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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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Ben Rawlence

How to parent in a climate emergency? What knowledge should we pass on? What future are we preparing our children for? 
 
Ben Rawlence first began writing to his eldest daughter before she was born, expressing his fears at what it would mean to raise a child in a world where the very concept of the future is in jeopardy. Twelve years later, dozens of these letters to his two daughters tell the story of one father’s attempt to navigate the fundamental contradiction of raising children within an economic system that seems hostile to all life, including us. 
 
By turns moving and hilarious, but always bracingly honest, these letters offer relatable and inspiring insights about how to parent in perilous times. Ultimately Rawlence (and his daughters) shows us that learning to see once again through the eyes of a child might hold the answer to how we parent, how we live and even the future of our planet.

Think Like a Forest

Letters to my Children from a Changing Planet

Helen Longstreth

Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. 
 
Helen Longstreth’s chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father’s alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents’ birth, her father dies – and it all comes to an abrupt end. 
 
In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Ten years after her father’s death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk – all untouched since his death – loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

Things in Every Room

Astrid Goldsmith

'Rich, moving and wryly funny... a delight' Observer *Graphic Novel of the Month* 
 
'Brilliant, witty and endlessly inventive' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine 
 
A road-trip across Europe and back in time: the debut graphic memoir from the prize-winning author of A Funeral In Freiburg. 
 
When her imperious, chain-smoking German Jewish grandmother dies, it falls to Astrid and her father to drive a hire van to the Black Forest and collect the family heirlooms from Gisela's nicotine-stained apartment. 
 
In Freiburg, they are faced with several lifetimes’ worth of belongings to sort through - infested Persian rugs, mysterious photographs, a toy monkey that started a marriage - and a grasping landlord, impatient to renovate. 
 
As the list of demands from uncles, sisters and cousins grows longer, the rabbit-holes of history and memory grow deeper. Long-buried secrets and tales of survival are revealed - from Nazi Germany to colonial Africa - and old feuds are reignited, as father and daughter struggle with the responsibility of preserving the family legacy. More importantly, will they be able to fit everything into a medium wheel-base transit van? 
 
Funny, bittersweet and beautifully drawn, The Crystal Vase is an odyssey of family arguments, identity crises, and late discoveries.

The Crystal Vase

Elizabeth McCracken

Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal guide for writers old and new 
 
‘A cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business’ Yiyun Li 
 
Write every day 
Show, don’t tell 
Write what you know 
Kill Your Darlings 
 
These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true. They are all pieces of writing advice that Elizabeth McCracken expertly and persuasively shoots down in A Long Game. 
 
McCracken has been writing for most of her life. For over thirty-five years, she has also taught creative writing to generations of students, including at Iowa, guiding many writers towards their own answers to the question of how to write fiction. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, deconstructing received wisdom whilst playfully tackling the mysteries that are inherent to writing and creativity. 
 
A book about the life of an artist and a guide to fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource and will lead all writers, at any stage of their career, back to the page. 
 
'Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers' Garth Greenwell 
 
'An irreverent, thought-provoking and ultimately inspiring book about making art' Rumaan Alam 
 
'A world class writer and a world class writing teacher' Paul Harding 
 
'I would encourage every writer to read it' Rebecca Ivory

A Long Game

How to Write Fiction

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

Anne Enright

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life 
 
'Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer' THE TIMES 
 
'A joy to read' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. 
 
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices. 
 
'One of the best essayists alive' MEGAN NOLAN, OBSERVER 
 
'Confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels' INDEPENDENT 
 
'A glorious antidote to the mad, sad world' EIMEAR MCBRIDE 
 
'So alert, so attuned, so alive' LUCY CALDWELL

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

Rory Stewart

From the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller Politics on the Edge and co-host of The Rest is Politics 
 
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. 
 
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an urgent and inspiring portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria. 
 
These are stories of beauty and ingenuity, which also show us what a better politics might look like.

Middleland

Dispatches from the Borders

Mimi Pond

'A total treat - bravo' Sunday Times 
 
'A spectacular, dizzying romp' Alison Bechdel, Fun Home 
 
Outrageous, passionate and glamourous - a stunning graphic biography of the six sisters who blazed their way through the 20th century, beguiling their peers, the press and then the rest of the world 
 
As a young girl living in sun-bleached 1960s suburban California, Mimi Pond fell in love with the Mitford sisters. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Mitford brought society glitz, pageantry, scandal, and real (rainy) weather to her own prosaic life. 
 
High society debutantes known for rubbing shoulders with some of history’s most infamous fascists and communists, the sisters were also, in turn, gifted writers, inveterate nicknamers, chicken-raising homebodies, scathing wits, and passionate adventurers in the maelstrom of the 20th century. 
 
Drawn with inimitable artistic flair and a mischievous affinity for the decadent and grandly declining aristocracy, Mimi Pond brings the Mitfords to life in this glittering and lovingly researched family biography.

Do Admit

The Mitford Sisters and Me

Alison Weir

Triumph and tragedy, love and loss, murder and malice in the lives of five fifteenth-century queens, from 'the queen of history writing' (Sunday Express) 
 
The fifteenth century was a turbulent age: the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the Wars of the Roses dominated the lives of people both inside and out of the royal courts. 
 
Joan of Navarre, Katherine of Valois, Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Wydeville and Anne Neville were the queens who stood by England's sovereigns, caught up in wars that changed the course of their lives, and the course of history. 
 
They were also formidable women who defied the limitations of their times, often living out the brutal consequences of their determination. 
 
Alison Weir uncovers their stories in this final volume of her ground-breaking series on the queens of medieval England. Queens at War is a stunning culmination of research by a historian at the full extent of her powers and gripping account of five women on the throne. 
 
* 
PRAISE FOR ALISON WEIR: 
 
‘A meticulous scholar’ New York Times 
‘She is an excellent storyteller: descriptions are vivid and her knowledge of the sources is extensive’ Spectator 
‘Weir’s hugely popular history books are as gripping as novels’ The Times 
‘[Weir] writes in a pacy, vivid style, engaging the heart as well as the mind’ Independent 
‘Alison Weir has the rare gift of being able to bring history vividly to life’ Choice

Queens at War

England's Medieval Queens

Akshi Singh

The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner invented new ways of thinking about leisure. A hundred years on, Akshi Singh follows her methods, with life-changing consequences. 
 
'Illuminating and thought-provoking' Darian Leader'Astounding, generous, and quietly exhilarating' Daisy LaFarge 
 
Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life. 
 
Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own. 
 
In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach - from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea - she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. 
 
'An exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived' Marianne Brooker, author of Intervals 
 
'Singh's verve and intelligence radiate from every page' Hannah Zeavin

In Defence of Leisure

Experiments in Living with Marion Milner

Kay Sohini

At once heartrending and enlivening, this phenomenal graphic memoir is not another ode to New York but a meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love 
 
*AN OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH* 
 
'This is such a rich book, both visually and narratively' - Isabel Greenberg, author of Young Hag 
 
'A ravishing new take on a storied city' - Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of, Wintering and Enchantment 
 
On her first night in New York, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK airport making an inventory of all she’s left behind in India. Kay realises two things: she's finally made it to the city that made her in celluloid and prose from across the Pacific – Kerouac, Friends, Plath – and that trauma she’s endured in her relationship has left gaping holes in her memory. 
 
In New York, at last, Kay has room to begin the work of piecing herself back together through art and food. But as her personal story becomes a window onto a mystifying metropolis both inhospitable and inspiring to the many who call it home, Kay embarks on an electric exploration of how to forge the self and a life of one’s own today. 
 
At once heartrending and enlivening, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is not another ode to New York but a phenomenal meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love with places – and indeed people – that do not always love us back but somehow still save us in weird, unexpected ways. 
 
'A stunning graphic memoir… a praise-song to her adopted home… with its glorious, candy-coloured drawings' - FINANCIAL TIMES

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City

A Graphic Memoir

David Grossman

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

The Thinking Heart

On Israel and Palestine

Miriam Gold

This is the story of the ordinary extraordinary life of Dr Elena Zadik. 
 
Lives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Elena Zadik was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Elena ran through the twentieth century without looking back. 
 
A refugee twice before she was 17, she broke glass ceilings to become a doctor during World War 2. She was as brilliant a doctor as she was terrible a driver (she never took a test). Finding community, falling in love and starting a family in Sheffield while her parents were imprisoned and killed in Auschwitz, she swam against the odds with courage and tenacity. 
 
Miriam gathers the threads of her Granny’s story, reflecting on their unconventional relationship and how trauma travels down through the generations in this gorgeous brocade of illustration and collage. 
 
Granny was an unintentionally hilarious woman, often difficult, always opinionated and deeply resourceful. Her hands were always busy and form the heart of this timely, irresistible graphic story of the ordinary extraordinary resilience of women. 
 
A heartfelt and charming graphic memoir of love, family and fearless women.

Elena: A Hand Made Life

Darrin Bell

***LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL*** 
***A GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She said that police think little Black boys older and less innocent than they are. So began 'The Talk'... 
 
'The Ta-Nehisi Coates of comics' 
GARRY TRUDEAU, creator of Doonesbury 
 
'Darrin Bell has produced another American classic' 
GUARDIAN 
 
Through evocative illustrations and sharp humour, Darrin Bell examines how The Talk all Black parents must have with their children shaped his intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles - and finding a voice through cartooning - Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbours and police officers, and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans, and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 
 
And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

The Talk

Lucie Arnoux

A funny, heartfelt graphic memoir about living in foreign countries, and finding one's place both at home and abroad. 
 
In this delightful graphic novel, Lucie Arnoux chronicles her adventures around the world. Growing up in Marseille as a misfit with a passion for drawing, she decides to settle in London to pursue her dream career as a comics writer. Je Ne Sais Quoi shows us London through the eyes of a mischievous and clear-sighted young French woman, the joys and pains of being an outsider and, ultimately, how to live life to its fullest.

Je Ne Sais Quoi

The Adventures of a French Woman in London

Kate Beaton

*WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDS FOR BEST MEMOIR AND BEST WRITER/ARTIST* 
 
'A vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people... it shimmers with grace' 
ALISON BECHDEL, author of FUN HOME 
 
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. 
 
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. 
 
Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Ducks

Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2022

Julian Aguon

'A powerful, beautiful book. Its fierce love - of the land, the ocean, the elders and the ancestors - warms the heart and moves the spirit.' - Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple 
 
Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice-for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. 
 
Aguon beautifully weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Bearing witness and reckoning with the challenges of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness. 
 
A powerful and bold new voice writing at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, Aguon is entrenched in the struggles of the people of the Pacific who are fighting to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites and obtain justice for generations of harm. 
 
In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy and triumph, and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.

No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies

With an introduction by Arundhati Roy

Julia Blackburn

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. 
 
In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. 
 
Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said. 
 
Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers. 
 
'An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty' Olivia Laing 
 
'Blackburn's wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a...genius for serendipity' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

Dreaming the Karoo

A People Called the /Xam

John Richardson

'A masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
'Magisterial... thrilling' Guardian 
 
'Terrifically enjoyable' Daily Telegraph 
 
The beautifully illustrated, long-awaited final volume of John Richardson's magisterial Life of Picasso, drawing on original research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives. 
 
 The Minotaur Years opens in 1933 with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso's château in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso was contributing to André Breton's Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris and the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur. 
 
 Richardson shows us the artist being as prolific as ever, painting Walter, as well as the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who became a muse, collaborator and lover. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 would inspire Picasso's vast masterwork of the same name, which he painted in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso chose to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso met Françoise Gilot who would replace Maar and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings. 
 
 As always, Richardson tells Picasso's story through his work, analysing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and illuminating narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth-century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed biography of one of the world's most celebrated artists.

A Life of Picasso Volume IV

The Minotaur Years: 1933–1943

Alison Bechdel

**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER AND FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK** 
**A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021** 
 
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Fun Home comes this Christmas's must-gift graphic novel. 
 
All her life, Alison Bechdel has searched for an elusive secret... 
 
The secret to superhuman strength. 
 
She has looked for it in her favourite books, the lives of her heroes, celibacy, polyamory, activism, therapy, and most obsessively, in her lifelong passion for exercise. Skiing, running, karate, cycling, yoga, weightlifting - you name it, she's tried it. "Oh, to be self-sufficient! Hard as a rock! An island!" 
 
But as she gets older, her body isn't getting any stronger. And in a changing, sometimes overwhelming world, are "cantaloupe-sized guns" all a person needs? Maybe the all-important secret is not where she expected to find it . . . 
 
'The Secret to Superhuman Strength practically glows with a beguiling mixture of intellect, warmth and humour' Daily Telegraph 
 
In this, her third graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel has written a deeply layered, personal story about selfhood, self-sabotage, mortality, addiction, bliss, wonder, and the concerns of a generation. This is an extraordinary, laugh-out-loud chronicle of the conundrums we all grapple with as we seek our true place in the world. Truly, a must-gift book this Christmas.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Blake Bailey

'Superlative... definitive and genuinely gripping' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Utterly engrossing' EVENING STANDARD 
 
'Compulsively readable... Beautifully written... Definitive' OBSERVER 
 
Appointed by Philip Roth and granted complete access and independence, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the post-war literary scene. 
 
Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of post-war American culture. 
 
*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN*

Philip Roth

The Biography

Julian Barnes

The updated edition of Julian Barnes’ best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays 
 
‘Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue... It is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.’ 
 
Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism. 
 
Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes’ essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Morisot, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Cassatt, Redon, Van Gogh, the legendary critic Huysmans, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud. It also offers new perspectives on the fruitful relationship between writers and artists, and on the rivalry among Russian collectors of French art in the late 19th century. 
 
‘A typically elegant and absorbing book by one of the greatest contemporary English writers.’ Guardian *Books of the Year* 
‘Gave me a new confidence in how to understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.’ Mariella Frostrup 
‘My book of the year.’ Natalie Haynes, Independent

Keeping an Eye Open

Essays on Art (Updated Edition)

‘It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 
 
This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads. 
 
The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other’s elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces: seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air’s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.

Gigantic Cinema

A Weather Anthology

Alex Halberstadt

'Engrossing' Daniel Beer, Guardian 
 
'A beautiful book... incisive, radiant' Olivia Laing 
 
'Illuminating, dramatic... majestic writing' Spectator 
 
'Enthralling... a triumph' Andrew Solomon 
 
Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia, the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family, in this haunting work of memoir and history. 
 
In Ukraine, Halberstadt tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his own story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. 
 
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a moving investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

A Memoir and a Reckoning

Mark Doty

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American – keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work. 
 
What is it, then, between us? Whitman asks. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.

What is the Grass

Raymond Briggs

In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death… and doesn’t like them much. 
 
Illustrated with Briggs’s inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog… He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. But most, like this one, are about his home in Sussex: 
 
Looking round this house, 
What will they say, 
The future ghosts? 
 
There must have been 
Some barmy old bloke here, 
Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type, 
Did pictures for kiddy books 
Or some such tripe. 
 
You should have seen the stuff 
He stuck up in that attic! 
Snowman this and snowman that, 
Tons and tons of tat.

Time For Lights Out

Sarah Lippett

A moving, often very funny graphic memoir about what it is like to grow up with an illness that no one can diagnose. 
 
 When the headaches started, Sarah Lippett would stand alone on a different side of the playground from the other children. When she started to drag one of her legs, her parents took her to hospital, and so began the visits to many different doctors, each one more bewildered by her illness than the last. Initially schooled at home, when Sarah went back to school she was placed with the struggling kids, and still so often ill, she felt even more alone. 
 
But although Sarah's parents often despaired of the stream of appointments and no cure, they never showed it and she grew up in the midst of a boisterous, loving family and found good friends at last, as well as venturing into bands, art, boys, books and records. Finally, when Sarah turned sixteen, she was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital where the doctors diagnosed her with the rare disease, Moyamoya. The book ends with Sarah waking up after brain surgery.

A Puff of Smoke

Joe Sacco

Rafah, a town at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front rubbish-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. Situated on the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been reduced to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this most bitter of conflicts. 
 
Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinian refugees dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah - coldblooded massacre or dreadful mistake - reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco arrives in Gaza and, immersing himself in daily life, uncovers Rafah, past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheikhs, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy. 
 
As in Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, Joe Sacco's unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience.

Footnotes in Gaza

Andrew Barrow

'Your brother looked healthy, happy, natural. But everything else about him is extremely odd. Not faintly odd. Extremely odd. Except in appearance. He's the opposite of you.' Quentin Crisp 
 
At the age of twenty-two, the youngest of five brothers, Jonathan Barrow, was killed with his fiancée in a car crash. He left behind the manuscript of a novel, The Queue, in which, among other things, he prophesied his own death. The story of a boy and a dachshund, populated by a kaleidoscopic menagerie of people and animals and an array of anthropomorphic in-betweens, The Queue is a vivid and irreverent portrayal of the world in which Jonathan and his awe-struck older brother Andrew were raised. 
 
Jonathan and his book form the framework of a remarkable study of a young man's inner and outer effervescence, his family, England and high and low society in the Swinging Sixties. Filled with fascinating and fantastical anecdotes, Animal Magic documents a heady and peripatetic childhood in Lancashire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, misadventures at home and school, and the early working life of the two brothers, on the lower rungs of show business, backstage at Claridge's, and finally in advertising. This spellbinding elegy negotiates love affairs, family tensions, exhibitions, publishers' rejections and precarious living in a flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. 
 
Punctuated with excerpts from The Queue and Jonathan's other bizarre and brilliant writings, Animal Magic is a book bursting with humour, wit and pathos and featuring an outlandish cast of characters, from an eccentric father, a mischievous family dog and a down-and-out ex-schoolmaster to curious stars of Swinging London like Mick Jagger and Tommy Cooper. It is a memoir unlike any other.

Animal Magic

A Brother's Story

Serena Katt

Serena Katt’s grandfather, whom she knew as Opa, was a ‘Sunday’s Child’, one of the lucky ones for whom everything always went right. Opa left a brief account of his childhood and teenage years, but it is opaque, a story of prizes won and boyish adventures. In Sunday’s Child, Serena Katt interrogates Opa’s version of his life. Was it really so innocent? Did he really not know what the Nazis were doing? He joined the Hitler Youth at the age of ten, swearing an oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer. From then on the games he played were actually military training, designed to produce a ‘new German youth … violent, domineering, unafraid, cruel … which the world will fear’. At seventeen, in the final desperate days of the war, he is called up but his luck holds. He is sent home and thus survives the war. 
 
Sunday’s Child marks the debut of a remarkable graphic novelist. Serena Katt’s book is powerful, eloquent and moving, and her drawing is superb.

Sunday's Child

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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