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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

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

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

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Emily M. Bender

Alex Hanna

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back. 
 
Is AI going to take over the world? Have scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care-workers? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? 
 
The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish', 'LOL', and 'definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used by tech corporations to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism, and devalue human creativity so they can replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Meanwhile, across healthcare, education, media, government and law-enforcement, ‘AI’ products are already being introduced that are unreliable, ineffective, unjust and dangerous. 
 
Packed with real-world examples, pithy arguments and expert insights, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.

The AI Con

How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

Eric Klinenberg

What unites us? What divides us? What do we value? Sociologist Eric Klinenberg had been studying what crises reveal about societies for over two decades when his home of New York became the deadliest hot spot of the global pandemic. In this book he tells the deeply reported stories of seven ordinary people trying to survive at the epicentre of the crisis, and combines them with data gathered from around the world to provide unprecedented insights into what societies are made of, why they come together or fall apart, and how they shape our lives.

2020

A Reckoning

Merlin Sheldrake

The smash-hit Sunday Times bestseller now illustrated with over 100 spectacular full-colour images, showcasing this wondrous and wildly various lifeform as never before 
 
'Astonishing ... it seems somehow to tip the natural world upside down' Observer 
 
'Completely mind-blowing ... reads like an adventure story' Sunday Times 
 
*WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY BOOK PRIZE 2021* 
*WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRTITING 2021* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021* 
 
The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature's processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself. 
 
'Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing' Robert Macfarlane 
'Urgent, astounding and necessary' Helen Macdonald 
'Gorgeous!' Margaret Atwood (on Twitter) 
'Wonderful' Nigella Lawson 
'This book is like one surprise after another' David Byrne 
'Uplifting' Jeanette Winterson 
 
* A Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Times, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, BBC Science Focus and Time Book of the Year *

Entangled Life (The Illustrated Edition)

Rachel E. Cargle

From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do. 
 
There are breaking points in all our lives when we realise that the way things have been done before just don't work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining - the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should - has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst for Cargle's personal transformation from a small-town Christian wife to an incisive queer feminist voice of a generation. 
 
In A Renaissance of Our Own, we witness the sometimes painful but always inspiring breaking points in Cargle's life that fostered a truer identity. These defining moments offer a blueprint for how we must all use our imagination - the space that sees beyond limits - to live in alignment with our highest values and to craft a world independent of oppressive structures, both personal and societal. Cargle now invites you to acknowledge ways of being that stem from societal expectations instead of your personal truth, and to embark on a renaissance of your own. She provides the very tools and prompts that she used to unearth her own truth, tools that opened her up to being a more authentic feminist and purpose-driven matriarchal leader. 
 
A Renaissance of Our Own gives us the courage to look at the world and say, 'I want something different.' It serves as a reminder of the power and possibility of reimagining a life that feels right, all the way down to the marrow of your bones.

A Renaissance of Our Own

A Memoir and Manifesto on Reimagining

Adam Wagner

0n 26 March 2020, a new law appeared. In eleven pages it locked down tens of millions of people, confined us to our homes, banned socialising, closed shops, gyms, pubs, places of worship. It restricted our freedoms more than any other law in history, justified by the rapid spread of a deadly new virus. 
 
You may have expected such a law to be fiercely debated in Parliament. But it wasn't debated at all. A state of emergency was declared, meaning the law came into force the moment it was signed. The emergency was supposed to be short but lasted for 763 days, allowing ministers to bring in, by decree over 100 new laws restricting freedoms more than any in history - laws that were almost never debated, changed at a whim and increasingly confused the public. Meanwhile, behind the doors of Downing Street, officials and even the Prime Minister broke the very laws they had created. 
 
This book tells the startling story of the state of emergency that brought about an Emergency State. A wake-up call from one of the UK's leading human rights barristers, Emergency State shows us why we must never take our rights for granted.

Emergency State

How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

Timothy Snyder

Nora Krug

A captivating graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting the arc toward authoritarianism. 
 
 Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is one of the essential books of recent years, using the darkest moments in twentieth-century history to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. These include a warning to be aware of how symbols used today could affect tomorrow, an urgent reminder to research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent, and an encouragement to use personalised and individualised speech rather than clichéd phrases when arguing a point 
 
 In this graphic edition, Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive style in Heimat - at once a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative and trove of memories - to breathe new life, colour and power into Snyder's modern classic, turning a quick-read pocket guide of lessons into a visually striking rumination and call for action. 
 
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In a time of great uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasises the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate participants in resistance.

On Tyranny Graphic Edition

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

A K Benjamin

What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care. 
 
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed. 
 
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends. 
 
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption. 
 
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth. 
 
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves. 
 
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement. 
 
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth. 
 
__________ 
 
Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad 
 
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing 
 
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee 
 
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

The Case for Love

My Adventures In Other Minds

Kamala Harris

Now adapted for young readers, Vice President Kamala Harris's empowering memoir about the values and inspirations that guided her life. 
 
With her election to the vice presidency, her election to the U.S. Senate, and her position as attorney general of California, Kamala Harris has blazed trails throughout her entire political career. But how did she achieve her goals? What values and influences guided and inspired her along the way? 
 
In this young readers edition of Kamala Harris's memoir, we learn about the impact that her family and community had on her life, and see what led her to discover her own sense of self and purpose. The Truths We Hold traces her journey as she explored the values she holds most dear-those of community, equality, and justice. An inspiring and empowering memoir, this book challenges us to become leaders in our own lives and shows us that with determination and perseverance all dreams are possible.

The Truths We Hold (Young Reader's Edition)

KATAPULT

'Terrifying yet funny, surprising yet predictable, simple yet poignant' Chris Packham 
 
A shocking but informative, eye-catching and witty book of maps that illustrate the perilous state of our planet. 
 
The maps in this book are often shocking, sometimes amusing, and packed with essential information: 
 
· Did you know that just 67 companies worldwide are responsible for 67 per cent of global greenhouse emissions? 
 
· Or that keeping a horse has the same carbon footprint as a 23,500-kilometre road trip? 
 
· Did you know how many countries use less energy than is consumed globally by downloading porn from the internet? 
 
· Do you know how much of the earth's surface has been concreted over? 
 
· Or how many trees would we have to plant to make our planet carbon-neutral? 
 
Presenting a wealth of innovative scientific research and data in stunning, beautiful infographics, 99 Maps to Save the Planet provides us with instant snapshots of the destruction of our environment. At one glance, we can see the precarious state of our planet - but also realise how easy it would be to improve it 
 
 Enlightening, a bit frightening, but definitely inspiring, 99 Maps to Save the Planet doesn't provide practical tips on how to save our planet: it just presents the facts. And the facts speak for themselves. Once we know them, what excuse do we have for failing to act?

99 Maps to Save the Planet

With an introduction by Chris Packham

Ibram X. Kendi

In this interactive workbook, one of the world's leading experts in antiracism, Ibram X. Kendi, author of the global bestseller How To Be an Antiracist, provides a series of questions, written exercises, quotes and provocations to help us absorb the key principles of antiracist behaviour and to embed them in our daily thoughts and actions. Kendi's powerful voice and gifts as a teacher combine with arresting graphic design to provide a vital tool for anyone who takes the necessity of being antiracist seriously. The journal can be used in groups as a teaching aid but is also ideal as a resource for individuals.

Be Antiracist

A Journal for Awareness, Reflection and Action

A virus is not human, but the reaction to it is a measure of humanity. 
 
America has not measured up well. Tens of thousands are dead for no reason. America is supposed to be about freedom, yet illness and fear make its citizens less free. After all, freedom is meaningless if we are too ill to think about our right to happiness or too weak to pursue it. So, if a government is making its people unhealthy it is also making them unfree. 
 
 On December 29, 2019, Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. As he clung to life he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right, but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning. And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched understaffed and undersupplied hospitals buckling under waves of coronavirus patients. The federal American government made matters worse through wilful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering. 
 
This passionate intervention outlines the lessons we must all learn, wherever we are, and finds glimmers of hope in dark times. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and truth, and planning for our children's future, can everyone be properly free. 
 
Freedom belongs to individuals. But to be free we need our health, and for our health we need one another.

Our Malady

Lessons in Liberty and Solidarity

Jeffrey Toobin

What happens when the President of the United States engages in criminal activity? He runs for re-election. 
 
Donald Trump's campaign chairman went to jail. So did his personal lawyer. His long-time political consigliere was convicted of serious federal crimes, and his National Security Advisor pleaded guilty to several more. Multiple Russian spies were indicted in absentia. Career intelligence agents and military officers were alarmed enough by his actions as President that they alerted senior government officials and ignited the impeachment process. Yet despite all this, a years-long inquiry led by Robert Mueller, and the third Presidential impeachment trial in American history, Donald Trump survived to run for presidency again. Why? 
 
Jeffrey Toobin's highly entertaining, definitive account of the Mueller investigation and the impeachment of the President takes readers behind the scenes of the epic legal and political struggle to call Trump to account for his misdeeds. Toobin recounts the mind-boggling twists and turns in the case – Trump's son met with a Russian operative promising Kremlin support; Trump paid a porn star $130,000 to hush up an affair; Rudy Giuliani and a pair of shady Ukrainian-American businessmen got the Justice Department to look at Russian-created conspiracy theories. Toobin shows how Trump's canny lawyers used Mueller's famous integrity against him, and how Trump's bullying and bluster cowed Republican legislators into ignoring the clear evidence of the impeachment hearings. 
 
Based on dozens of interviews with prosecutors in Mueller's office, Trump's legal team, Congressional investigators, White House staffers, and several of the key players, including some who are now in prison, True Crimes and Misdemeanours is a revelatory narrative that makes sense of the seemingly endless chaos of the Trump years. Filled with never-before-reported details of the high-stakes legal battles and political machinations, the book weaves a tale of a rogue President guilty of historic misconduct, and how he got away with it.

True Crimes and Misdemeanors

The Investigation of Donald Trump

Barton Gellman

'A remarkable, authentic and chilling exposé of a global conspiracy that reads like a first-rate conspiracy thriller: a book of gripping, compulsive and disturbing impact' William Boyd 
 
Dark Mirror is the ultimate inside account of the vast, global surveillance network that now pervades all our lives. 
 
Barton Gellman’s informant called himself ‘Verax’ – the truth-teller. It was only later that Verax unmasked himself as Edward Snowden. But Gellman’s primary role in bringing Snowden’s revelations to light, for which he shared the Pulitzer prize, is only the beginning of this gripping real-life spy story. Snowden unlocked the door: here Gellman describes what he found on the other side over the course of a years-long journey of investigation. It is also the story of his own escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries after he discovered his own name on a file in the NSA document trove and realised that he himself was under attack. 
 
Through a gripping narrative of paranoia, clandestine operations and jaw-dropping revelations, Dark Mirror delineates in full for the first time the hidden superstructure that connects government espionage with Silicon Valley and the most powerful corporation whose name you’ve never heard. Who is spying on us and why? Here are the answers.

Dark Mirror

Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

Jane Jacobs

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written. 
 
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground. 
 
The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in. 
 
'Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... Jacobs has a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind' New York Times Book Review

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Robert A Caro

‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times 
 
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. 
 
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Master of the Senate takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. Once the most august and revered body in politics, by the time Johnson arrived the Senate had become a parody of itself and an obstacle that for decades had blocked desperately needed liberal legislation. Caro shows how Johnson’s brilliance, charm and ruthlessness enabled him to become the youngest and most powerful Majority Leader in history and how he used his incomparable legislative genius – seducing both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives – to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction.

Master of the Senate

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 3)

‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times 
 
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. 
 
 In this second instalment we witness a momentous turning point in American politics: the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new. Following Johnson through his service in the Second World War, it describes the foundation and the myths of his long-concealed fortune. The explosive heart of the book is Caro’s revelation of the shocking true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, which Johnson won with the the ‘87 votes that changed history’.

Means of Ascent

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 2)

‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times 
 
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. 
 
This first instalment tells of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country, revealing in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy and ambition that set LBJ apart. It charts his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as a Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate and his attainment, nonetheless, at the age of thirty-one of the power for which he hungered.

The Path to Power

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 1)

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is 'simply one of the best non-fiction books in English of the last forty years' (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times): a riveting and timeless account of power, politics and the city of New York by ‘the greatest political biographer of our times’ (Sunday Times); chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time and by the Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize; a Sunday Times Bestseller; 'An outright masterpiece' (Evening Standard) 
 
The Power Broker tells the story of Robert Moses, the single most powerful man in New York for almost half a century and the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever once being elected to office, he created for himself a position of supreme and untouchable authority, allowing him to utterly reshape the city of New York, turning it into the city we know today, while at the same time blighting the lives of millions and remaining accountable to no one. 
 
First published in the USA in 1974, this monumental classic was a Sunday Times bestseller when published in the UK in 2015 and is now widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest books of its kind.

The Power Broker

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest's The Great Terror is the book that revealed the horrors of Stalin's regime to the West. This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. 
 
One of the most important books ever written about the Soviet Union, The Great Terror revealed to the West for the first time the true extent and nature Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, in which around a million people were tortured and executed or sent to labour camps on political grounds. Its publication caused a widespread reassessment of Communism itself. 
 
This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition gathers together the wealth of material added by the author in the decades following its first publication and features a new foreword by leading historian Anne Applebaum, explaining the continued relevance of this momentous period of history and of this classic account.

The Great Terror

Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written. 
 
More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First World War. 
 
Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow describes how millions of peasants in the USSR were dispossessed and deported as a result of the abolition of private property, and how millions in the newly established ‘collective’ farms of the Ukraine and other regions were then deliberately starved to death through impossibly high quotas, the removal of all other sources of food and their isolation from outside help. 
 
With the publication of this and his earlier book, The Great Terror, which revealed the truth about Stalin’s political purges, Robert Conquest revealed to the West the staggering human cost of the Soviet regime.

The Harvest of Sorrow

Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine

Jerry White

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert. 
 
London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. 
 
In Jerry White’s acclaimed history of London’s magnificent and boisterous rebirth we witness the astonishing drama of daily life in the midst of this burgeoning city.

London In The Eighteenth Century

A Great and Monstrous Thing

Philip Caputo

The first memoir of the Vietnam War and an all-time classic of war literature 
|40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION| 
 
In March 1965, Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home - physically whole but emotionally destroyed, his youthful idealism shattered. 
 
A decade later, having reported first-hand the very final hours of the war, Caputo sat down to write ‘simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them’. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time. 
____________________ 
 
‘A singular and marvellous work – a soldier’s-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in this hellish jungle’ The New York Times 
 
‘Unparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Heller’ Kevin Powers 
 
‘To call this the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it will make the strongest among us weep’ Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
‘Caputo’s troubled, searching meditations on the love and the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I have read in modern literature’ New York Review of Books 
 
‘Superb. At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel’ New Statesman

A Rumor of War

Stamped from the Beginning is a redefining history of anti-Black racist ideas that dramatically changes our understanding of the causes and extent of racist thinking itself. 
 
** Winner of the US National Book Award** 
 
Its deeply researched and fast-moving narrative chronicles the journey of racist ideas from fifteenth-century Europe to present-day America through the lives of five major intellectuals - Puritan minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis - showing how these ideas were developed, disseminated and eventually enshrined in American society. 
 
Contrary to popular conception, it reveals that racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era, including anti-slavery and pro-civil rights advocates, who used their gifts and intelligence wittingly or otherwise to rationalize and justify existing racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. Seen in this piercing new light, racist ideas are shown to be the result, not the cause, of inequalities that stretch back over centuries, brought about ultimately through economic, political and cultural self-interest. 
 
Stamped from the Beginning offers compelling new answers to some of the most troubling questions of our time. In forcing us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about racism and also about ourselves, it leads us to a true understanding on which to build a real foundation for change. 
 
**INCLUDED IN BARACK OBAMA'S BLACK HISTORY MONTH READING LIST**

Stamped from the Beginning

The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
‘A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close’ Rachel Maddow 
 
'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer 
 
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. 
 
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. 
 
History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. 
 
Now is a good time to do so.

On Tyranny

Orlando Figes

Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A People's Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available today. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Andrew Marr 
 
Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People's Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded. 
 
Illustrated with over 100 photographs and now including a new introduction that reflects on the revolution's centennial legacy, A People's Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the most important events in modern history. 
 
'The most moving account of the Russian Revolution since Doctor Zhivago' Independent

A People's Tragedy

The Russian Revolution – centenary edition with new introduction

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. 
 
London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. 
 
In Jerry White's dazzling history we witness the city's unparalleled metamorphosis over the course of the century through the daily lives of its inhabitants. We see how Londoners worked, played, and adapted to the demands of the metropolis during this century of dizzying change. The result is a panorama teeming with life.

London In The Nineteenth Century

Jerry White's London in the Twentieth Century, Winner of the Wolfson Prize, is a masterful account of the city’s most tumultuous century by its leading expert. 
 
In 1901 no other city matched London in size, wealth and grandeur. Yet it was also a city where poverty and disease were rife. For its inhabitants, such contradictions and diversity were the defining experience of the next century of dazzling change. 
 
In the worlds of work and popular culture, politics and crime, through war, immigration and sexual revolution, Jerry White’s richly detailed and captivating history shows how the city shaped their lives and how it in turn was shaped by them.

London in the Twentieth Century

A City and Its People

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age. 
 
Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience's deepest desires and fears, and by reconnecting with this historic reality we are able to experience the true character of the playwright himself. Greenblatt traces Shakespeare's unfolding imaginative generosity - his ability to inhabit others, to confer upon them his own strength of spirit, to make them truly live as independent beings as no other artist has ever done. 
 
Digging deep into the vital links between the playwright and his world, Will in the World provides the fullest account ever written of the living, breathing man behind the masterpieces.

Will In The World

How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

David Van Reybrouck

Whenever there are elections, the results are the same: fear-mongering, division and broken promises. Against Elections offers a new diagnosis &ndash; and an ancient remedy. 
 
'Excellent . . . Why does our system keep electing people whose incomes, assets, interests and psychology are hugely at variance with ours? Because that is what it is designed to do' George Monbiot, Guardian 
 
'Very persuasive . . . invigorating' Daniel Finkelstein, The Times 
 
As this ingenious book shows, the original purpose of elections was not democracy: it was to exclude the people from power by appointing an elite to govern over them. 
 
In fact, for most of its 3000-year history, democracy did not involve elections at all: members of the public were appointed to positions in government through a combination of volunteering and lottery. 
 
Based on studies and trials from around the globe, this hugely influential manifesto presents the practical case for a true democracy &ndash; one that actually works. 
 
Urgent, heretical and completely convincing, Against Elections leaves only one question to be answered: what are we waiting for? 
 
'Riveting' Irish Examiner 
'Persuasive' Financial Times 
'A convincing case' Observer

Against Elections

The Case for Democracy

Dominique Moisi

Samuel Huntington's landmark book, The Clash of Civilizations, presented a vision of a world divided by cultural differences, national interests, and political ideologies. In The Geopolitics of Emotion, Dominique Moïsi brilliantly demonstrates that the world is nowadays more likely to be shaped by the 'clash of emotions'. 
 
Moïsi contends that both Europe and the United States are dominated by a fear of the 'other' and by the loss of their national identity and purpose. For Muslims and Arabs, the combination of historical grievances, exclusion from the economic boon of globalization, and civil and religious warfare has created a culture of humiliation that is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. 
 
And as the West and the Muslim world lock horns, Asia, able to concentrate on building a better future, has come to embody 'the culture of hope'. 
 
By making clear the driving emotions behind today's headlines, Dominique Moisi offers a better understanding of the world we live in and perhaps a more constructive approach to the conflicts that plague us.

The Geopolitics of Emotion

How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World

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.

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