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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Charles King

'A delicious history of music, power, love, genius, royalty and adventure. Unforgettable' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFORE 
 
'A mesmerising journey through one of the most fascinating and creative moments in human history' AMANDA FOREMAN 
 
London - Dublin, 1741-42. 
An actress mired in scandal plans her escape from an abusive husband. 
A penniless sea captain sets out to rescue the city’s abandoned infants. 
An African Muslim and former captive in the colonies becomes a celebrity. 
A grieving political dissident seeks release from his torment. 
And a great composer to kings – George Frideric Handel – now ill and straining to keep an audience’s attention, faces a decision that will secure his place in history. 
 
'An absolute delight, beautifully told' PETER FRANKOPAN 
 
Evoking a pivotal moment at the birth of modernity, a time of fear, conspiracy and uprising, and featuring some of the most unusual and brilliant personalities of the eighteenth century, Every Valley is a cinematic and moving drama of hope in the darkness and the entangled lives that shaped a masterpiece. 
 
'Fascinating...cinematic...truly informative, imaginative and engaging' Financial Times

Every Valley

The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah

The Story of Handel’s Messiah

Edwin Frank

For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger than Fiction, he offers a legendary editor’s survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel. 
 
Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence; Colette and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles; and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Frank also shows how Japan’s Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe adapted European models to their own ends – and how Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante did the same as they attempted to reckon with the traumas of World War II. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and WG Sebald. 
 
In the manner of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.

Stranger Than Fiction

Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Emmanuel Carrère

On 13 November 2015, nine attackers wearing suicide bombs killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded at sites in and around Paris in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War. V13 was the code name for the much-awaited trial of those who helped to carry out these attacks. Lasting nine months, from September 2021 to June 2022, it consisted of 14 defendants, 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers and a file 53 metres high. 
 
In V13, Emmanuel Carrère follows this landmark trial from its first day to its last, taking us behind the scenes to the lawyers, survivors, family members and the defendants. He assembles, in painstaking and subtle detail, a human portrait of the crime – a study of good and evil, and the philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. 
 
Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre, fusing passion, curiosity and a profoundly humane intellect, making him one of the most distinctive and important literary voices today.

Chronicle of a Trial

Mayumi Inaba

A beloved Japanese modern classic about our special connection with cats and how they can change our lives over the course of a lifetime 
 
'Cat lovers, prepare to weep' The Times 
'A cat classic' Catherine Lacey 
'Profoundly real... and beautifully written' Elif Batuman 
'Aglow with incidental joys' Rivka Galchen 
 
On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry. She follows the sound to the banks of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River and finds a newborn kitten dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii: so begins an unshakeable bond. 
Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, as she pursues quiet solitude and a room of her own. Through it all, Mii, a fiercely independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse. 
This beloved Japanese modern classic is not just a love letter to companionship: it’s a poignant, searching meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create and to build a life. 
‘Reveals the profound respect, and compassion, that a friendship with an animal can inspire’ Sigrid Nunez, New Yorker 
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori 
 
**Readers ADORE Mii** 
‘A lovely little gem’ 
‘Gentle and enchanting and had me in floods by the end’ 
‘Absolutely beautiful' 
‘Sweet and heartbreaking’ 
‘Told with grace, beauty and love’

Mornings With My Cat Mii

Charlotte Lydia Riley

Suzanne Nossel

Intelligence Squared

Two leading thinkers present alternative answers to one of the most difficult and divisive questions of our times: Is free speech under threat? 
 
Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the leading free expression organisation, argues that alongside the necessary and long-overdue elevation of minority voices in recent years, there has also arisen an uncompromising intolerance – most notably on university campuses and online – that wrongly equates a wide range of offensive speech with violence and seeks to shut it down. This has led to an escalating free speech arms race, from which everyone loses. 
 
Charlotte Lydia Riley, historian of empire and editor of The Free Speech Wars, argues that accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are too often disingenuous attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important realignment in which hateful speech is at last being called out for what it is and the right to free expression is being extended to more people than ever before. 
 
Published in conjunction with Intelligence Squared, the world’s leading curator of debate, this book is part of the THINK AGAIN series: short books that present two expert, contrasting but equally persuasive views in a single volume that can be read from either end.

Is Free Speech Under Threat?

Ray Kurzweil

In this visionary and fundamentally optimistic book, the legendary oracle of technological change explains how AI will transform our species beyond recognition. 
 
‘The best person I know at predicting the future of AI’ BILL GATES 
'A fascinating exploration of our future' YUVAL NOAH HARARI 
'Essential reading to understand our exponential times' MUSTAFA SULEYMAN 
 
Within our lifetimes, we will be able to connect our brains directly with AI, enhancing our intelligence a millionfold and expanding our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine. This is the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil is one of the greatest inventors of our time with over 60 years’ experience in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Dozens of his long-range predictions about the rise of the internet, AI and bioengineering have been borne out. Here Kurzweil explains how the Singularity will occur and what it will mean to live free from the limits of biology: What will we choose if our bodies need no longer define us? What new realms of beauty, connection and wonder might we inhabit? Who will we become if our minds can be stored and duplicated? Drawing on a lifetime’s expertise, Kurzweil presents deeply reasoned answers to these questions and argues that we can and will transform life on earth profoundly for the better.

The Singularity is Nearer

When We Merge with AI

Pedro Almodóvar

The Last Dream brings together twelve stories from legendary film director Pedro Almodóvar’s personal archive. Delivering a tantalising glimpse into Almodóvar’s world, together they reflect his most intimate obsessions, as well as his daring evolution as an artist. 
 
Ranging from a beautiful chronicle of the death of Almodóvar’s mother in ‘The Last Dream’, to a love story between Jesus and Barabbas, a cult film director out in search of painkillers on a bank holiday weekend, the original story behind the film Bad Education, and a gothic tale of a repentant vampire, these mischievous stories delight and surprise. 
 
The Last Dream is a celebration of the relationship between life and art, fiction and reality, bursting with desire and playful humour.

The Last Dream

Russ Buettner

Susanne Craig

Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit. 
 
The devastating exposé of Trump’s financial failings that you need to read to understand the man whose deals are destroying the world economy. 
 
'A first-rate financial thriller' NEW YORK TIMES 
'Damning' SUNDAY TIMES 
'Devastating ... thrilling' GUARDIAN 
 
Donald J. Trump once declared life has ‘not been easy for me’. He spun a fable of how he turned a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar empire and argued this made him singularly qualified to lead. 
 
Except none of it was true. 
 
A meticulous masterpiece based on Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, this is the definitive true accounting of Trump and his money – what he had and what he lost. 
 
'Strikes at the heart of the Trump myth' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'Groundbreaking reporting ... comprehensive, persuasive' NEW YORKER

Lucky Loser

How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

Laura Freeman

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism 
 
'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it' 
EDMUND DE WAAL 
 
'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for' 
OBSERVER 
 
The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. 
 
Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.

Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Yuval Noah Harari

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – an alien information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? 
 
Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has brought us here. Taking us from the Stone Age through the canonisation of the Bible, the invention of print, the rise of mass media and the recent resurgence of populism, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how systems like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. 
 
Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes and, in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Nexus

A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Rory Cellan-Jones

‘Fills my heart with so much joy' Niall Harbison, bestselling author of Tina 
'In a dark time, a daily dose of hope’ Jojo Moyes 
 
How do you welcome someone new into your heart and home? A week before Christmas, newly retired BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones receives a special delivery that will change his life. 
 
This is the story of rescue dog #SophieFromRomania. 
 
In January 2022, the Cellan-Jones-Coyle family said goodbye to their beloved elderly Collie cross, Cabbage. She and Rory had become inseparable during daily pandemic walks, which alleviated his Parkinson’s symptoms. After a grief-stricken year, Rory and his wife Diane come across a listing for ‘a kind girl who loves everybody and is just looking for her forever home’. 
 
Bright-eyed, big-eared and trembling, Sophie arrives in London on 17 December 2022. Rory holds the Romanian rescue in his arms, excited for their first walk together – but the road ahead will be a long one . . . This book follows the real journey of Sophie’s adoption – from her battles with anxiety, to the joys of play and her first time outside – as Rory and Diane work with expert dog trainer Si to win Sophie’s trust and navigate Rory’s Parkinson’s disease. 
 
This is a moving story of love, kindness and a lot of patience, paying tribute to rescue dogs and their tender community.

Sophie From Romania

What a rescue dog taught me about patience, love and hope

A Year of Love and Hope with a Rescue Dog

Layne Fargo

To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession. 
 
‘Perfect if you’re a fan of Daisy Jones and the Six’ Cosmopolitan 
‘Brilliant… will keep you guessing until its very last page’ Jodi Picoult 
'A delight - I was completely hooked' Sophie Cousens 
 
 
***** READERS ARE OBSESSED WITH THE FAVOURITES***** 
‘A true gold medal 5-star book’ 
‘Forever changed me’ 
‘Completely captivating’ 
‘Spectacular drama’ 
‘My book of 2025 – already’ 
‘Get ready to be obsessed’ 
 
The whole world was obsessed with Kat and Heath. 
 
Childhood sweethearts turned Olympic champions, they captivated fans with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style and rollercoaster relationship – on and off the ice. 
 
Until that fateful day. As the world watched, the unthinkable happened. 
 
Everyone saw it. 
 
Nobody knows the truth. 
 
But that’s about to change. 
 
NOW INCLUDES A BONUS STORY TOLD FROM HEATH'S PERSPECTIVE

The Favourites

Nick Davies

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING TRUE STORY BEHIND ITV’S THE HACK** 
 
WITH EXPLOSIVE NEW EVIDENCE, THIS IS THE UPDATED EDITION OF THE BOOK THAT EXPOSED THE PHONE HACKING SCANDAL 
 
Crime, conspiracy, abuse of power – this is the inside story of the scandal that blew the lid off Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Nearly twenty years since one of Murdoch’s reporters was caught eavesdropping on Buckingham Palace, the revelations keep coming. And Nick Davies is still digging out new evidence. 
 
Hack Attack is the story of how Davies and a network of rebel lawyers, MPs and celebrities took on one of the most powerful men in the world and uncovered a web of crime and cover-up reaching from the Murdoch newsrooms to Scotland Yard and Downing Street. It was a scandal that shocked the British elite. And it’s not over yet. 
 
'A colossal service to Britain's democracy' Financial Times 
 
'As exciting as a thriller but far more important' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A masterly summary of the hacking affair, as well as the ingenuity and persistence that lead to great journalism' Observer

Hack Attack

How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch

Agri Ismaïl

'A fascinating, thrilling novel' Samira Ahmed, Front Row, BBC Radio 4 
‘Brilliant…a book of big, heady ideas’ Guardian 
‘A state of the nation novel’ TLS 
 
Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, founder of the Communist Party of Kurdistan, has fled Tehran and settled in London. As his three children embrace their new adult lives they each struggle with an increasingly desperate relationship to money: 
 
Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai. 
 
Mohammed, the eldest, stays in London to climb the unforgiving ladder of the financial sector. 
 
Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life in a condo near Wall Street, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall. 
 
Sharp, topical, and powerful, Hyper is a story about what remains of our humanity in a world increasingly dominated by the flows of capital. 
 
‘Ambitious, epic, heartfelt... I was blown away’ Fredrik Backman 
‘A tightly stitched work of melancholy wit and rueful irony… Hyper evokes what it feels like to live now’ Tom Benn 
‘Hyper marks the arrival of a significant, keenly perceptive new voice in literature’ Sam Byers

Hyper

Timothy Snyder

A brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival – by the acclaimed, bestselling author of On Tyranny. 
 
Freedom is the great Western commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means – and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government interference. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. 
 
Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers and his own experiences, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes – the habits of mind – that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions but also the role of institutions. Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity and grace. 
 
Snyder’s book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.

On Freedom

Orlando Reade

**A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
‘Lively and humane… Reade’s enthusiasm and curiosity are winning’ GUARDIAN 
 
Summoned in Haiti’s struggle against colonial rule, read in prison by the young Malcolm X, and reimagined by Virginia Woolf - this is the revolutionary history of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost 
 
Orlando Reade shows the many different, surprising, and often contradictory ways in which Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost has been read across centuries and continents. 
 
Boldly original, lively, and far-reaching, What in Me Is Dark is the story of how a work of literature born in the ashes of a failed revolution became an indelible part of the modern imagination. 
 
Reade guides us through the epic, exploring how Milton came to write its dark and dazzling poetry, and offers us a new account of its radical, ever-evolving legacy. 
 
‘Clever, wide-ranging…witty and sardonic' NEW STATESMAN

What in Me Is Dark

The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

John Burnside

John Burnside recalls the failed relationship with his father, in the first of his trilogy of exquisite memoirs 
 
With a new introduction by Megan Nolan 
 
‘A master of language’ Hilary Mantel 
 
He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn’t seen his son for years. 
 
John Burnside’s extraordinary story of this failed relationship is a beautifully written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father’s world: men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. 
 
A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall apart, and about understanding that in order to have a good son you must have a good father. 
 
‘Memoir this good illuminates something larger than itself. It is an exercise in understanding, compassion and forgiveness’ Sunday Telegraph 
 
Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year

A Lie About My Father

Sammy Wright

School should equip children for adulthood. In reality, it means one thing: exams. Exam Nation sets out a better way – and, crucially, shows us how we might get there. 
 
Educationalist and Head of School Sammy Wright argues that grades, rankings and Ofsted reports all miss the point of school, and together they are undermining our whole approach to education. Rather than sorting pupils into winners and losers, we need to think differently about what our schools are actually for – to see them as communities not factories – if we are to give all young people the opportunities and future they deserve.

Exam Nation

Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School

The last of John Burnside’s three memoirs, I Put a Spell on You is an enthralling ode to love and wonder in all its forms 
 
With a new introduction by Seán Hewitt 
 
'A master of language' Hilary Mantel 
 
The first time he was played ‘I Put a Spell on You’, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song – it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him – love, possession, and danger. 
 
In this exquisite and haunting book, John Burnside evokes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge, and follows his drifting thoughts and memories along the way: from uncanny encounters with ‘lost girls’ to digressions on voodoo, acid, and insomnia, alongside a cast that includes Kafka, Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. 
 
The last of John Burnside’s three memoirs, I Put a Spell on You is a memoir of romance – of lost love and the love of being lost – darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour. 
 
'Astonishing… Not just brilliant, but essential reading' Independent 
 
'Exact and enthralling' Tessa Hadley

I Put a Spell on You

Joseph Hone

‘A page-turner about page-turners’ Janice Hallett 
‘The perfect piece of armchair detection’ Ruth Ware 
‘Hugely entertaining and unexpectedly gripping’ London Review of Books 
 
A true detective story from the age of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: the literary crime that fooled the world - and the daring young booksellers who uncovered it 
 
London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. 
 
One night, two young booksellers stumble upon a strange discrepancy leading them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem. Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core. 
 
‘A thrilling unravelling of bookish fraud that reads like a detective story from the golden age’ Roland Philipps, author of A Spy Named Orphan 
 
‘Hone is a lively and fluent writer, ratcheting up the temperature with snappy sentences and chapters ending on cliffhangers’ Sunday Telegraph

The Book Forger

The true story of a literary crime that fooled the world

With wit, precision and grace, John Burnside's second memoir traces the aftershocks of a troubled childhood into troubled adulthood. 
 
With a new introduction by Sarah Perry 
 
‘Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ Andrew O’Hagan 
 
In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a ‘Surbiton of the mind.’ But the suburbs are not quite as normal as he had imagined, and he relapses into chaos. 
 
He encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms, as he drifts further into unreality. 
 
The second of John Burnside’s extraordinary trilogy of memoirs, Waking Up in Toytown is the story of one man’s search for sanity – but also the story of love that outgrows its restraints and a scorching enquiry into the soul, from one of our greatest contemporary writers. 
 
‘Burnside’s memoir deserves to become a classic. Has anyone written about the direct experience of mental illness with such scrupulous observation and wit?’ Daily Express

Waking Up in Toytown

A Memoir

Rosie Price

Rhianne expresses her inner world through line and colour. This summer, though, back home in the west country, she is seeking distraction in heat and noise. Art school in London has ripped away her confidence and sense of safety: better for now to be swept along by the hotel kitchen where she’s working, where the pressure is high and the dangers are more obvious. Sharp knives. Hot plates. Little time to think. 
 
Her dad, Dominic, is concerned for Rhianne but relieved to have her close. Her step-mum, Melissa, is on alert, though trying to tread carefully. But then there’s Callum, just across the chef’s pass, with his controlled manner and intent gaze. There’s attraction. There’s everything that comes next. 
 
From the acclaimed author of What Red Was, The Orange Room is about the narrow line between passion and control, and an insidious kind of violence that is difficult to name. Asking what it means to see clearly, and what courage it takes to be seen, it is the story of a tenacious young woman who – through her art, her strength, her determination – finds her way back to herself.

The Orange Room

Momtaza Mehri

Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt. 
 
***WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*** 
***FINALIST FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD*** 
***WINNER OF THE SKY ARTS AWARD FOR POETRY*** 
 
'Exceptional… Mehri is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century' 
BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
'A once in a generation poet' 
CALEB FEMI, author of Poor 
 
The definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri's debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing her own family's experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind. 
 
We meet the poet, the translator, the refugee, the exile, and the diaspora kid attempting to transcend their clichéd angst. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.

Bad Diaspora Poems

Lucy Foulkes

What we experience during adolescence shapes us for life, but psychologist Lucy Foulkes shows that too often we fear, dismiss or even try to prevent aspects of it that are crucial to our development. Drawing on decades of psychological research, and including profoundly moving interviews, Coming of Age gets beneath the recent myths and age-old stereotypes of adolescence to reveal the reasons why teens behave the way they do. 
 
Above all, Foulkes shows that adolescents have an extraordinary capacity for resilience, empathy and mutual support, and that even the most challenging encounters are part of an essential process of self-discovery.

Coming of Age

How Adolescence Shapes Us

Alexandra Fuller

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight 
 
** Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025 in Memoir/Autobiography ** 
 
'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD 
 
‘A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. 
 
And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep. 
 
From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

A Memoir of My Son

Laurence Blair

Stretching from the edge of Antarctica to the shores of the Caribbean, South America is a continent of stunning natural beauty and biodiversity, a cultural and culinary powerhouse that feeds, fuels and cools the planet. Yet this vast region remains an enigma to many outsiders, its 450 million inhabitants often forgotten, or stereotyped as eternal victims of colonialism, crime and corruption. 
 
Patria reveals an alternative history of South America, spanning thousands of miles and five centuries to the present. Looking beyond modern borders, Laurence Blair takes as his waymarks nine countries that can’t be found on a map: vanished realms, half-imagined utopias and dismembered homelands. He travels to each in turn – on foot and horseback, by rail and river – to trace their rise, fall and unexpected afterlives. 
 
Blair goes in search of ancient Amazonian civilisations, a rebel Inca dynasty in the jungle, and the Patagonian power that defeated Imperial Spain. His journey ranges from a seafaring Peruvian kingdom made rich by bird droppings, to a fearsome nation of fugitives that defied slavery in Brazil, and an insurgent desert confederation that went down fighting with an Andalusian conman. He falls in with Bolivia’s landlocked navy, the African freedom fighters who marched over the Andes to liberate the hemisphere, and the New World Napoleon who led Paraguay to its ruin. 
 
Patria incorporates groundbreaking recent scholarship, striking archaeological discoveries and vivid eyewitness reporting – including encounters with drug lords, Indigenous leaders, refugees bound for the United States and former guerrillas – to weave an epic of survival, resistance and revolution. This is the story of South America as is rarely told: at the epicentre of global history and the forging of the modern world.

Patria

Lost Countries of South America

'Deliciously dark, razor-sharp, and unapologetically wrong in all the right ways' C.J. Skuse, author of SWEETPEA 
 
He wasn’t afraid of me. That was his first mistake. 
 
Read the cult word-of-mouth hit readers are obsessed with: 
 
‘Such an incredible read!’ 
‘Holy hell this book was fun!’ 
‘Included all the things I like in fiction…vigilantism/revenge, cold, calculating women, themes of obsession, queer desire’ 
‘Amazing twists!’ 
‘You guys NEED TO READ THIS!’ 
 
 
Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor and an even better serial killer. She’s made it her mission in life to track down predatory men on campus and kill them and she’s preparing for her biggest murder yet. 
 
Carly Schiller is just trying to survive her freshman year at college – keeping her head down and focussing on work. But when her roommate Allison is assaulted at a party Carly becomes obsessed with making the attacker pay. 
 
When police start investigating the spate of local deaths, Scarlett starts to realise it’s only a matter of time before her secret life is exposed and everything she’s built comes crashing down with it… 
 
‘Deliciously satisfying… The feminist revenge thriller we need and deserve’ Megan Collins 
 
‘A gorgeously-written ragestorm of a thriller…will shock readers as much as it satisfies them’ Wendy Heard 
 
‘Grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go’ Samantha Downing

They Never Learn

Roland Philipps

Celebrated reformer and proud Irish nationalist, romantic radical and vilified traitor, Roger Casement was a man of many, often contradictory, parts. 
 
It was a life caught between fault lines. Casement exposed the horrors of the Belgian Congo on behalf of the British establishment, championing the colonially oppressed and pioneering modern human rights. He fought passionately for Irish independence, even as each step led towards martyrdom. And, desperate for love but forced to hide his sexuality, his deepest relationship became treacherously entangled in espionage and sabotage, isolating him and carrying him to an unmarked prison grave. 
 
Masterfully drawing on his letters, diaries and new archival material, Broken Archangel uncovers the extraordinary life and legacy of Roger Casement – one of the 20th century’s most complex and compelling individuals.

Broken Archangel

The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement

Alexei Navalny

Patriot is the unforgettable life story of one of the most fearless and inspiring figures of our time. 
 
Alexei Navalny’s poisoning in 2020 by the Russian security services was a global news event. In 2024 he died in a brutal Arctic prison. He began writing Patriot whilst recovering from his poisoning; it ends with his secret prison diaries. 
 
HUSBAND 
 
He was a beacon to millions and became the sole political threat to Vladimir Putin. This is his life in his own words: his political awakening, his marriage and beloved family, his total commitment to taking on a corrupt regime and his enduring love of Russia and its people. 
 
PRISONER 
 
We witness his message of hope gain nationwide support, his many arrests and harassment, and the incredible attempt on his life. We understand why he felt he had to return to Russia. In prison, we feel the power of his unbreakable spirit and sense of humour. 
 
 
PATRIOT 
 
Patriot is as dramatic as Navalny’s life – and full of the passionate belief that good and freedom will prevail. It is an astonishingly positive account of a heroic life.

PATRIOT

Kapka Kassabova

‘A classic for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY 
 
‘Haunting, beautiful… Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN 
 
'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN 
 
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. 
 
She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. 
 
Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. 
 
‘An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us’ THE TABLET

Anima

A Wild Pastoral

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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