Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992 and he has published two books of stories and ten further novels, most recently Missing Fay (2017), and six poetry collections. 
 
 
www.adamthorpe.net

Adam Thorpe

Adam Tooze is the author of the highly praised Crashed, The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction, all published by Allen Lane. He has been the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Tooze has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

Adam Tooze

Adam Usden

Adam Wagner

Adam Wasson

Adam Weymouth's work has been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, The Observer and the BBC. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Writing Centre as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.

Adam Weymouth

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg (1937-95) was born on the outskirts of Warsaw. His science fiction writing is largely focused around the consequences of totalitarianism. Although largely unread during his lifetime, after his suicide in 1995 his work began to receive major critical attention. He is now considered to be, along with Stanislaw Lem, one of Poland's greatest science fiction writers.

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Ade Edmondson

Adele Lang

Adele Nozedar is an author and photographer. Previously, she was in a cult indie band, then ran her own indie record label and became A&amp;R Director/General Manager of a major record company. 
 
Her wide-ranging passions are reflected in her books, which include The Hedgerow Handbook (2012), The Signs and Symbols Sourcebook (2011), The Secret Language of Birds (2006), and The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans (2013).

Adele Nozedar

Adele Puhn

Adeline Yen Mah

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer and book critic. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic,Slate,The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adelle Waldman

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an Indian illustrator based in France. She likes experimenting with bright, happy colours. She grew up reading fairytales, watching animated films and imagining adventure stories, and her style is an embodiment of her Indian heritage and western culture. She loves animals and taking long walks on the beach, but she is never too far away from a pencil and a paper to draw her perception of the world.

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand

Aditya Chakrabortty

Adiva Geffen is a bestselling writer and playwright. Her plays have appeared on major stages in Israel, she lectures and leads numerous writing workshops and she is a board member of the Israeli Writers’ Association. 
 
 Geffen started out as a special-education teacher, before serving as the spokesperson for the Habima National Theatre for more than a decade. She founded and subsequently led the Israeli Theatre Award for ten years, and now serves as head of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world. 
 
 Born in Haifa, Israel and the mother of three sons, Geffen now lives in Tel Aviv with her partner Aharon Meidan.

Adiva Geffen

Adnan Sarwar, 35, is a former British soldier who served in the Iraq War.  He has since worked as a military consultant to film and is a writer based in London.  Read more at www.adnansarwar.com / @adnansarwar

Adnan Sarwar

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Loos (1877-1933) was a leading Austro-Hungarian architect, perhaps most famous for the revolutionary 'Loos House' opposite the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, which caused outrage when it was built in 1912, and the wonderful American Bar, also in Vienna. He wrote extensively on architecture and design, working in reaction to the elaborate mass of decoration celebrated by the Vienna Secession movement.

Adolf Loos

Adolfo García Ortega

Adomnan of Iona

Adonis

Adriaan Van Dis

Adrian Bean

Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer and performer from London, best known for his comedy sketches which, explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Adrian's work has earned him nearly 20 million followers across social media and has been featured in CNN, The Times and Vogue. Adrian was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Just For Laughs, and his one-man play Inside Everyone sold out its debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival prior to opening.

Adrian Bliss

Adrian Desmond

Adrian Edmondson

Adrian Fort

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Simon Hughes

Cricket defines Englishness like no other national pastime. From its earliest origins in the sixteenth century (or an early version played by shepherds called creag in the 1300s), through the formation of the MCC and the opening of Lord's cricket ground in 1787, to the spread of county cricket in the next century, when the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was first published and the Ashes series was born, this simple sport of bat and ball has captured the imagination of the masses. 
 
Throughout its 500-year history, cricket has been a mirror for society as a whole, reflecting the changes that have brought us from the quintessential village green to Freddie Flintoff's pedalo, from W G Grace to Monty Panesar, via a fair number of eccentrics, heroes and downright villains. 
 
William Hill Award-winning writer Simon Hughes, no mean player himself, has lived and breathed cricket his whole life and now takes his analytical skills and typically irreverent eye to charting the history of English cricket. But this is no dry, dusty tome. It is the story of the mad characters who inhabit the game, the extraordinary lengths people will go to to watch and play it, the tale of a national obsession. It debunks the myth of cricket sportsmanship, showing the origins of sledging and match-fixing in centuries of subterfuge, corruption and violence. And it takes us beyond sport, to the heart of what it really means to be English.

And God Created Cricket

Richard Dawkins

Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core on publication in 1859. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke but he would surely have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity. 
 
In The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of 'Intelligent Design' and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection. Like a detective arriving on the scene of a crime, he sifts through fascinating layers of scientific facts and disciplines to build a cast-iron case: from the living examples of natural selection in birds and insects; the 'time clocks' of trees and radioactive dating that calibrate a timescale for evolution; the fossil record and the traces of our earliest ancestors; to confirmation from molecular biology and genetics. All of this, and much more, bears witness to the truth of evolution. 
 
The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is now flourishing as never before, especially in America. In Britain and elsewhere in the world, teachers witness insidious attempts to undermine the status of science in their classrooms. Richard Dawkins provides unequivocal evidence that boldly and comprehensively rebuts such nonsense. At the same time he shares with us his palpable love of the natural world and the essential role that science plays in its interpretation. Written with elegance, wit and passion, it is hard-hitting, absorbing and totally convincing.

The Greatest Show on Earth

The Evidence for Evolution

Carolyn Slaughter

Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, but for the last twelve years she has been completely silent. She had become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This powerful memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her traumatic childhood. 
 
Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert. Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of the Kalahari itself for solace. 
 
The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book. What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father, siblings. Despite its sometimes harrowing contents, it is a work of great, dangerous beauty.

Before The Knife

Memories Of An African Childhood

John Boyle

John Boyle was born and raised in Scotland but he could never feel Scottish. His parents were poor immigrants from the West of Ireland who came to Scotland to find work and eventually settled in Paisley, where John was the first of six children. 
 
Galloway Street beautifully captures the poverty and the rough humour of the family's life in the Paisley tenements, the songs and stories of their Irish Catholic relatives and the often uneasy relationships with their Scottish Protestant neighbours. It also shows how the boy is marked at the age of ten by an extended stay with his spinster aunt on the remote island of Achill, as he begins to understand the life his parents left behind. 
 
This is a book about exile and belonging, about the poignancy of growing up Irish in Scotland, so close to the place your mother still calls home. It is a truthful, funny and moving evocation of a unique place and time, experienced through the eyes of a child.

Galloway Street

John O'Farrell

Following his hugely popular account of the previous 2000 years, John O'Farrell now comes bang up to date with a hilarious modern history asking 'How the hell did we end up here?' 
 
An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain informs, elucidates and laughs at all the bizarre events, ridiculous characters and stupid decisions that have shaped Britain's story since 1945; leaving the Twenty-First Century reader feeling fantastically smug for having the benefit of hindsight.

An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain

or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always

Andrew Parker

The description of creation as it appears in the Bible makes no sense. The first page of Genesis features no humans at all. The substance of heaven and earth arise spontaneously at God's command. Light is mentioned twice, whales appear before birds. Vegetation appears after light, but before day is separated from night. 
 
Could it be, however, that the creation story in Genesis was written as it was because that is in fact the correct order of events at the beginning of the world? Can science - while agreeing with Darwinian evolution, the big bang theory and the complexity and deep age of the universe - prove the order of events as described in the Bible to be true? 
 
In The Genesis Enigma, respected scientist Andrew Parker brings the latest discoveries to bear on this controversial and contentious question and reveals in stunning detail how the world and all of the life on it came into being.

The Genesis Enigma

John McCarthy

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

Tim Cahill

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

David E Sanger

During his seven years covering the White House for the New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent David E. Sanger has had extraordinary and unrivaled access to presidents, world leaders and secretaries of state. Here, in The Inheritance, he gathers together all the evidence he has uncovered, both on and off the record, to offer us an insider's look at the many complex and oftentimes terrifying challenges that Obama now faces. Uncovering in fascinating detail the inner workings of the US military and intelligence communities, and describing the huge cost of the decision to invest so much of America, and Britain's, future on what once seemed like an easy mission in Iraq, Sanger talk us through a war gone bad in Afganistan, a power-hungry Iran on the brink of nuclear weapons, an unstable alliance with Pakistan, a rising China and a the worldwide economic crisis. 
 
Mapping the political landscape that Obama has inherited, this book examines the international arenas that will remain the focus of the entire western world throughout the years to come, and gives us a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Situation Room of the presidency. If you want to understand the world today in all its complexity, there's only one book for you: The Inheritance by David E. Sanger.

The Inheritance

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

Niall Edworthy

Petra Cramsie

Are optimists just reckless dreamers? Are pessimists miserable doom-mongers or just erring on the side of caution? Is the glass half empty or half full? 
 
Brilliantly compiled and beautifully written, this is a rich anthology of evidence from both sides of any argument. Covering everything from Beauty to Happiness, Patriotism to Walking, it is the perfect tool for squabbling families, a counterbalance for arguing couples and a mine of detail for the quarrelsome. 
 
The Optimist on the Afterlife: My heaven will be filled with wonderful young men and dukes. (Dame Barbara Cartland) 
And the Pessimist: 'That's what Hell will be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead. (Samuel Beckett)

The Optimist's/Pessimist's Handbook

A companion to hope and despair

Steve Lopez

When Steve Lopez sees Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles's skid row, he finds it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years ago, Ayers was a promising student at Julliard - ambitious, charming and hugely talented - until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless and paranoid, but glimmers of his earlier brilliance are still there. 
 
Over time, the two men form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayer's life. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. Their friendship will changes both of their lives in ways that neither could predict. Poignant and ultimately hopeful, The Soloist is a beautifully told story of devotion in the face of seemingly unbeatable challenges, and the inspiring power of music.

The Soloist

Rubina Ali

My name is Rubina Ali. I don't know when my birthday is, and nor does my father, but I do know that I am nine years old. 
 
Rubina is a one-in-a-million-star. After being plucked from among the five-hundred slum children who auditioned for Danny Boyle's multi-Oscar-winning film SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, she saw her fairytale dream of stardom come true. But what does the future hold for a little girl now trapped between Hollywood glamour and the bleak poverty of her Mumbai slum? 
 
Now she tells her own incredible story, from playing marbles with her friends beside the sewers of Garib Nagar , to dancing along to the Bollywood films she and her family watch on their old television set. Rubina brings alive a world of wastelands and rat-infested shanty dwellings, and shows us her home near the raliway line where she lives with her beloved father and siblings. 
She tells us how her co-star came to be covered head to toe in chocolate, and how she came to meet a tall pale lady named Nicole Kidman. But how has this little girl's intimate world changed since Hollywood came knocking? And what will happen to her next? 
 
Royalties from this book will be shared with the author and Medecins du Monde in India.

Slumgirl Dreaming

My Journey to the Stars

Carl Hiaasen

"Every weekend, thousands of otherwise rational men and women are cursing, kicking at divots and smashing expensively milled putters against the trunks of immovable hardwood trees. These players go home in a toxic funk to inflict gloom upon their loved ones until the following Saturday, when they rush back to the golf course and do it all over again." 
 
In the summer of 2005, Carl Hiaasen picked up a golf club again for the first time in 32 years. He was not the best of players in 1973, and had certainly not got any younger in the intervening period. Undeterred, and weighed down by an increasing quantity of golf equipment and game-enhancing products acquired from adverts on The Golf Channel, who can see a sucker coming, Carl was soon hacking and shanking his way around the courses of Florida, and his obsession with the sport was rekindled. Animals were harmed during the making of this book. 
 
Over the course of the next 18 months, Carl's game got better, then worse, then slightly better, then much worse again, and he even managed to jinx Tiger Woods. On the way to finally summoning up the courage to compete in an actual tournament himself, Carl details the hilarious consequences of his misguided belief that he could actually play the game. We also learn that Justin Timberlake has a better golf handicap (6) than Bob Dylan (17), that Eagle Trace golf course contains not one trace of an eagle, and that Mind Drive capsules are not necessarily a good idea. 
 
But through all the misery and frustration (save the odd glorious shot), golf took up residence in Carl's heart again. Fairway to Hell is the ultimate tale of the trials and tribulations of the amateur golfer, but also the heart-warming story of how the game brought together the generations of the Hiaasen family.

Fairway To Hell

Bill Bryson

What is the difference between cant and jargon, or assume and presume? What is a fandango? How do you spell supersede? Is it hippy or hippie? 
 
These questions really matter to Bill Bryson, as they do to anyone who cares about the English language. Originally published as The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors, Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors has now been completely revised and updated for the twenty-first century by Bill Bryson himself. Here is a very personal selection of spellings and usages, covering such head-scratchers as capitalization, plurals, abbreviations and foreign names and phrases. Bryson also gives us the difference between British and American usages, and miscellaneous pieces of essential information you never knew you needed, like the names of all the Oxford colleges, or the correct spelling of Brobdingnag. 
 
An indispensable companion to all those who write, work with the written word, or who just enjoy getting things right, it gives rulings that are both authoritative and commonsense, all in Bryson's own inimitably goodhumoured way.

Bryson's Dictionary: for Writers and Editors

Tim Cahill brings 'em back alive. Not only has he survived fantastic journeys through the Himalayan rapids, the Grand Terror of Montana, and Dian Fossey's forbidden zone, he writes about them, too. Fearless and hell-bent on destroying all obstacles in his path, Cahill takes us to places rarely seen and barely endured.  All admonitions and warnings be damned: Tim Cahill dares us to follow him wherever danger and craziness lurk.  And to laugh as he prevails.

A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg

Driving 15,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in a record-breaking twenty-three and a half days, Tim Cahill's Road Fever is a hilarious account of a preposterous journey, a breathtaking tour of North and South America, as well as a veritable how-to for pulling off cheeky scams to get ahead. All in the spirit of getting his name written into the record books. 
 
Told with the humour, knowledge, and propriety-be-damned attitude that have made his other adventure books such critical and popular successes, Cahill embarks on his fastest, funniest trip yet. He reveals everything there is to know about surviving South America on a diet of beef jerky and Farmer's milk shakes and getting General Motors and the Guinness Book of World Records to subsidize his wanderlust.

Road Fever

Jane Mulvagh

Madresfield Court is an arrestingly romantic stately home in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. It has been continuously owned and lived in by the same family, the Lygons, back to the time of the Domesday Book, and, unusually, remains in the family's hands to this day. Inside, it is a very private, unmistakably English, manor house; a lived-in family home where the bejewelled sits next to the threadbare. The house and the family were the real inspiration for Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh was a regular visitor, and based his story of the doomed Marchmain family on the Lygons. 
Never before open to the public, the doors of Madresfield have now swung open to allow Jane Mulvagh to explore its treasures and secrets. And so the rich, dramatic history of one landed family unfolds in parallel with the history of England itself over a millennium, from the Lygon who conspired to overthrow Queen Mary in the Dudley plot; through the tale of the disputed legacy that inspired Dickens' Bleak House; to the secret love behind Elgar's Enigma Variations; and the story of the scandal of Lord Beauchamp, the disgraced 7th Earl.

Madresfield

One house, one family, one thousand years

Eric Weiner

What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... 
 
After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. 
 
·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) 
·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. 
·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! 
·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? 
 
In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.

The Geography of Bliss

Many of us were put off history by the dry and dreary way it was taught at school. Back then 'The Origins of the Industrial Revolution' somehow seemed less compelling than the chance to test the bold claim on Timothy Johnson's 'Shatterproof' ruler.But here at last is a chance to have a good laugh and learn all that stuff you feel you really ought to know by now... 
 
In this 'Horrible History for Grown Ups' you can read how Anglo-Saxon liberals struggled to be positive about immigration; 'Look I think we have to try and respect the religious customs of our new Viking friends - oi, he's nicked my bloody ox!'Discover how England's peculiar class system was established by some snobby French nobles whose posh descendents still have wine cellars and second homes in the Dordogne today. And explore the complex socio-economic reasons why Britain's kings were the first in Europe to be brought to heel; (because the Stuarts were such a useless bunch of untalented, incompetent, arrogant, upper-class thickoes that Parliament didn't have much choice.) 
 
A book about then that is also incisive and illuminating about now, '2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge', is an hilarious, informative and cantankerous journey through Britain' fascinating and bizarre history.As entertaining as a witch burning, and a lot more laughs.

An Utterly Impartial History of Britain

(or 2000 Years Of Upper Class Idiots In Charge)

Sandy Tolan

'At a time when peace seems remote and darkness deepens, this lucid, humane, hopeful book shines like a ray of light' The Times 
 
'Extraordinary... Tolan's narrative provides a much needed human dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.' Washington Post 
 
The true story of a friendship spanning religious divisions and four decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict 
 
In the summer of 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Palestinian men ventured into the town of Ramla in Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes, from which they and their families had been driven out nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had the door slammed in his face, one found that his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir, was met at the door by a young woman named Dalia, who invited him in... 
 
This poignant encounter is the starting point for the story of two families - one Arab, one Jewish - which spans the fraught modern history of the region. In the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard of his childhood home, Bashir sees a symbol of occupation; Dalia, who arrived in 1948 as an infant with her family, as a fugitive from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust. Both are inevitably swept up in the fates of their people and the stories of their lives form a microcosm of more than half a century of Israeli-Palestinian history. 
 
What began as a simple meeting between two young people grew into a dialogue lasting four decades. The Lemon Tree offers a much needed human perspective on this seemingly intractable conflict and reminds us not only of all that is at stake, but also of all that is possible.

The Lemon Tree

Emma Brockes

Film musicals: you either love them or they make you want to kill yourself slowly with plastic cutlery. Nothing has the power to lift your heart or turn your stomach like Howard Keel in fake sideburns singing Bless Your Beautiful Hide or Julie Andrews singing...well, just about anything.There are few situations where the question What would Barbra do? doesn't have relevance in a world which is much better lived to a soundtrack of show-tunes. 
 
This is a book for people who know that 
* People don't tend to die in musicals, but those who do deserve it 
* True love waits long enough for an element of mistaken identity to be introduced (especially if one of the couple is a Nazi) 
* Women carry the show. 
* Talented women wind up alone... 
* ...But they have the consolation of the torch song, which in Hollywood musicals is more fulfilling than a husband.

What Would Barbra Do?

Isn't it always the way? You wait ages for one purple flour-filled condom and then three come along at once. Of course the correct procedure for a chemical attack in the House of Commons would have been for MPs to remain in the chamber and remove all items of clothing.I'm not sure which is the more horrific vision; anthrax all over London or Nicholas Soames slipping out of his Y-fronts while chatting to a naked Ann Widdecombe. 
 
Here at last is the third collection of John O'Farrell's immensely popular Guardian columns - the final part of the trilogy in which he discovers that Margaret Thatcher is actually his mother. Contained within these covers are a hundred funny, satirical essays on subjects as diverse as Man's ascent from the apes and the re-election of George W. Bush.Plus there is a full account of O'Farrell's heroic but slightly less successful attempt to capture his Tory home town for socialism.He claims that identity fraud has got so bad that an audacious impostor using the name A.L. Blair even managed to get himself a Labour Party card by posing a left-wing champion of wealth distribution and civil rights.He asks why a Blackberry isn't compatible with an Apple.And find out why the Queen didn't go to her own son's wedding; 'What happened to that other girl you were seeing?' 'Mother, we got divorced and then she died in a car crash, remember?' 'Well sometimes you have to work at these things dear...'

I Have A Bream

Jason Webster

After twelve years in Spain, Jason Webster had developed a deep love for his adopted homeland; his life there seemed complete. But when he and his Spanish wife moved into an idyllic old farmhouse in the mountains north of Valencia, by chance he found an unmarked mass grave from the Spanish Civil War on his doorstep.Spurred to investigate the history of the Civil War, a topic many of his Spanish friends still seemed to treat as taboo, he began to uncover a darker side to the country. Witness to a brutal fist-fight sponsored by remnants of Franco's Falangists, arrested and threatened by the police in the former HQ of the Spanish Foreign Legion, sheltered by a beautiful transvestite, shunned by locals, haunted by ghosts and finally robbed of his identity, Webster encountered a legacy of cruelty and violence that seems to linger on seventy years after the bloody events of that war. 
 
As in Webster's previous books, Duende and Andalus, ¡Guerra! reveals the essence of modern Spain, which few outsiders ever manage to see. Fascinating true stories from the Civil War, vividly retold as he travels around the country. Yet the more Webster unveils of the passions that set one countryman against another, the more he is led to wonder: could the dark, primitive currents that ripped the country apartin the 1930s still be stirring under the sophisticated, worldly surface of today's Spain?

Guerra

Stephen Clarke

Have you been taken to what you've been assured is the perfect house deep in the French countryside, only to find there's no electricity or running water? Gone to the doctor with a nasty cough, and been diagnosed with a rather more personal complaint? Walked into an half-empty restaurant, only to be told that it's complet? 
 
If the answer to any of the above is oui, Talk to the Snail is the book for you.Find out how to get served in a restaurant; the best way to deal with French hypochondria; learn the language of love, sex and suppositories (not necessarily in that order); it's all here in this funny, informative, seriously useful guide on how to get what you really want from the French. 
 
With advice on essential phrases and bons mots to cover all eventualities, and illustrated with witty real-life anecdotes, Talk to the Snail is a book that no self-respecting Francophile - or Francophobe - can afford to be without. 
 
Don't go to France without reading this book. 
And don't even think of buying a house there.

Talk to the Snail

John Pilger

John Pilger is one of the world's pre-eminent investigative journalists and documentary film-makers. His best-selling books of reportage, which include Heroes and Hidden Voices, have in the words of Noam Chomsky 'been a beacon of light in often dark times'. 
 
In Freedom Next Time he looks at five countries, in each of which a long struggle for freedom has taken place; in each the people, having shed blood and dreams, are still waiting. In Afghanistan, Iraq and South Africa there has been the promise of hope, and even an 'official' freedom, but the reality of these divided societies is that they are still waiting for real freedom. In Palestine, the cycle of violence continues with no resolution in sight. And the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, is a microcosm of the ruthlessness of great powers. The island was sold by the British to the American military in the 1960s. The indigenous population, descended from slaves, were forcibly removed to the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius. They have continued to fight for the return of their homeland ever since - three years ago the High Court granted them the right of return, but this has subsequently been blocked. The island remains the US's third biggest military base; a base from which they are able to launch attacks against the Middle East. 
 
Once again John Pilger gives a voice to the people living through these momentous times and, in gripping detail, shows us the lives behind the headlines.

Freedom Next Time

Billy Bragg

What does it mean to be English? What does it mean to be British? Is the cross of St George a proud symbol of a great tradition, or the badge of a neo-Nazi? In a world where British citizens can lay bombs to kill their countrymen, where religious fundamentalism is on the increase and where the BNP are somehow part of the democratic process, what does patriotism actually mean? 
 
Our identity can change depending on what company we are in. For example, someone could describe themselves British to one person, Scottish to another and, say, a Londoner to another, and be right every time. But problems arise when someone tries to tell you what you are, based on your skin tone, religion, accent, surname, or whatever. 
 
This book is Billy Bragg's urgent, eloquent and passionate response to the events of 7 July 2005, when four bombs tore through a busy morning in London, killing 52 innocent people and injuring many more. 
A firm believer in toleration and diversity, he felt himself hemmed in by fascists on one side and religious fanatics on the other. The suicide bombers were all British-born and well integrated into our multicultural society. Yet they felt no compunction in murdering and maiming their fellow citizens. Inclusivity is important, but without a sense of belonging to accompany it, what chance social cohesion... 
 
But where does a sense of belonging come from? Can it be conferred by a legal document? Is it a matter of blood and soil? Can it be taught? Is it nature or nurture? The Progressive Patriot is a book we all need to read. It pulls no punches in its insights and its radical vision offers a positive hope for a country teetering on the brink of catastrophe.

The Progressive Patriot

Liza Campbell

Liza Campbell was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle, as featured in Macbeth. Her father Hugh, the 25th Thane of Cawdor, inherited good looks,wealth, an ancient title, three stately homes and 100,000 acres of land. But increasingly overwhelmed by his enormous responsibilities, Hugh turned to drink, drugs, and extramarital affairs. Until the castle was transformed into an arena of reckless profligacy, abuse and terrifying domestic violence, leading to the abrupt termination of a legacy that had been passed down through the family for six hundred years. 
 
Title Deeds is a dark yet funny, contemporary fairy story about growing up in an old family where ancient curses and grisly past events are matched by the turmoil of a confusing and frightening present. Liza Campbell shows how even enormous wealth and privilege can hide unspoken abuse and misery: and what it is like to watch your father destroy himself and everything he holds dear.

Title Deeds

Germaine Greer

THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE FEMALE EUNUCH, GERMAINE GREER RETURNS TO THE SUBJECT OF FEMINISM, WITH THE BOOK SHE VOWED SHE WOULD NEVER WRITE. 
Germaine Greer proclaims that the time has come to get angry again! Modern feminism has become the victim of unenlightened complacency, and what started out in the Sixties as a movement for liberation has become one that has sought and settled for equality. 
 
With fiery rhetoric, authoritative insight, outrageous humour and broad-ranging debate, Greer shows that, although women have indeed come a very long way in the last thirty years, the notion of our 'having it all' has disguised the persistent discrimination and exploitation that continues to exist for women in the basic areas of health, sex, politics, economics and marketing. 
 
Erudite, eccentric, provocative and invigorating, Germaine Greer once again sets the agenda for the future of feminism. Here is all the polemical power that sold over a million copies of The Female Eunuch and kept its author at the heart of controversy ever since. The Whole Woman was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller for five weeks and was hailed by the critics as a 'polemical bomb' (Guardian) and as required reading for thinking adults everywhere.

The Whole Woman

The No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller

By Hand

Byrne & Balzano

Described by his creator as 'short, fat and primitive', Evert Bäckström is a rather unique homicide detective but he is undeniably the real deal with it comes to modern policing. 
 
This series is blackly comic, thrillingly compelling and utterly real.

Bäckström

CAMP GOLD

Caedmon Aisquith

Cairo Trilogy

Can You Solve the Murder?

Capital

Care Bears

Cartoon Kid

Cath Kidston

A crime-fiction series with a twist - private investigator Catherine Berlin, is a damaged soul struggling with a heroin addiction, but she still manages to do her best, even when her own neck is on the chopping block.

Catherine Berlin

Celeste Express

Central Intelligence

Chaos and Flame

Charles Hayden

Charles Paris Dramatisations

Charlie Bass

Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

Charlie and Lola

Cherry Blossoms After Winter

Chevalier

Chinese Cinderella

Life at Tanglewood isn't all sleepovers, picnics and beach parties. Cherry, Summer, Skye, Coco and Honey all face some tough life challenges in this delicious series from bestselling girls' favourite Cathy Cassidy. Every sister has a secret to share. Which one will be your favourite?

Chocolate Box Girls

Christmas

Chronicles of Vladimir Tod

Churchminister

Welcome inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, and learn how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.

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