Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Cédric Sapin-Defour

Having a dog as company makes nothing feel excessive – not time or space. It's not even about passing time, but being of it. 
 
A tiny ad in a local newspaper catches Cédric Sapin-Defour’s eye: a litter of Bernese Mountain Dog puppies need homes. A lonely, single, sports teacher and mountain climber in the French Alps, Cédric visits the dogs and immediately falls for the puppy with a blue collar. 
 
Named Ubac, French for the north side of the mountain – the rainy, cloudy slope – the puppy quickly upends Cédric’s life. They go on hikes together, taking to the hills and exploring, forging a bond that brings joy and a sense of fulfillment and adventure. They brave the world together, hate to be apart, crave the mountains and the natural world; they protect each other. 
 
Over the course of thirteen years, their pack expands to include Mathilde, Cédric’s wife, and more dogs. Ubac and Me is an intimate meditation on a joyous life lived too fast, the aching pain of separation, and the transformative effect of unconditional love. A dog named for the rainy side of the mountain is an inspiring lesson in how walking the rocky, cloudy hills together can bring the greatest light, the sunniest joys, even if the shared journey is unbearably short. 
 
 
‘Not just a tribute to the love humans feel for their pets but also a means of voicing the deep grief that can be felt after a dog’s death, when all that is left is a collar and hairs, and the house seems too big without them.’ Guardian 
 
Ubac and Me has been a surprise bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation in France, championed by indie booksellers, selling 400,000 copies. 
 
Translated by Adriana Hunter.

Ubac and Me

A Life of Love and Adventure With a French Mountain Dog

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka spent eight months at his sister's house in Zürau between September 1917 and April 1918, enduring the onset of tuberculosis. Illness paradoxically set him free to write, in a series of philosophical fragments, his settling of accounts with life, marriage, his family, guilt and man's condition. These aphorisms have appeared with minor revisions in various posthumous works since his death in 1924. By chance, Roberto Calasso rediscovered Kafka's two original notebooks in Oxford's Bodleian Library. 
 
The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the work of a genius.

The Zurau Aphorisms

Anthony Powell

These journals, started in 1982 when Powell had become 'stuck' on a novel, became the place where he could most happily exercise his extraordinarily acute and often witty powers of observation and record his memories of times and writers past. 
 
This, the second volume of the journals sees the writer in his house in Somerset, The Chantry, encountering old friends, journalists, publishers, relations. He reads through the plays of Shakespeare, and also re-reads A dance to the Music of Time, giving an astonishingly dispassionate and perceptive analysis of his own greatest creation. He remembers Evelyn Waugh, Phillip Larkin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Gerald, Brenan and John Betjeman. He is visited by, among others, V.S Naipaul, Alison Lurie, Roy Jenkins, and Harold Pinter. He becomes a Companion of Honour. His beloved cat Trelawney dies. In these frank and entertaining pages, the daily life of a writer unfolds in a volume that will delight his many fans as much as its predecessor did.

Journals 1987-1989

Michelle Orange

'Rich and moving' New York Times 
 
'A book that expands and breaks your heart' Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. 
 
A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter 
 
During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome. 
 
So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. 
 
A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called 'the great unwritten story': that of the mother-daughter bond. 
 
Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it.

Pure Flame

On Mothers and Daughters

George Orwell

George Orwell was a tireless and lively correspondent. He communicated with family members, friends and newspapers, figures such as Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler, and strangers who wrote to him out of the blue. This carefully selected volume of his correspondence provides an eloquent narrative of Orwell's life, from his schooldays to his final illness. 
 
Orwell's letters afford a unique and fascinating view of his thoughts on matters both personal, political and much in between, from poltergeists, to girls' school songs and the art of playing croquet. In a note home to his mother from school, he reports having 'aufel fun after tea'; much later he writes of choosing a pseudonym and smuggling a copy of Ulysses into the country. 
 
We catch illuminating glimpses of his family life: his son Richard's developing teeth, the death of his wife Eileen and his own illness. His talent as a political writer comes to the fore in his descriptions of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, his opinions on bayonets, and on the chaining of German prisoners. And of course, letters to friends and his publisher chart the development and publication of some of the most famous novels in the English language, providing unparalleled insight into his views on his own work and that of his contemporaries. 
 
A Life in Letters features previously unpublished material, including letters which shed new light on a love that would haunt him for his whole life, as well as revealing the inspiration for some of his most famous characters. Presented for the first time in a dedicated volume, this selection of Orwell's letters is an indispensible companion to his diaries.

A Life in Letters

Harry Dodge

‘Where can the human animal seek its energy in this era of lockdowns and social distancing? Dodge may help us to find out’ Guardian 
 
‘If you’re a fan of Maggie Nelson’s work, you’ll like this book. It’s truly beautiful’ Dazed 
 
Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging. 
 
 Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life. 
 
'Holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friend. Dodge is a masterful writer' Miranda July

My Meteorite

Or, Without The Random There Can Be No New Thing

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.

Hope Abandoned

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. Eleven diaries are presented here, and we know there may be two more from his time in Spain hidden away in the NKVD Archives in Moscow. Covering the period 1931-1949, this volume follows Orwell from his early years as a writer up to his last literary notebook. 
 
His Hop-Picking Diary covers some of Orwell's time spent down and out; a wonderful entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains. The notes from his travels through industrial England, which formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, show the development of the gifted young novelist and impassioned social commentator. 'Frightful landscape of slag-heaps and belching chimneys.[...] Beards of ice on lock gates.' This same acute power of observation is evident in his diaries from Morocco, where he also encountered extreme poverty. We catch a glimpse of a different Orwell at home. His domestic diaries chart the progress of his garden and animals with a keen eye, from the succinct, 'Pig active again.' to the more poetic, 'One of the plants that carries the snow most beautifully is lavender.' 
 
The wartime diaries make fascinating reading, from descriptions of events overseas, to the daily violence closer to home and his astute perspective on the politics of both. Orwell offers a different take on the typical view of the home front. 'War is simply a reversal of civilised life, its motto is "Evil be thou my good", and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.' 
 
The diaries provide a new and entirely refreshing insight into Orwell's character and help towards an understanding of his great works.

Diaries

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