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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. 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

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

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John Yorke

To command narrative is to control a sometimes frightening power. What is it that turbocharges some tales, and how is it possible to harness that potency? 
 
John Yorke’s groundbreaking bestseller, Into the Woods, revolutionised our understanding of story structure. This new book delves deeper into how to put that structure to work in the world. Trip to the Moon takes us on a journey not just through drama and fiction but through politics, religion and non-western narrative. Through these terrains, Yorke seeks out the role of story in all our lives, examining how to utilise its lessons to create life-changing tales – and, in a world aflame with conspiracy theories, to guard ourselves against their darker purpose too. 
 
Revealing the artful symmetry and underlying principles that connect Summer beach reads to Classical Chinese poetry, superhero flicks to Russian arthouse, and classical rhetoric to state propaganda, Yorke makes dazzling connections that show how stories have the power to transfigure the chaos of our existence into a new equilibrium, and make the world anew.

Trip to the Moon

Understanding the True Power Of Story

Lucy Lavers

Judy Ovens

Suzanna Prizeman

At the heart of the modern world lie ventilation shafts. We may not notice them, but wherever there are tunnels, sewers, mines, car parks and energy stations under our feet, vents will be doing vital work keeping them cool and fume-free.Vents come in a wonderful and inventive variety of forms. This book celebrates them both in their own right as intriguing individual structures, and as an innovative way to tell the story of Britain's subterranean industrial development from the eighteenth century to the present day.Here are one hundred of the most interesting ventilation shafts, dotted around Britain, sometimes in the most surprising places. You'll find them masquerading as sculptures and small buildings, adorned with fine details or displaying their purpose with confidence.Whether you're inspired to take off in search of them, or just to admire them from your armchair, vents are fabulous objects. By putting them – perhaps for the very first time – centre-stage, Adventurous Vents celebrates a highly unusual but exciting architectural form.

Adventurous Vents

A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain

The White Pube

Gabrielle de la Puente

Zarina Muhammad

At a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Labelled “the Diet Prada of the art world” by British Vogue, in Poor Artists writers Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad ridicule a contemporary art world that has turned art into artworks, art schools into art universities, and creative expression into cut-throat competition. 
 
Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight – The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.

Poor Artists

Sally Mann

Art Work, by photographer and writer Sally Mann, offers a spellbinding mix of wild and illuminating stories, practical (and some impractical) advice, and life lessons for artists and writers—or anyone interested in the creative path. Written in the same frank, fearless, and occasionally outrageous tone of her bestselling memoir, Hold Still, this new book reaffirms Mann as a unique and resonant voice for our times and is destined to become a classic. 
 
Illustrated throughout with photographs, journal entries, and letters that bring immediacy and poignancy to the narrative, Art Work is full of thought-provoking insights about the hazards of early promise; the unpredictable role of luck; the value of work, work, work, and more hard work; the challenges of rejection and distraction; the importance of risk-taking; and the rewards of knowing why and when you say yes. In sparkling prose and thoughtfully juxtaposed visuals and ephemera, Art Work is a generous, provocative, and compulsively readable exploration of creativity by one of our most original thinkers.

Art Work

On the Creative Life

Martin Parr

Wendy Jones

By the age of 14, I decided I would be a photographer. ‘It’s what I will do for the rest of my life, until I drop dead.’ I knew when I was very young. It was a definite decision. Don’t ask me why. I just knew it was the right thing. 
 
When Martin Parr was fourteen, his teacher wrote that he was ‘utterly lazy and inattentive’ in a school report. He went on to become one of the most successful and sought-after photographers in the world. Martin has published over one hundred photobooks on many different subjects, from seaside resorts to smoking, over his career. Now, for the first and only time, Martin has produced a book about himself, telling his own story, in his own words. 
 
This autobiography combines over 150 of Martin’s photographs – from his earliest snapshots to the work he is doing today – with his recollections and reflections on each image. We meet a boy growing up in suburbia, who collects obsessively and notices everything. We see him exploding into the public consciousness in the late eighties with a series of startling, ultra-saturated colour images of the British seaside – and scandalising the photography establishment in the process. We see society changing over the decades, from the demise of steam trains, through the opening of the first McDonald’s in Moscow, to the transformations of the post-pandemic world. 
 
As Martin shares his story, his distinctive voice delicately captured by his friend, the writer Wendy Jones, he also reveals his approach to work and commissions; his tricks for gaining access and getting the shot; and he divulges his particular passions: for crowds and queues, fetes and placards, bad weather on beaches, and more. 
 
This is the definitive account of a great photographer’s career, curating the work that has defined his life. By looking at the world through his eyes and his lens, we come away seeing Martin Parr – and ourselves – a little differently.

Utterly Lazy and Inattentive

Martin Parr in Words and Pictures

Andy Saunders

When we think of the history of space exploration, we can’t help but think of the Apollo missions and Neil Armstrong’s one giant leap. But what about the small steps that enabled NASA to reach for the Moon? 
 
Astronauts working on the earliest space missions, from Project Mercury to the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, answered fundamental questions about the possibilities of long-duration space travel, paving the way for the Apollo missions and, ultimately, the Moon landings. They also took the first, and still some of the finest, images of Earth ever captured on film. 
 
Now, the bestselling author of Apollo Remastered, Andy Saunders has restored images from these first missions to show them in unprecedented detail and tell their full story, filled with dramatic life or death moments, mischievous pranks and astonishing triumphs. This stunning visual odyssey brings to life the pivotal, intimate moments of early space travel, unveiling the raw beauty and profound challenges faced by the pioneering astronauts pushing the boundaries of human achievement. Gemini and Mercury Remastered is a striking tribute to the visionaries who dared to dream beyond our world and a testament to the enduring power of exploration.

Gemini and Mercury Remastered

David Gentleman

We are all artists as children, painting and drawing each day. Most of us stop when we get older – but David Gentleman kept going. For over ninety years he has been drawing, painting, engraving and printing, rising to become one of Britain’s best-known and most loved artists. His watercolours have filled galleries; his iconic wood cuts are emblazoned across posters, book jackets and train stations; his stamps have made their way to the furthest corners of the world. 
 
Here, the great, polymathic artist and craftsman shares what he has learned over the course of a lifetime of making and thinking about art. Unlike his contemporaries, Gentleman was never a teacher; his lessons are a sequence of unconventional prompts and reflections that will deepen how you think about art and the world around you. 
 
 
Sincere, practical and unpretentious, Gentleman’s insights are a breath of fresh air. Here are new ways to focus, notice the world and cultivate your own style; techniques to evolve your work, from playing with time to painting in bad weather; methods for getting the most out of mistakes and negative criticism; and, above all, reminders to return, always, to the simple delights of creativity.

Lessons for Young Artists

Mihaela Noroc

'True beauty lies in the sum of our qualities, used for positive purposes. In other words, using your power for the good.' 
 
This new book delves deeper into the stories behind the captivating images that have made Mihaela Noroc an online sensation. With 500 portraits from over 60 countries, including Japan, India, Peru, Namibia and the United States, The Power of Women is a celebration of courage, resilience and beauty in all its forms.

The Power of Women

An Atlas of Beauty Book

Richard Ogilvy

Susan Ogilvy

Our trees are among our greatest national treasures, and yet today many people have forgotten their names, their identifying features and the stories we used to tell about them. In Overleaf, the botanical painter Susan Ogilvy and the forester Richard Ogilvy reacquaint us with the trees of the British Isles through careful study of their leaves. From the water-loving alder to the long-lived yew, Susan paints every tree's leaf or needle in exquisite, jewel-like detail, at exactly life size, while Richard explores their natural history, the landscapes they inhabit and the ways we use their timber, leaves, flowers and fruit in craft, industry, food and medicine. As vivid and true to life as a book of freshly picked and pressed leaves, Overleaf will delight and inform tree-spotting beginners and seasoned naturalists alike.

Overleaf

An Album of British Trees

Frida Ramstedt

How do you choose dining chairs that are still comfortable at the end of a long meal? A sofa you can sink into without sagging? A bed that doesn't leave your neck and back aching? 
 
Award-winning blogger and bestselling author of The Interior Design Handbook Frida Ramstedt is back with practical tips and insider secrets from the world of furniture design. In The Furnishing Handbook, she shares insights and advice on what to look out for to ensure the furniture we buy doesn&rsquo;t just look good but is also well-made, long-lasting and, most importantly, comfortable to use every day. 
 
Looking beyond the latest furniture trends and styles, Frida equips readers with everything they need to understand what works best when choosing furniture and why. With chapters on chairs, tables, sofas and more, The Furnishing Handbook is an indispensable guide for anyone investing in new pieces for their home.

The Furnishing Handbook

Owen Hatherley

Modernism is now a century old, and its consequences are all around us, built into our everyday lived environments. Its place in Britain&rsquo;s history is fiercely contested, and its role in our future is the subject of ongoing controversy &ndash; but modernist buildings have undoubtedly changed our cities, politics and identity forever. 
In Modern Buildings in Britain, Owen Hatherley applauds the ambition and explores the significance of this most divisive of architectures, travelling from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from St Ives to Shetland, in search of our most important and distinctive modern buildings. As Hatherley considers the social, political and cultural value of these structures &ndash; a number of which are threatened by demolition &ndash; two linked questions emerge: what happens to a building after it has been lived in, and what becomes of an idea when its time has passed? 
With more than six hundred pages of trenchantly opinionated, often witty analysis, and with three hundred photographs in both duotone and colour, Modern Buildings in Britain is a landmark contribution to the history of British architecture.

Modern Buildings in Britain

A Gazetteer

Coralie Bickford-Smith

One autumn evening, a young squirrel spots an acorn glinting on the forest floor. 
 
Eager to protect her treasure from watchful eyes and hungry mouths, she buries it deep in the heart of the forest. 
 
But when she returns after the icy winter, her acorn is nowhere to be found. Where could it be? 
 
An enchanting fable about growth, new life and finding hope in unexpected places.

The Squirrel and the Lost Treasure

Matthew Rice

Matthew Rice is a long-time observer and illustrator of cities, buildings and all those who inhabit them, with an uncanny ability to express the energy of a place through a few lines of ink and splashes of paint. In the first book in this new sketchbook series, he explored the glittering canals of Venice: now he turns his attention to Rome, the Eternal City. 
 
Rome is a place where the ancient, the baroque and the modern clash, and this tension runs through Matthew's paintings. In this guide, he makes sly juxtapositions of people and animals against the backdrop of the city's architectural and artistic wonders, its ruins and its ristoranti. Matthew's ability to notice detail, his sense of light and dark, his expert's knowledge of architecture and how it creates an atmosphere allows him to present Rome, in these pages, in its all its living, breathing splendour. 
 
Following the same landscape format as Matthew's real-life sketchbooks, Rome: A Sketchbook will combine enchanting watercolour illustrations with an informed, personal and witty text, and promises to delight all visitors to Rome, armchair or actual.

Rome

A Sketchbook

C. B. Newham

Deep in the countryside, away from metropolitan abbeys and cathedrals, thousands of funerary monuments are hidden in parish churches. These artworks - medieval brasses and elegant marble effigies, stone tomb chests and grand mausoleums - are of great historical and cultural significance, but have, due to their relative inaccessibility, faded from accounts of our art history. 
 
Over twenty-five years, C. B. Newham FSA has visited and photographed more than eight thousand rural churches, cataloguing the monumental sculptures encountered on his quest. In Country Church Monuments, he presents 365 of the very best, each accompanied by detailed photographs, biographies of both the deceased and their sculptors and a wealth of contextual material. Many of these works commemorate famous historical figures, from scheming Tudor courtier Richard Rich to Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. But more moving are the countless others - minor aristocrats, small-time industrialists, much-loved mothers, fathers and children - who, if not for their memorials, would wholly be lost to time. 
 
As Newham blows the dust off these artworks and breathes life into the stories they tell, a new aesthetic history of rural England and Wales emerges. Country Church Monuments is a poignant record of the art we make at the borders of life and death, of our ceaseless human striving for eternity.

Country Church Monuments

In a frozen vault in Houston sits the original NASA photographic film of the Apollo missions. For half a century, almost every image of the Moon landings publicly available was produced from a lower-quality copy of these originals. 
 
Now we can view them as never before. Expert image restorer Andy Saunders has taken newly available digital scans and, applying painstaking care and cutting-edge enhancement techniques, he has created the highest quality Apollo photographs ever produced. Never-before-seen spacewalks and crystal-clear portraits of astronauts in their spacecraft, along with startling new visions of the Earth and the Moon, offer astounding new insight into one of our greatest endeavours. 
 
'Just incredible. I have personally checked the images in the book, and if you want to know what it was really like on the Apollo missions, then this is for you' Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7

Apollo Remastered

The Sunday Times Bestseller

Matthew Rice is a long-time observer and illustrator of cities, buildings and all those who inhabit them, with an uncanny ability to express the energy of a place through a few lines of ink and splashes of paint. For years, Venice has been a source of deep creative inspiration for him; and now, in Venice: A Sketchbook Guide, he captures the highlights of this most beguiling of Italian cities. 
 
Unsurprisingly, given his abiding passion for architecture, Matthew provides a wealth of information about the 'stones' of Venice, including an illustrated guide to the main building styles of the city - Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Modern - and exemplars of its balconies, bridges and campaniles. Further sections explore the city's sestieri - its six residential quarters - as well as its history, paintings, festivals, wildlife and, not least, its cicchetti and aperitivi. 
 
Following the same landscape format as Matthew's real-life sketchbooks, Venice: A Sketchbook Guide will combine enchanting watercolour illustrations with an informed, personal and witty text, and promises to delight all visitors to Venice, armchair or actual.

Venice

A Sketchbook Guide

John-Paul Stonard

No house embodies the spirit of one dynasty better than Chatsworth. Set in an unspoilt Derbyshire valley, surrounded by wild moorland, and home to the Cavendish family for sixteen generations, this treasure house is filled with works of art and objects - from Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds and Antonio Canova's Endymion to great contemporary paintings by Lucian Freud and David Hockney - which have all, in their time, represented the very best of the new. As Stoker Cavendish, the twelfth Duke of Devonshire, likes to point out: 'Everything was new once.' 
 
Following the completion of a decade-long programme of renovations, the exterior of Chatsworth is gleaming, its stone façade newly cleaned and its window frames freshly gilded. Inside, through the inspired juxtaposition of old and modern, its rooms fizz with creative energy. Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now tells the story of this extraordinary place through seven scenes from its life, alongside a stunning photographic portrait of the house and its collections, captured at a moment of high optimism in its long history.

Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now

Seven Scenes from the Life of a House

Susan Ogilvy started painting bird nests almost by accident. One day, while tidying up her garden after a storm, she found a chaffinch nest - a strange, sodden lump on the grass under a fir tree. She carried it inside and placed it on a newspaper; over the next few hours, as the water drained out of it, the sodden lump blossomed into a mossy jewel. She was amazed, and dropped everything to make a painting of the nest at exact life size. 
 
This was the start of an obsession; Ogilvy has since painted more than fifty bird nests from life, each time marvelling at its ingenious construction. Every species of bird has its own vernacular, but sources its materials - most commonly twigs, roots, grasses, reeds, leaves, moss, lichen, hair, feathers and cobwebs, less usually, mattress stuffing and string - according to local availability. Ogilvy would, of course, never disturb nesting birds; instead she relies upon serendipity, which is why all her nests have either been abandoned after fulfilling their purpose, or displaced by strong winds. 
 
Although Nests showcases the specimens she has found near her homes in Somerset and on the Isle of Arran, its subject matter is by no means only British, since these same birds can be found all over Europe, Scandinavia and as far afield as Russia, Turkey and North Africa. This wondrous book is all the more special for its rarity. Few modern books exist specifically on the subject of bird nests; the most recent among the author's reference works was published in 1932. Exquisitely designed and packaged, Nests will be an essential addition to the libraries of all nature lovers.

Nests

Edward Ross

Golden Axe. The Sims. Half Life. Mega Drive. SNES. Like many teenagers around the world, Edward Ross grew up on a steady diet of video games and fascinating gadgets. As he continued to obsess over video games while drawing comic books, he started wondering what it was that made them more than just a pastime. Why do we play? 
 
This gorgeously illustrated book takes us deep into the history of video games, from the early prototypes created in the late 1940s through the growth of the medium in the 1970s and into the modern era, in which games are a crucial part of mainstream culture. Exploring politics, history and personal stories, and moving seamlessly from the greatest hits to engrossing indie games, Gamish is a love letter to an obsession that has gripped more than two billion people around the world.

Gamish

A Graphic History of Gaming

Over seventy years of quintessential London views in one box 
 
In 1950, aged 19, David Gentleman arrived in the capital, ready to begin his life as an artist. Over the next seven decades, he would sketch, paint, and engrave his way through London, documenting the cityscape, and shaping it, too - most notably through his iconic mural in Charing Cross Underground Station. 
 
Combining world-famous imagery with unexpected scenes of daily life in the city, this box of London artworks is a treasure trove for all those who flock to the capital. 
 
'David Gentleman is London's visual laureate' Quentin Blake

London Postcards

THE BESTSELLING SWEDISH PHENOMENON 
 
What looks good and why? 
 
Design consultant Frida Ramstedt runs Scandinavia's leading interior design blog. In this book she distils the secrets of successful interior design and styling to help you create a home that works best for your space, taste and lifestyle. Filled with practical tips, rules-of-thumb and tricks of the trade, The Interior Design Handbook will help you to think like a professional designer. 
 
 
'Frida has created this BIBLE to interior design ... such useful info that has taken me years to learn, all in one place' Rebecca Wakefield, Studio Fortnum 
 
'Beautifully illustrated with handy line drawings ... The Interior Design Handbook gets down to the nitty gritty of successfully putting a room together' Fabric Magazine 
 
'Take it to bed and you'll be utterly engrossed and elightened' Stylist

The Interior Design Handbook

Sarah Urist Green

A few years ago, curator Sarah Urist Green left her office in the basement of an art museum to travel around visiting a diverse range of artists, asking them to share prompts that relate to their own ways of working. The result is You Are an Artist, an invitation to invent imaginary friends, measure your cultural history, become someone else but mostly, become a truer version of yourself. Your challenge is to filter these assignments through the lens of your own experience and to have fun along the way. 
 
You don't have to know how to draw, paint or take a picture. This book is about expressing who you are through art, regardless of age or experience. The only materials you'll need are what you already have to hand or can source for free. 
 
You Are an Artist brings together more than 50 assignments gathered from some of the most innovative creators working today, including Sonya Clark, Michelle Grabner, The Guerrilla Girls, Fritz Haeg, Pablo Helguera, Nina Katchadourian, Toyin Ojih Odutola, J. Morgan Puett, Dread Scott, Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, and many others.

You Are an Artist

Assignments to Spark Creation

David Gentleman, an iconic British illustrator and designer, has lived a lifetime in London. Drawing from over sixty years of engagement with this most well-known capital city, My Town presents London as it was and as it is today. His beautiful and intricate work - of the Thames, Hampstead Heath, Camden Town (where David Gentleman has lived in the same house for fifty years), London's parks and sights - offers us the pleasure of looking again at the everyday. Accompanied by reflections on the work of an artist, commentary on the possibilities of ink, pen and paint and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a delight for all those who flock to London.

My Town

An Artist's Life in London

Heike Faller

Valerio Vidali

5: You learn that boys and girls fall in love. Incredible! 
13: When will your parents learn? Not in front of your friends. 
36: A dream came true, but it feels different than you thought. 
45: Do you like yourself as you are? 
75: You learn to unlearn things. Can you still do a somersault? 
86: Everything can be different in every moment. 
 
How does our perception of the world change in the course of a lifetime? When Heike Faller's niece was born she began to wonder what we learn in life, and how we can talk about what we have learnt with those we love. And so she began to ask everyone she met, what did you learn in life? Out of the answers of children's writers and refugees, teenagers and artists, mothers and friends, came 99 lessons: that those who have had a difficult time appreciate the good moments more. That those who have had it easy find it harder getting old. That a lot of getting old is about accepting boundaries. And of course, as one 94 year old said to her, 'sometimes I feel like that little girl I once was, and I wonder if I have learned anything at all.' 
 
A bestseller in Germany, Hundred is a book given by children to grandparents and the other way around, for christenings and Mother's days, significant birthdays and times of celebration. With every age beautifully illustrated by Valerio Vidali, Hundred cannot simply be read because, like life itself, it must be experienced. 
 
'Now this is a truly wonderful book, about life, love, age, about all of us. I gave it to look at to a 7 year old who sat with her 75 year old grandmother, and both were intent, deeply engaged, the one full of questions, the other searching still for answers. A remarkable and important book!' - Michael Morpurgo

Hundred: What You Learn in a Lifetime

Mark Ovenden

Maxwell Roberts

In this gorgeously illustrated collection of airline route maps, Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts look to the skies and transport readers to another time. Hundreds of images span a century of passenger flight, from the rudimentary trajectory of routes to the most intricately detailed birds-eye views of the land to be flown over. Advertisements for the first scheduled commercial passenger flights featured only a few destinations, with stunning views of the countryside and graphics of biplanes. As aviation took off, speed and mileage were trumpeted on bold posters featuring busy routes. Major airlines produced highly stylized illustrations of their global presence, establishing now-classic brands. With trendy and forward-looking designs, cartographers celebrated the coming together of different cultures and made the earth look ever smaller. 
 
Eventually, fleets got bigger and routes multiplied, and graphic designers have found creative new ways to display huge amounts of information. Airline hubs bring their own cultural mark and advertise their plentiful destination options. Innovative maps depict our busy world with webs of overlapping routes and networks of low-cost city-to-city hopping. But though flying has become more commonplace, Ovenden and Roberts remind us that early air travel was a glamorous affair for good reason. Airline Maps is a celebration of graphic design, cartographic skills and clever marketing, and a visual feast that reminds us to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

Airline Maps

A Century of Art and Design

Since its launch with The Odyssey in 1946, Penguin Classics has become the largest and best-known classics imprint in the world. Spanning 4,000 years of world literature, covering all the greatest works of fiction, poetry, drama, history and philosophy in between, this set of literary postcards is the perfect gift for book lovers everywhere. Here you will find Shakespeare, Austen, Balzac, Ibsen, Virgil, Chekhov, Gaskell, Dickens, Bronte, Nietzche, Wells, Confucius, Keko, Keats and so much more.

100 Postcards from Austen to Zola

Denis O'Regan

In 1990, on their third world tour together, photographer Denis O'Regan told David Bowie what inspired him to take up rock photography. 'It's because of you,' said Denis. He was inspired by Bowie's 1973 Ziggy Stardust concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. Bowie's response: 'Nah, you'll probably tell Bono the same thing tomorrow night.' 
 
In Ricochet: Bowie 1983, the official photographer of one of the most celebrated musicians of all time reveals intimate stories and pictures that offer an exclusive insight into David Bowie the man and musician. Taken on the 'Serious Moonlight Tour' - Bowie's largest ever tour that took in 99 concerts in over 60 cities - Denis's photos provide a thrilling, intimate view of life on the road with a unique pop icon. From capturing the theatre and mime of Bowie on stage to unguarded snapshots of the artist at his most human, every single image in Ricochet was personally approved by Bowie himself, and the result is a music photography book like no other. 
 
Witty, poignant, and beautifully produced, Ricochet is a rare and spirited look into the life of an inimitable artist, whose music and performances have inspired - and continue to inspire - generations of listeners around the world.

Ricochet

David Bowie 1983: An Intimate Portrait

Photographs and stories of 500 women from around the world, based on the author's hugely popular website. 
 
Since 2013 Mihaela Noroc has travelled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity and beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs that celebrates women from fifty countries across the globe and shows that beauty is everywhere, regardless of money, race or social status, and comes in many different sizes and colours. Mihaela's portraits feature women in their native environments, from the Amazon rain forest to markets in India, London city streets and parks in Harlem, creating a mirror of our varied cultures and proving that beauty has no rules. 
 
'Stunning . . . aims to challenge the ideals of beauty dictated by the women's fashion magazine industry' Independent 
 
'A startling and revealing project' Daily Mail 
 
'Scrolling through "The Atlas of Beauty", beauty becomes not a universal standard, but a complicated tapestry' Huffington Post

The Atlas of Beauty

Women of the World in 500 Portraits

***Waterstones Book of the Year 2015*** 
 
From an award-winning designer comes an original fable about need and loss 
 
Once there was a Fox who lived in a deep, dense forest. For as long as Fox could remember, his only friend had been Star, who lit the forest paths each night. But then one night Star was not there, and Fox had to face the forest all alone. 
 
The Fox and the Star is a work of prose and design, each page thoughtfully created by Coralie Bickford-Smith

The Fox and the Star

Vogue

A collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a striking cover from American Vogue. From early aspirational illustrations to modern celebrity photography, this is a stunning selection of Vogue's most dazzling images. 
 
Since its launch in 1892, Vogue has brought sophistication to its readers around the world. Early illustrations from artists including George Wolfe Plank, Olive Tilton, Pierre Brissaud, and Eduardo Garcia Benito saw ethereal figures of fantasy develop into red-lipped flappers, and as colour photographs began to appear, the women transformed again: from Surrealist images by Horst P. Horst to 'women in the life of the moment', captured by Irving Penn. 
 
From the fifties onwards, Vogue women became more accessible still, as models and stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Cindy Crawford, and Cher, with their own distinct personalities, appeared through the lenses of Richard Avedon and Snowdon. 
 
Vogue covers now are the epitome of style and beauty, with such illustrious photographers as Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein, and Patrick Demarchelier photographing stars like Lady Gaga, Kirsten Dunst, and Kate Moss, celebrating female icons across modern culture.

Postcards from Vogue

100 Iconic Covers

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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