated) New Orleans for even longer - an addiction he's never wanted to kick. But nothing prepared him for the experience of being pitched, more or less by accident, into the role of Triksta, rap impresario. 
 
A white alien in a black world, with no funding or qualifications, and not a clue what he was doing, he had to rethink himself from scratch. Surrounded by a cast that included such names as Choppa and Soulja Slim, Big Ramp and Lil T, Bass Heavy, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Shorty Brown Hustle, he entered a world of tiny backstreet studios, broken-down slums and gun turfs. 
 
Triksta is the story of a three-year odyssey to the heart of rap, and New Orleans, and self-knowledge.

Triksta

Life and Death and New Orleans Rap

Samuel Lock

When Richard agrees to share a flat with Chuck, his life takes a strange new lurch. Chuck is enormous, ebullient, and more than a trifle camp. He's also violently jealous of Richard and his growing friendship with George. . . Set in the bedsitter world of South Kensington in 1950s, AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT is a strikingly original first novel, told in a voice unlike any you have encountered in modern fiction. Since first publication in 1995, it has gained an extraordinary reputation and went on to win the Sagittarius Award for 1996. 'Strange and compelling' Edmund White OBSERVER 'Very odd and original' Alan Hollinghurst HAMPSTEAD &amp; HIGHGATE EXPRESS (Books of the Year). 'A hilarious book. . . 'Rachel Cusk TIMES (Books of the Year) 'Vivid and peculiar. . Lock writes almost as elegantly as Alan Hollinghurst. . . . AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT is memorable. ' Kate Kellaway, OBSERVER

As Luck Would Have It

Samuel Lock's first novel, AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, was acclaimed by the critics as one of the most strikingly original first novels for years and went on to win the Sagittarius Award. NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, Lock's new novel, shares many of its qualities - an exact but curiously mysterious prose style, superb evocation of a time and place (in this case Chelsea's King's Road in the fifties), and range of deliciously eccentric characters. It is the story of Jason Callow, a mildly successful novelist, estranged from his wife and children. As Jason struggles to comprehend and overcome the inner crisis that grips him, he is observed by his neighbours, his family, his friends, all powerless, it seems, to alter the inexorable course of his destiny.

Nothing But The Truth

Kristen Roupenian

Random House presents the audiobook edition of You Know You Want This, written by Kristen Roupenian, read by Aubrey Plaza, Jayme Mattler, Molly Pope, Will Damron, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Emily Tremaine, Finn Wittrock, Amy Ryan, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Corey Brill, Jacques Royand and Kristen Roupenian. 
 
The truth was that if a woman bit a man in an office environment, there would be a strong assumption that the man had done something to deserve it . . . 
 
From the creator of Cat Person – the first short story to go viral – comes You Know You Want This, a compulsive collection about sex, dating and modern life. These are stories of women’s lives now. They also happen to be horror stories. In some, women endure the horror. In others, they inflict it. 
 
Here are women at work, at home, on dates, at the doctor’s, with their families and with their friends. Here are women grappling with desire, punishment, guilt and anger. These are stories that make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused. 
 
You Know You Want This shows why Kristen Roupenian is the most audacious new voice in American fiction. Funny, furious, sly and explicit, she takes a long, hard look at the messed-up power dynamic between men and women – and messes it up some more. 
 
(c) 2019, Kristen Roupenian (P) 2019 Penguin Random House LLC

You Know You Want This

Maria Gainza

‘A highly original, piercingly beautiful work, full of beautiful shocks… I felt like a door had been kicked open in my brain’ Johanna Thomas-Corr, Observer 
 
A woman searches Buenos Aires for the paintings that are her inspiration and her refuge. Her life -- she is a young mother with a complicated family -- is sometimes overwhelming. But among the canvases, often little-known works in quiet rooms, she finds clarity and a sense of who she is . . . 
 
 'I was reminded of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, enfolded in tender and exuberant personal narratives' 
Claire-Louise Bennett 
 
'This woman-guide, who goes from Lampedusa to The Doors with crushing elegance, is unforgettable' Mariana Enriquez 
 
'A dazzling combination of memoir, fiction and art book, like nothing you’ve ever read before’ Elle

Optic Nerve

Haruki Murakami

Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying short story. A taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami's 70th birthday. 
 
She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan on that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. 
 
One rainy Tokyo night, a waitress's uneventful twentieth birthday takes a strange and fateful turn when she's asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant's reclusive owner. Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami's 70th birthday. 
 
Birthday Girl is also available in Birthday Stories and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Birthday Girl

Mark Clemens

2018 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
With honesty and humour, Mark Clemens describes lessons he learned from a honeymoon spent recovering from terrible sickness in a Manhattan hotel room. Years later he considers the complex history of the building in which he and his new bride spent their convalescence. A carpentry shop, a brothel, a butcher's. As Mark reflects on the impermanence of New York and the impermanence of his marriage, he offers insights on history and personal growth.

In Sickness and In Health

Historical Notes from an Attempted Honeymoon

Stephen Groves

2018 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
A timely exploration of art on the boundary of Northern Ireland’s fragile peace. Stephen Groves follows a famed Protestant artist and his Catholic accomplice as they paint the walls of Belfast’s no man’s land. Through their lives, we see a glimpse of the deep social issues which plague Northern Ireland today. Epidemics of drugs and suicide – the symptoms of internalised trauma. Is peace simply the absence of violence?

The Painters of Belfast’s No Man’s Land

How Northern Ireland is Grappling with a Hollow Peace

Miriam Driessen

2018 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
The Restless Earth explores the lives of communities who remain sceptical of China’s big city allure. As the traditions of the New Year bring urban dwellers back to rural Qinghe, Miriam Driessen interrogates the tensions between the proud stoicism of rural family members and the ambitions of their returning relatives. Thoughtful and immersive, it is a portrait of a community whose existence is much more than a hurdle on the way to urbanization.

The Restless Earth

Rural China in Transition

When Edwin Carpenter runs away from a brutal father and a rural life, he plans to begin a new life in 1950s Chelsea. But he has a terrible secret, a gripping compulsion: he steals, obsessively, without interest in financial gain, and stores the stolen possessions in his flat. Slowly Edwin struggles to cure himself, and with the help of his lover tries to reconcile himself with his past.

The Whites of Gold

Dry January

Try Dry can help you feel happier and healthier in 2023. 
 
DID YOU KNOW foregoing our nightly tipple, even just for a few weeks, can lead to a life of: 
 
- Deeper sleep 
- Improved mood 
- Fresher skin 
- More energy 
- Extra cash 
 
Try Dry, with its invaluable resources from the experts at Alcohol Change UK, is your ticket to a hangover-free month and more. So what are you waiting for? Go on. Give Dry January a try. 
 
**Foreword by Lee Mack**

Try Dry

The Official Guide to a Month Off Booze

Richard Beard

A love story, in which all the events, people and places are taken from the contents of the "The Times" of 1st November, 1993. 
 
'It's the last day of the holidays and Spencer Kelly (12) wants to hold Hazel Burns (12) by the hand. This is the meaning of life. He wants to sit beside her on a sand dune and hold her hand and then kiss her. Just kissing, in a nice way, on her cheek perhaps and then a little bit at the top of her arms- If he can kiss her this once then he'll always have kissed her, and everything which follows will be different. It's to be the one moment which instantly changes everything.'

Damascus

Jay Mason is experiencing a crisis of faith. 
 
Disillusioned with his calling as a Deacon in the Anglican Church of Geneva, and estranged from his pregnant girlfriend, he's about to fall into the murky world of celebrity grave-robbing. His church has been bought by the shadowy antiquities dealer Joseph Moholy, who arrives to claim its most interesting asset: the toe bone of Thomas Becket. Moholy has a large collection of dubiously acquired relics and is keen to add to his collection. Jay, he decides, is the man to assist him. Jay finds that grave-robbing can be both lucrative and thrilling, however morally troubling for a man of God, and in Switzerland's cemeteries he finds a rich cast to work on: James Joyce, Richard Burton, John Calvin and Charlie Chaplin all receive his midnight attentions. But Moholy is a ruthless man whose ambitions are perilously high, and as Jay assists him in his search for the holy grail of relics, he puts himself and his loved ones in serious danger.

Dry Bones

'Feeling the way I do now, it's not a feeling I ever want to have again.' Andrew Flintoff speaks for a nation. 
 
The Ashes, 2006/07: Australia 5 England 0. The nightmare returns. 
 
For twenty years, Australia has produced competitors so gritty they order sandwiches with sand in, and not just at cricket. Fourth in the medals table at the Athens Olympics, Tour de France contenders, Davis Cup champions, and the Socceroos 3--1 winners over England. For Richard Beard, the football was the last straw. 
 
So, on the well-established principle that if you want something doing ..., he travelled down to Australia for seven rounds of hand-to-hand sporting combat, to find out just what makes the Australians so good, and how to beat them.

How to Beat the Australians

George Orwell

With an introduction by Kamila Shamsie 
 
‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’ 
 
GEORGE ORWELL is one of the world’s most famous writers and social commentators. Through his writing he exposed the unjust sufferings of the poor and unemployed, warned against totalitarianism and defended freedom of speech. 
 
This selection, from both his novels and non-fiction, charts his prescient and clear-eyed thinking on the subject of FREEDOM. It ranges from pieces on individual liberty, society and technology, to political liberty, revolution and the importance of free speech. Orwell's ambition to create a fairer and more egalitarian society is essential inspiration as we strive for freedom and equality in today's world. 
 
'If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

Orwell on Freedom

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

Passions Of The Mind

Selected Writings

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways to the art of Cézanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage.

Portraits In Fiction

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

Filters

Category

Age

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter