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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Neil McCormick

'Squirm-inducing, excruciatingly honest and painfully funny' Joseph O'Connor 
 
We all went to school with friends who've turned out more successful than ourselves. But they don't all phone from improbably glamorous places and drive us mad by telling us about it. And they're not all Bono. 
 
Neil McCormick always dreamed of life as a rock star. Instead, he had to watch while his friend became one of the most famous men on the planet. Killing Bono tells the story of the less-than-successful rival band which he set up with his brother Ivan in the late 1970s. 
 
While the young brothers struggled to find success Bono and his friends went on to achieve superstar status. A heartwarming story of friendship, loyalty, rivalry and ambition, read it and weep - with sympathy and laughter.

Killing Bono

Eddie Izzard

The stand-up comedian of his generation. Star of stage and screen. Tireless supporter of charity. Runner. Political campaigner. Fashion icon. Human. There is no one quite like Eddie Izzard. 
 
This is the story of how a boy who wanted to become a professional footballer and win the lead in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat found comedy. Affecting, witty and nothing less than rousing, readers will, as Eddie himself says, 'look at my life and say, 'If that idiot transvestite can run a whole bunch of marathons, play the Hollywood Bowl, and travel across France with a French-speaking tour, then what's holding me back?''

Believe Me

A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens

Wendy Joseph KC

What is justice? Do our legal courts dispense it? Has our judicial process improved, for the victims, the accused and for society? What more must be done to ensure genuine justice is carried out in future? 
 
Following on the heels of her bestseller Unlawful Killings, Old Bailey judge Wendy Joseph KC skilfully reconstructs courtroom dramas affecting society’s most vulnerable - so often women and children, drawing on her many years’ experience as a murder trial judge, and asking the key questions of the institutions tasked to deliver what is right and fair. 
 
From the trial of a child charged with disposing of dismembered body parts, to the woman accused of killing her own husband, Joseph is utterly compelling as she sets out how our justice system works. But, as she compares these modern courtroom tales with eerily similar cases and miscarriages of justice from years ago, might the most chilling story of all be that the lessons of the past have yet to be learned? 
 
Incisive, masterfully crafted, Rough Justice illuminates the struggles of any one of us caught up in our legal system – but particularly the marginalized and the easily exploited – and grapples with the concept of ‘justice for all’ so that we might demand better.

Rough Justice

Do we have the law we deserve?

David Nasaw

In this pioneering new work, celebrated historian David Nasaw examines the life of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. Drawing on never-before-published materials from archives on three continents and interviews with Kennedy family members and friends, Nasaw tells the story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and the Cold War, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive the history of the American century. 
 
"Riveting...The Patriarch is a book hard to put down...As his son indelibly put it some months before his father was struck down: 'Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your county.' One wonders what was going through the mind of the patriarch, sitting a few feet away listening to that soaring sentiment as a fourth-generation Kennedy became president of the United States. After coming to know him over the course of this brilliant, compelling book, the reader might suspect that he was thinking he had done more than enough for his country. But the gods would demand even more." - New York Times Book Review

The Patriarch

The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

Roddy Collins

Paul Howard

Roddy Collins is a football man - now in the sixth decade of a career as a player (at sixteen clubs), manager (twelve clubs) and commentator. And he is a funny man: an unequalled raconteur with a sharp eye for the absurdities of the professional game and spectacular recall. He has made friends wherever he has gone, along with some high-quality enemies. When John Delaney said he could get Roddy a job if he'd just stop criticising him, Roddy replied that he'd 'rather dig holes in the road'. 
 
Now, with the brilliant Paul Howard, Roddy puts it all down on paper for the first time - the adventures, the rows and the craic - in what is not only one of the funniest but also one of the most eye-opening books ever written about professional football.

The Rodfather

Inside the Beautiful (Ugly, Ridiculous, Hilarious) Game

Simon Winchester

Before fate intervened, Joseph Needham was a distinguished biochemist at Cambridge University, married to a fellow scientist. In 1937 he was asked to supervise a young Chinese student named Lu Gwei-Djen, and in that moment began the two greatest love affairs of his life - Miss Lu, and China. 
 
Miss Lu inspired Needham to travel to China where he initially spent three dangerous years as a wartime diplomat. He established himself as the pre-eminent China scholar of all time, firm in his belief that China would one day achieve world prominence. By the end of his life, Needham had become a truly global figure, travelling endlessly and honoured by all - though banned from America because of his politics. And in 1989, after a fifty-two year affair, he finally married the woman who had first inspired his passion. 
 
The Magnificent Barbarian is Simon Winchester at his best - at once a magnificent portrait of one man's remarkable life and a riveting exploration of the country that so engaged him.

Bomb, Book and Compass

Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China

Josef Lewkowicz

Michael Calvin

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
'A riveting, compelling, mesmerizing journey. Josef Lewkowicz is a hero in every sense of the word. The Survivor both terrifies us and inspires us. It's a must read.' 
Tova Friedman, author of The Daughter of Auschwitz. 
 
One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit, unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil. 
 
At only sixteen years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. 
 
From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces. 
 
With his freedom, Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in hiding. 
 
Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Göth, played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives. 
 
The Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.

The Survivor

How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter

Joe Power

For almost a decade, psychic medium Joe Power has used his extraordinary powers to investigate high-profile, unsolved crimes around the world, including, most recently, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. 
 
But it wasn't always this way. Joe had denied his psychic abilities until the day his brother was found dead. Then messages from the spirit world led him to see the shocking truth behind the tragedy . . . his brother had been murdered. 
 
Joe realized he could no longer ignore the startling visions and voices in his head. He vowed to use his psychic gift to help solve the murder cases that were leaving detectives baffled, and loved ones without closure. In The Man Who Sees Dead People he tells the astonishing story of his life for the first time.

The Man Who Sees Dead People

Stephen T Johnson

In 1794, Joseph Priestley - amateur scientist, ordained minister and radical thinker - set sail for America to escape persecution. Stephen Johnson tells his incredible story: the discovery of oxygen, the invention of a science, the founding of a church, and, with the great minds of his time, the development of the United States itself. But Priestley's revolutionary ideas put him in terrible danger. 
 
Johnson uses the progress of Priestley and his colleagues not merely to describe the wonder of discovery, but to show us how we have come to understand the world, how far we have travelled with the power of human enquiry - and how one man's curiosity can help build an entire country.

The Invention of Air

An experiment, a journey, a new country and the amazing force of scientific discovery

Allan Hall

On 28 August 1984, Josef Fritzl drugged his teenage daughter with ether and imprisoned her in an underground bunker behind eight locked doors. Over the following twenty-four years, he raped and abused her, never letting her or the children she bore him out of the dark, windowless cellar. 
 
Based on 150 new interviews with psychologists, neighbours, colleagues and friends who knew Fritzl, as well as the insight of his own chilling confession, Allan Hall reconstructs the monstrous personality behind this hideous crime. He exposes Josef Fritzl's dark past in Nazi Austria, his previous conviction as a rapist, the appalling conditions in which Elisabeth and her children were kept and her astonishingly brave conduct while held prisoner. Including exclusive photographs and previously unseen evidence, this is a truly heart-stopping record of one of the most elaborate and disturbing cases of abuse in modern times.

Monster

Joe Cassidy

Though many of us suspect that there is more to our world than meets the eye, it takes someone special to connect with what lies beneath the surface. Leading diviner Joe Cassidy is such a man and he knows a side of life that is at once familiar, mysterious and powerful. 
 
In The Diviner, Joe explains the ancient art he practices. He describes how he discovered his gift and why he resisted it for many years, suffering the consequences in stress and ill-health. Over a decade ago he realised he had to accept his destiny and despite having a young family, he began working as a diviner. Since then has worked on over five thousand cases. 
 
Joe does not advertise but somehow people find him. Everyone from housewives and lorry drivers, to lawyers and record company executives, turns up at his door. What they each sense is that Joe's timeless insights can help with a problem that appears insoluble. 
 
The Diviner is a story of listening, divining and healing that throws a light on a side of life that is both ancient and still very much part of modern life. And it is a fascinating and uplifting story of a life less ordinary.

The Diviner

The inspiring true story of a man with uncanny insight and the ability to heal

Stephen Breen

Owen Conlon

Meet the Wilsons - the deadliest family in crime 
 
Brothers Eric, Keith and John Wilson, their cousin Alan, and nephew Luke shared a trade - assassination. Working for Ireland's criminal gangs they brought bloodshed and chaos to the streets. 
 
The Wilsons were not choosy about their targets. Hutches, Real IRA chiefs or random opponents from pub rows - they were all the same to them. Nor were they picky about motives - as long as the price was right, they asked no questions. 
 
The Hitmen is the shocking story of how a family cornered the market in intimidation and vengeance. It details the terrible cost in human suffering, particularly the death of an innocent teenage girl, Mariaora Rostas, when she randomly crossed their path. And it reveals how, one by one, each of the Wilsons was put out of business. 
 
The Hitmen draws on exclusive access to wire taps, case files and interviews with sources close to the gang who have never spoken before. No 1 bestselling authors Stephen Breen and Owen Conlon have written an extraordinary account of a family business like no other.

The Hitmen

The Shocking True Story of a Family of Killers for Hire

Rose Callaly

The day Rose Callaly found her daughter Rachel's battered body was only the start of her nightmares. 
 
Shortly afterwards Rose became certain that the person who had killed her beautiful daughter was Rachel's husband, Joe O'Reilly. After what seemed like an eternity, O'Reilly was charged. But that was the start of another ordeal - the revelation of just how much he despised his wife and the unfolding of his ingenious plan to kill her, a plan that set Rose up to discover the murder scene. 
 
Remembering Rachel is the shocking and heart-breaking story of Rachel Callaly's short life and brutal death. It is also a remarkable account of what it is like to be at the heart of a sensational and tragic murder case. And finally, it is a touching portrait of motherly love and the bond that survives death.

Remembering Rachel

A True Story of Betrayal and Murder

Judith Flanders

The Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.

A Circle of Sisters

Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

Joe Schmidt

In the autumn of 2010, a little-known New Zealander called Joe Schmidt took over as head coach at Leinster. He had never been in charge of a professional team. After Leinster lost three of their first four games, a prominent Irish rugby pundit speculated that Schmidt had 'lost the dressing room'. 
 
Nine years on, Joe Schmidt has stepped down as Ireland coach having achieved success on a scale never before seen in Irish rugby. Two Heineken Cups in three seasons with Leinster. Three Six Nations championships in six seasons with Ireland, including the Grand Slam in 2018. And a host of firsts: the first Irish victory in South Africa; the first Irish defeat of the All Blacks, and then a second; and Ireland's first number 1 world ranking. 
 
Along the way, Schmidt became a byword for precision and focus in coaching, remarkable attention to detail and the highest of standards. But who is Joe Schmidt? In Ordinary Joe, Schmidt tells the story of his life and influences: the experiences and management ideas that made him the coach, and the man, that he is today. And his diaries of the 2018 Grand Slam and the 2019 Rugby World Cup provide a brilliantly intimate insight into the stresses and joys of coaching a national team in victory and defeat. 
 
From the small towns in New Zealand's North Island where he played barefoot rugby and jostled around the dinner table with seven siblings, to the training grounds and video rooms where he consistently kept his teams a step ahead of the opposition, Ordinary Joe reveals an ordinary man who has helped his teams to achieve extraordinary things.

Ordinary Joe

Jane Martinson

You May Never See Us Again is the definitive story of David and Frederick Barclay - commonly known as the Barclay brothers. Born poor, these enigmatic twins built one of the biggest fortunes in Britain together and spent six decades at the epicentre of British business, media and politics. Their empire, said to be worth &pound;7bn at its height, included Littlewoods, the Ritz, The Daily Telegraph and the channel island of Brecqhou. 
 
And yet despite their fortune and influence, the Barclays' desire for privacy meant that their story has remained largely unknown - until a very public family dispute pitched Barclay against Barclay in the High Court. 
 
Journalist Jane Martinson unravels the fascinating story of these once inseparable brothers. Through their lives she offers compelling insights into post-war Britain, from the conditions that enabled their way of doing business to thrive through to the tightly enmeshed webs of influence between capitalism, politics and the media that shape Britain today.

You May Never See Us Again

The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession

Ronan Casey

Growing up in poor circumstances in the midlands town of Mullingar might seem an unlikely start for a musical superstar, but that's exactly the journey Joe Dolan travelled in his amazing life. Not only that, Joe never forgot his roots and loved Mullingar to the day he died. 
 
From losing his father at a tragically young age, to his bold decision while still a teenager to throw in a good job and pursue his dream of playing music for a living, to early stardom with The Drifters and conquering the USSR, to his later re-emergence for a new generation of fans as the iconic Man in the White Suit - the amazing, mad, bad and funny stories behind the legendary career will be told for the first time. 
 
It is a colourful, life-affirming, revealing and hugely entertaining biography that is a fitting tribute to such a beloved performer.

Joe Dolan

The Official Biography

Nell Frizzell

'My favourite person on the politics of parenthood' Pandora Sykes 
 
'Exhilarating, infuriating, urgent and human' Daisy Buchanan 
 
'A blazing, brilliant read ... compassionate, convincing, funny!' Amy Liptrot 
 
'Honest, unflinching and necessary' Sara Pascoe 
 
'Funny and brisk ... urgent and incisive' Rob Delaney 
 
'A timely and important book' Clover Stroud 
 
It's time to share the motherload. 
 
A memoir culminating in a manifesto, Holding the Baby sets out to understand why we still treat early parenthood as an individual slog rather than a shared cultural responsibility. Tracing her own journey to the nadir of sleeplessness via social retreat and murderous rage, Frizzell draws on the latest research to explore: 
 
- What effect does parenting have on your career? 
 
- How can we make childcare affordable and fit for purpose? 
 
- If parenting is so hard, why does anyone ever do it more than once? 
 
Funny, reassuring and radically ambitious, Holding the Baby sheds light on the ways in which we fail new parents, and offers a rallying crying that we fight for a better alternative.

Holding the Baby

Milk, sweat and tears from the frontline of motherhood

Jonathan Safran Foer has long had a passion for the work of the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell&rsquo;s avian-themed boxes, and suspecting that they would be similarly inspiring to others, Foer began to write letters. 
 
The responses he received from luminaries of American writing were nothing short of astounding. Twenty writers generously contributed pieces of prose and poetry that are as eclectic as they are imaginative, and the result is a unique collaborative project and one of the most significant engagements of literature with art for many years.

A Convergence of Birds

Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell

Rupert Isaacson

One family's epic journey to rescue their son . . . 
 
Rupert and Kirstin Isaacson were heartbroken when they learned that their two-year-old son Rowan was autistic. And with each passing day, Rowan's growing isolation, his uncontrollable fits, each failed treatment, filled them with despair. 
 
Then one day Rowan escaped and ran into a field of horses. Rupert watched in horror - but saw a miracle occur. The horses responded lovingly to Rowan - and he to them. Could Rowan's affinity with these animals save their son from his condition? 
 
The Isaacsons left their home in Texas and travelled to the plains and mountains of Mongolia - the spiritual home of the horse - risking everything - their happiness, future and sanity - on an arduous epic horseback journey in search of a cure for Rowan . . .

The Horse Boy

A Father's Miraculous Journey to Heal His Son

Sarah Burton

The little known story of the inseparable brother and sister, lights of the Romantic circle, privately haunted by madness 
 
Wordsworth thought that if there were such a thing as a good man, it would be Charles Lamb, while Hazlitt believed Mary Lambto be the only sensible woman he knew. The couple's literary reputation rested partly on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. And yet there was an unhappier side: Charles was an alcoholic and Mary, in an attack of insanity, stabbed their mother to death. 
 
This fascinating account reaches to the heart of early nineteenth century London, meeting its eccentrics and its literary giants. It also visits the city's darker corners, where poverty stalks rented rooms and madhouses conceal terrible abuse.

A Double Life

A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb

Joe Dunthorne

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. 
 
The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew… 
 
Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it? 
 
Children of Radium is a remarkable, searching meditation on individual and collective inheritance. Witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising, it considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

Sigrid Rausing

For years Sigrid Rausing watched helplessly as her brother Hans and his wife Eva succumbed to drug addiction. It afflicted a terrible toll on their family, culminating in Eva's tragic early death. As this death led to inquest and media circus, the world looked on in horror, but few understood the suffering endured by the Rausing family. 
 
 In Mayhem, Sigrid explores the collateral damage addiction wreaks on loved ones. Telling her family's story, she examines painful and rarely discussed questions. What is it like to live with addiction in the family? How can you help without hurting the one you love? And what does it mean to survive another's addiction?

Mayhem

A Memoir

PJ Gallagher

I grew up in a psychiatric experiment crossed with an alcoholic experiment. . . . a place run by two people who were extraordinarily drunk and guarded by a potentially vicious dog with a brain tumour. 
 
PJ Gallagher spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents' northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when - having lost the pub - his mum took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them 'care in the community'. Now it was a household of ten - PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever. 
Madhouse is PJ's riotous life story. Being a kid while the adults around you are usually drunk, throwing house Masses or taking you to Camp Jesus instead of Trabolgan. Struggling at school, leaving early and discovering a talent for comedy. Making iconic TV shows like Naked Camera and The Young Offenders. Finally, finding a home in radio. 
 
Covering everything from dogs, motorbikes and the art of small talk, to the lessons of mental breakdown and finally figuring out love, this is PJ unbound. Most surprising - to PJ more than anyone - is the prospect of becoming a dad in his late forties, when he always thought of 'family' as a trap. 
 
Madhouse is the funny, insightful and moving story of someone just trying to keep his head above water - and how he is making sense of it all at last!

Madhouse

The naked truth about my chaotic childhood, losing my mind and finding a place to call home

Molly McCloskey

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. 
 
When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly - having moved from the US to Ireland - hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike's, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck - the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered him unrecognizable. 
 
Now, in Circles around the Sun, she tells that story - which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family slowly fell apart and, in the end, regrouped. It is a work of extraordinary intensity and drama from a wonderfully gifted writer.

Circles around the Sun

In Search of a Lost Brother

Various

Love, literature, friendship, music, carnival, travel, dance, work, nature, food - Black Joy can be found in so many places. And this anthology is an invitation for readers to ruminate on what brings them joy, too. 
 
Edited by award-winning journalist Charlie Brinkhust-Cuff and up-and-coming talent Timi Sotire, join twenty-eight inspirational voices in this uplifting and empowering anthology as they come together to celebrate being Black British, sharing their experiences of joy and what it means to them. 
 
 
With incredible pieces from: 
 
Diane Abbott - Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé - Fopé Ajanaku - Athian Akec - Travis Alabanza - Haaniyah Angus - Rukiat Ashawe - Bukky Bakray - Richie Brave - Munya Chawawa - Ruby Fatimilehin - Theophina Gabriel - Lauryn Green - Ife Grillo - Isaac James - Chanté Joseph - Vanessa Kisuule - Henrie Kwushue - Tobi Kyeremateng - Mikai McDermott - Jason Okundaye - Tope Olufemi - Melz Owusu - Leigh-Anne Pinnock - Mayowa Quadri - Lavinya Stennett - Timi Sotire - Sophia Tassew

Black Joy

Clare Balding

In Clare Balding's family, walking just took too long - she galloped through the countryside and she galloped through life. 
 
Then, starting out in her broadcasting career, she was asked to present a series discovering the glories of Britain and Ireland. Clare caught the walking bug. 
 
Now she wants her family to share some of that pleasure. She and her brother Andrew are determined to conquer the Wayfarer's Walk, a 71 mile route. What could possibly go wrong? 
 
This is a story of paths and people, of (mis)adventures, and of life-changing rambles. This is Clare's story of walking home.

Walking Home

Great British Adventures . . . and Other Rambles

My Family and Other Rambles

Colm Tóibín

'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses 
 
In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce - and examines their earliest influences: their fathers. With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn't feed his own family. This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

Anthony McCarten

From the prize-winning screenwriter of The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour, The Two Popes is a fascinating, revealing and gripping tale of two very different men whose destinies converge with each other - they both live in the Vatican - and the wider world. 
 
On 28 February 2013, a 600-year-old tradition was shattered: the conservative Pope Benedict XVI made a startling announcement. He would resign. Reeling from the news, the College of Cardinals rushed to Rome to congregate in the Sistine Chapel to pick his successor. Their unlikely choice? Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,200 years, a one time tango club bouncer, a passionate football fan and a man with the common touch. 
 
How did these two men become two of the most powerful people on Earth? 
What's it like to be the Pope? 
What does the future hold for the Catholic Church and its 1 billion followers? 
 
The Two Popes is a dual biography that masterfully combines these two popes' lives into one gripping narrative. From Benedict and Francis' experiences of war in their homelands - when they were still Joseph and Jorge - and the sexual abuse scandal that continues to rock the Church to its foundations, to the intrigue and the occasional comedy of life in the Vatican, The Pope glitters with the darker and the lighter details of life inside one of the world's most opaque but significant institutions.

The Two Popes

Caroline Elton

Meet Lionel, Caroline’s older brother. Born in the late 1940s, when little was known about autism, Lionel was considered a peculiarity. From the beginning, he was a silent child, oblivious to the people around him and intent only on playing with his toy trucks. By the time he turned four, doctors declared him ineducable and advised that he be institutionalised – a shockingly standard practise at the time. 
 
No one could have predicted that Lionel would go onto music college and find his place in the world. With the help of his mother – who refused to send him away – Lionel lived a life that was certainly unusual but never dull. He had perfect pitch, could multiply three-figure numbers in his head, or work out which day of the week you were born on, the instant you told him your birthday. 
 
But when Lionel’s mother dies, and shortly after he is diagnosed with cancer, his two sisters struggle to fill the void – to become Lionel’s caretaker and support him as they had promised their mother. Looking After is both a portrait of one autistic man's remarkable life, and a heart-rending story of how one family learnt to care for each other, to deal with loss and to be by each other’s side at the very end.

Looking After

Autism, Family and End-of-Life Care

A Portrait of My Autistic Brother

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