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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Duncan Hamilton

'Without football, we were strangers under a shared roof. With it, we were father and son.’ 
 
Inspired by his father’s devotion to Newcastle United and the heroes of yesteryear, Duncan Hamilton brings to life a bygone age telling the story of British football from the hardscrabble 1940s and the ‘never-had-it-so-good’ ’50s right through to the dowdy First Division of the ’70s and ’80s, and today’s slick Premiership. Hamilton recalls some of football’s most sublime players, managers and characters, from Bill Shankly and Jackie Milburn to George Best and Lionel Messi. 
 
But at the heart of The Footballer Who could Fly is Hamilton’s relationship with his own father. Here he tells how football became the only real connection between two people who, apart from their love of the beautiful game, were wholly different from one another.

The Footballer Who Could Fly

Dylan Jones

** Shortlisted for the NME Best Music Book Award 2018 ** 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A HERALD BOOK OF THE YEAR 
AN IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
'The definitive book on Bowie' The Times 
 
Drawn from a series of conversations between David Bowie and Dylan Jones across three decades, together with over 180 interviews with friends, rivals, lovers, and collaborators - some of whom have never before spoken about their relationship with Bowie - this oral history is an intimate portrait of a remarkable rise to stardom and one of the most fascinating lives of our time. 
 
Profoundly shaped by his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother Terry, Bowie was a man of intense relationships that often came to abrupt ends. He was a social creature, equally comfortable partying with John Lennon and dining with Frank Sinatra, and in Dylan Jones's telling - by turns insightful and salacious - we see as intimate a portrait as could possibly be drawn. 
 
Including illuminating, never-before-seen material from Bowie himself, drawn from a series of Jones’s interviews with him across three decades, DAVID BOWIE is an epic, unforgettable cocktail-party conversation about a man whose enigmatic shapeshifting and irrepressible creativity produced one of the most sprawling, fascinating lives of our time. 
 
***NOW REVISED AND EXPANDED***

David Bowie

A Life

James Ellroy

America's greatest crime writer investigates his mother's murder. On 21 June 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in California. She was found strangled the next day. Her ten year-old son James had been with her estranged husband all weekend and was informed of her death on his return. Her murderer was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son - he spent his teens and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict. 
 
Only later, through his obsession with crime fiction, triggered by his mother's murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking novel WHITE JAZZ, he determined to return to Los Angeles and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the 38-year-old killing. 
 
The result is one of the few classics of crime non-fiction and autobiography to appear in the last few decades; a hypnotic trip to America's underbelly and one man's tortured soul.

My Dark Places

Tony Fletcher

To this day, they were, their fans believe, the best band in the world. Critics and sales figures told a similar story. Yet for all their brilliance and adoration – their famously energetic live shows routinely interrupted by stage invasions – The Smiths were continually plagued by their reticence to play the game, and by the time of 1987’s Strangeways Here We Come, they had split. 
 
Tony Fletcher’s A Light That Never Goes Out – part celebration, part paean – moves from Manchester in the nineteenth-century to the present day to tell the complete story of The Smiths. The product of extensive research and unprecedented access, it will serve to confirm The Smiths as one of the most important and influential rock groups of all time.

A Light That Never Goes Out

The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

America's greatest living crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir-as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels-about his obsessive search for "atonement in women." 
 
The year was 1958.Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name.Her son, James, was ten years old.He hated and lusted for his mother and "summoned her dead." She was murdered three months later. 
 
The Hilliker Curse is a predator's confession, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all a cri de cœur. Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. 
 
A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.

The Hilliker Curse

My Pursuit of Women

Katie Waldegrave

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, were life-long friends. They were also the daughters of best friends: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic Age. 
 
Living in the shadow of their fathers’ extraordinary fame brought Sara and Dora great privilege, but at a terrible cost. In different ways, each father almost destroyed his daughter. Growing up in the shadow of genius, each girl made it her life’s ambition to dedicate herself to her father’s writing and reputation. Anorexia, drug addiction and depression were part of the legacy of fame, but so too were great friendship and love. 
 
Drawing on a host of new sources, Katie Waldegrave tells the never-before-told story of how two young women, born into greatness, shaped their own legacies.

The Poets' Daughters

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge

Tara Westover

THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLER 
 
A BETWEEN THE COVERS PICK 
 
Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE 
 
'One of the best books I have ever read . . . unbelievably moving' Elizabeth Day 
'An extraordinary story, beautifully told' Louise O'Neill 
'A memoir to stand alongside the classics . . . compelling and joyous' Sunday Times 
 
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate until she was nine years old. 
 
At sixteen, to escape her father's radicalism and a violent older brother, Tara left home. What followed was a struggle for self-invention, a journey that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it. 
 
'It will make your heart soar' Guardian 
'Jaw-dropping and inspiring, everyone should read this book' Stylist 
'Absolutely superb . . . so gripping I could hardly breathe' Sophie Hannah

Educated

The international bestselling memoir

Zaiba Malik

For Zaiba Malik, growing up in Bradford in the '70s and '80s certainly has its moments - staying up all night during Ramadan with her father; watching mad Mr Aziz searching for his goat during Eid; dancing along to Top of the Pops (so long as no-one's watching). And, of course, there's her mother - whether she's writing another ingratiating letter to the Queen or repeatedly referring to Tom Jones as 'Thumb Jone'. 
 
But Zaiba's story is also one of anxiety and seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Growing up she is constantly torn between two identities: 'British' and 'Muslim'. Alienated at school and confused at home, the racism she encounters as a child mirrors the horrors she experiences at the hands of Bangladeshi interrogators 
as a journalist years later. 
 
We Are A Muslim, Please is a stirring and enchanting memoir. We see, through Zaiba's childhood eyes, the poignancy of growing up in a world whose prejudices, contradictions and ambiguities are at once distressing and utterly captivating.

We Are a Muslim, Please

Jasmin Darznik

'With this one word, Lili had finally understood many things: that no matter what she promised or sacrificed or gave, she would always be 'broken' to her daughter.' 
 
When Jasmin Darznik finds a photo among her father's possessions shortly after his death, she recognises the child in the veil and bride's clothes as her mother, Lili, but the groom is unfamiliar. 
 
Who had her mother married all those years before? A few months later Lili sends Jasmin ten cassette tapes which reveal the secret history of their family: the true story of the abusive man she married, and the daughter she was forced to leave behind. 
 
This is an unforgettable story of secrets, betrayal and exile, and of an unshakeable mother-daughter bond.

The Good Daughter

My Mother's Hidden Life

Becky Cooper

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 
 
'Brilliant and extraordinary' Philippe Sands 
 
'Astonishing ... Cooper is one hell of a detective' Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body 
 
'Seductive ... Haunting' Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply 
 
In 1969, Jane Britton, an ambitious graduate student at Harvard, was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. A whisper network kept Jane's story alive: a rumour of an affair with a professor that ended in tragedy when Britton threatened to expose him. 
 
Forty years later, when curious undergrad Becky Cooper first heard the story, she felt compelled to find out more. We Keep the Dead Close is an account of her complex and fascinating investigation spanning a decade.

We Keep the Dead Close

A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

David R. Dow

Shortlisted for The CWA Gold Dagger for Non Fiction 
 
David Dow is a leading death row attorney in Texas, where 99% of appeals are rejected.He knows his clients are guilty, but he defends them because he believes murder is wrong. 
 
Henry Quaker is a quiet man, charged with murdering his childhood sweetheart and their two children. All the evidence is against him: he's mentally unstable, his gun is missing, his son's blood was found in his car, and he'd taken out life insurance on his family immediately before their murder. But as Dow painstakingly pieces the case together, he gradually becomes convinced that Quaker - whose execution is just weeks away - is actually innocent. 
 
This is the real story of Death Row; of corrupt lawyers, judges who are hostile to the very idea of justice and executioners who rely on inmates for moral support.Killing Time is a modern classic; both a searing and haunting memoir, and a story that will have you holding your breath until the last page.

Killing Time

One Man's Race to Stop an Execution

Helen Rappaport

Shortlisted for the HWA Sharpe Books Non-Fiction Crown Award 
 
A work of investigative history that will completely change the way in which we see the Romanov story. Finally, here is the truth about the secret plans to rescue Russia’s last imperial family. 
 
On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets. 
 
Historian Helen Rappaport sets out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them. It was not, ever, a simple case of one British King’s loss of nerve. In this race against time, many other nations and individuals were facing political and personal challenges of the highest order. 
 
In this incredible detective story, Rappaport draws on an unprecedented range of unseen sources, tracking down missing documents, destroyed papers and covert plots to liberate the family by land, sea and even sky. Through countless twists and turns, this revelatory work unpicks many false claims and conspiracies, revealing the fiercest loyalty, bitter rivalries and devastating betrayals as the Romanovs, imprisoned, awaited their fate. 
 
A remarkable new work of history from Helen Rappaport, author of Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs.

The Race to Save the Romanovs

The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Imperial Family

Hugh Thomson

In the Middle Ages, mules were used to transport goods across Britain. Strong, sturdy and able to carry a good 160lbs of weight, they made ideal walking companions – as long as you didn’t ask them to do anything they didn’t want to do! 
 
So when Hugh Thomson decides he wants to revive this ancient tradition, but with a mule who is only willing to carry sandwiches, water and a map, his father can’t quite comprehend why: “Taking a mule across England? Really? Whatever for?” 
 
Using old drovers’ roads that have largely passed into disrepair, Hugh and his trusty mule Jethro set out to travel across England, from the Lake District to the Yorkshire Moors. Along the way, they discover a landscape rich in history, and encounter the charismatic people who bring it to life.

One Man and a Mule

Across England with a Pack Mule

Matthew Parker

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Completely fascinating, authoritative and intriguing' William Boyd 
 
'The big bang of Bond books... Beautiful, brilliant' Tony Parsons 
_______________________________________________________________________ 
 
Goldeneye: the story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of British national icon, James Bond. 
 
From 1946 until the end of his life, Ian Fleming lived for two months of every year at Goldeneye - the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. 
 
Fleming adored the Jamaica he had discovered, at the time an imperial backwater that seemed unchanged from the glory days of the empire. Amid its stunning natural beauty, the austerity and decline of post-war Britain could be forgotten. For Fleming, Jamaica offered the perfect mixture of British old-fashioned conservatism and imperial values, alongside the dangerous and sensual: the same curious combination that made his novels so appealing, and successful. The spirit of the island - its exotic beauty, its unpredictability, its melancholy, its love of exaggeration and gothic melodrama - infuses his writing. 
 
Fleming threw himself into the island's hedonistic Jet Set party scene: Hollywood giants, and the cream of British aristocracy, the theatre, literary society and the secret services spent their time here drinking and bed-hopping. But while the whites partied, Jamaican blacks were rising up to demand respect and self-government. And as the imperial hero James Bond - projecting British power across the world - became ever more anachronistic and fantastical, so his popularity soared. 
 
Drawing on extensive interviews with Ian's family, his Jamaican lover Blanche Blackwell and many other islanders, Goldeneye is a beautifully written, revealing and original exploration of a crucially important part of Ian Fleming's life and work.

Goldeneye

Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

Azar Nafisi

In Azar Nafisi's personal story of growing up in Iran, she shares her memories of a life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution. 
 
Nafisi's intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerising fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. When her father began to see other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi's complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal - as well as political, cultural, and social - injustices. 
 
Things I've Been Silent About is also a powerful historical picture of a family that spans the many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and a troubled homeland is a new triumph from a modern master of the memoir.

Things I've Been Silent About

Memories of a Prodigal Daughter

Thomas Harding

_____________________________________ 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
WINNER OF THE JQ WINGATE PRIZE 2015 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
 
'A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.' JOHN LE CARRÉ 
_____________________________________ 
Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, becoming an investigator of war crimes. 
 
Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and children. 
 
The hunt was on. 
 
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf Höss his most elusive target. 
 
In this book Thomas Harding reveals for the very first time the full account of Höss’ capture. Moving from the Middle-Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s, to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, Hanns and Rudolf tells the story of two German men whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.

Hanns and Rudolf

The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

Marc Morris

This is the first major biography for a generation of a truly formidable king. Edward I is familiar to millions as 'Longshanks', conqueror of Scotland and nemesis of Sir William Wallace ('Braveheart'). Edward was born to rule England, but believed that it was his right to rule all of Britain. His reign was one of the most dramatic of the entire Middle Ages, leading to war and conquest on an unprecedented scale, and leaving a legacy of division that has lasted from his day to our own. 
 
In his astonishingly action-packed life, Edward defeated and killed the famous Simon de Montfort in battle; travelled across Europe to the Holy Land on crusade; conquered Wales, extinguishing forever its native rulers, and constructed - at Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris and Caernarfon - the most magnificent chain of castles ever created. After the death of his first wife he erected the Eleanor Crosses - the grandest funeral monuments ever fashioned for an English monarch.

A Great and Terrible King

Edward I and the Forging of Britain

'Rappaport uses new sources to give a vivid account of Albert's death . . . a valuable and insightful book which will change our view of Queen Victoria.' Spectator 
 
When Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died in December 1861 the nation was paralysed with grief. 
 
His death was a catastrophe for Victoria, who not only adored her husband but had, through twenty-one years of marriage, utterly relied on him: as companion, father of their children, friend, confidant, and unofficial private secretary. Without Albert to guide and support her, the Queen retreated into a state of pathological grief which nobody could penetrate and few understood. 
 
Drawing widely on contemporary letters, diaries and memoirs, Rappaport brings new light to bear on the causes of Albert's death and tracks Victoria's mission to commemorate her husband in perpetuity. Richly compelling, this is the story of a magnificent obsession that even death could not sever.

Magnificent Obsession

Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy

'I was no longer fitting in at school. I was unsure of my friends, and they were increasingly unsure of me. I wanted to be a rock star. But while all around, voices were starting to break, acne beginning to appear, facial hair sprouting, I remained all flabby flesh and innate scruff, with a high-pitched whine and not a muscle to my name. I was the runt of the class and rarely allowed to forget it. I had no father at home to help me out, and could hardly talk to my mum. So I took solace in The Jam.' 
 
As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history. 
 
Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity. 
 
Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.

Boy About Town

Rob Cowen

ONE OF BRITAIN'S FAVOURITE NATURE BOOKS AS FEATURED ON BBC's WINTERWATCH 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 
 
'Bold and beautiful.' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic ... leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world' Michael Palin 
 
'Touched by genius' John Lewis-Stempel 
 
'Absolutely mesmerizing, utterly beautiful and engrossing' Joanne Harris 
 
After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, and about to become a father for the first time, Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for open space, he ventures out to a nearby edge-land: a pylon-slung tangle of wood, hedge, field, meadow and river that lies unclaimed and overlooked on the outskirts of town. 
 
Digging deeper into this lost landscape, he begins to uncover its many layers and lives – beast, bird, insect, plant and people – in kaleidoscopic detail. As the seasons change and the birth of his child draws closer, his transformative journey into the blurry space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound. In bringing this edge-land to life, Cowen offers both a both a unique portrait of people and place through time and an unforgettable exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

Common Ground

One of Britain’s Favourite Nature Books as featured on BBC’s Winterwatch

Marlena de Blasi

'If you loved Under the Tuscan Sun, you’ll love this' Red Magazine 
 
 
Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four rural Italian women gather in an old stone house in the hills above Italy’s Orvieto. There – along with their friend, Marlena – they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk. 
 
Surrounded by candle light, good food and friendship, the four women tell Marlena their evocative life stories, and of cherished ingredients and recipes whose secrets have been passed down through generations.

The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

Anthony Sattin

In the winter of 1849, Florence Nightingale was an unknown 29-year-old - beautiful, well-born and deeply unhappy. After clashing with her parents over her refusal to marry, she had been offered a lifeline by family friends who suggested a trip to Egypt, a country which she had always longed to visit. 
 
By an extraordinary coincidence, taking the same boat from Alexandria was an unpublished French writer, Gustave Flaubert. Like Nightingale, he was at the crossroads in his life that was to lead to future 
acclaim and literary triumph. Egypt for him represented escape and freedom as well as inspiration. 
 
But as a wealthy young man travelling with male friends, he had access to an altogether different Egpyt: where Nightingale sought out temples and dispensaries, Flaubert visited brothels and harems. 
 
In this beguiling book, Anthony Sattin takes a key moment in the lives of two extraordinary figures on the brink of international fame, and provides a fascinating insight into the early days of travel to one of 
the greatest tourist destinations on the planet.

A Winter on the Nile

The brilliantly compelling new biography of the treacherous and tyrannical King John, published to coincide with the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. 
 
King John is familiar to everyone as the villain from the tales of Robin Hood — greedy, cowardly, despicable and cruel. But who was the man behind the legend? 
 
Drawing on contemporary chronicles and the king's own letters, bestselling historian Marc Morris brings the real John vividly to life. We see how a youngest son with limited prospects became the ruler of the greatest dominion in Europe, but at a terrible cost. His rise to power involved treachery, rebellion and murder, and his reign witnessed oppression on an almost unprecedented scale. It climaxed in conspiracy and revolt, and his leading subjects forced him to issue Magna Carta, a document binding him and his successors to behave better in future. John's rejection of the charter led to civil war and foreign invasion, bringing his life to a disastrous close. 
 
Authoritative and dramatic, Marc Morris's King John offers a compelling portrait of an extraordinary man at a momentous turning point in the history of Britain and Europe.

King John

Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta

Steve Jones

NOW A LIMITED SERIES DIRECTED BY DANNY BOYLE 
_____________________ 
 
Foreword by Chrissie Hynde 
 
Without the Sex Pistols there would be no punk rock, and without Steve Jones there would be no Sex Pistols. 
 
It was Steve who formed Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols, the band that eventually went on to become the Sex Pistols, with his schoolmate Paul Cook and who was its original leader. As the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of Punk - the influence and cultural significance of which is felt in music, fashion and the visual arts to this day - Steve tells his story for the very first time. 
 
Rising from the streets of Hammersmith, Steve Jones was once a lonely, neglected boy living off his wits and petty thievery. Given purpose by the glam art rock of David Bowie and Roxy Music, he became one of the first generation of punks taken under the wings of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. For the very first time Steve describes the neglect and abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather, and how his interest in music and fashion saved him from a potential life of crime. 
 
From the Kings Road of the early seventies, through the years of the Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and the recording of Never Mind the Bollocks (ranked number 41 in Rolling Stone magazine's Best Albums of All Time), to his self-imposed exile in New York and Los Angeles where he battled with alcohol, heroin and sex addiction - caught in a cycle of rehab and relapse - Lonely Boy, written with music journalist and author Ben Thompson, is the story of an unlikely guitar hero who, with the Sex Pistols, changed history.

Lonely Boy

Tales from a Sex Pistol

Mike Parker

WINNER OF THE WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2020 
__________________________ 
'A moving story of love, tradition and landscape.' Evening Standard, 'Books of the Year' 
 
'A moving, multilayered memoir... extraordinary, ambitious... its scope is immense. A book that is deep in riches.' Simon Callow, Guardian 
 
'A marvellous book... an uplifting tale of tranquillity sought and found in the nearest Britain gets to paradise.' Simon Jenkins 
 
'There are worlds on worlds within this lyrical and profoundly cultured book. In an age of toxic artifice, this is the most necessary medicine: the tenderness of reality and the living, elemental, world.' Jay Griffiths 
__________________________ 
A multi-layered memoir of love, acceptance, finding home and the redemptive power of nature. 
 
In 2006, Mike Parker and his partner Peredur were witnesses at the civil partnership of their friends Reg and George, the first in the small Welsh town of Machynlleth. Years later, when Reg and George died within a few weeks of each other, Mike and Peredur discovered that they had been left their home: a whitewashed 'house from the children's stories', buried deep within the hills. 
 
On the Red Hill is the story of Rhiw Goch, 'the Red Hill', and its inhabitants, but also the story of a remarkable rural community and a legacy that extends far beyond bricks and mortar. It is a story that celebrates the turn of the year's wheel, of ever-changing landscapes, and of the family found in the unlikeliest of places. 
 
Highly commended by the judging panel for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 
__________________________ 
'A delightful book about beauty, joy, love and home... to be celebrated and read.' Sara Maitland 
 
'A great queer rural triumph of a book - wonderfully passionate, funny and insightful. It overflows with love.' Tom Bullough

On the Red Hill

Where Four Lives Fell Into Place

Joe Moshenska

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY and THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY 
 
'A thrilling account' The Times 
 
'As heroic as Digby himself, Moshenska has defied the tyranny of genre and made his own absorbing account' Observer 
 
'A master storyteller. Full of exquisite details, but with the grandest themes... this is a gripping adventure story' Zia Haider Rahman 
 
'A brilliant account of one of the seventeenth century's most dashing lives' Ruth Scurr 
 
'Gripping and extraordinary' Ann Wroe 
 
On the 16th of August 1628, five battle-scarred English ships sailed into the harbour of the Greek island of Milos. Dropping anchor, the 25-year-old captain banqueted with the local lord before sitting down to write an account of his journey – an account that would transform him entirely. 
 
Sir Kenelm Digby was one of the most remarkable Englishmen who ever lived: a trusted advisor to the King, but the sworn enemy of the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham; a pioneering philosopher and scientist, but committed to the occult arts of alchemy and astrology; a friend not only of Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes and van Dyck, but even Oliver Cromwell. He was also widely known as the ‘son of a traytor and husband of a whore’: a man who witnessed his father’s gruesome execution for high treason as a Gunpowder Plotter, and the lover of the most celebrated beauty of the age, Venetia Stanley. 
 
In an attempt to clear his name, and on a quest for personal glory, Digby assembled a fleet and set sail for the Mediterranean: a world of pirate cities and ancient ruins where people, ideas and exotic goods moved freely between languages and nations. His journey – encompassing fevers, mutiny, piracy, daring rescues and heroic sea battles – is a great and terribly overlooked adventure, and a prism through which to view England, and all of Europe, during one of the most pivotal periods in its history. 
 
A Stain in the Blood is the story of an extraordinary life, and of a journey that helped to shape a nation. It is a revelatory first work of non-fiction by one of the brightest young writers and thinkers of today.

A Stain in the Blood

The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby

Clemantine Wamariya

Elizabeth Weil

A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us 
 
When Clemantine Wamariya was six years old, her world was torn apart. She didn't know why her parents began talking in whispers, or why her neighbours started disappearing, or why she could hear distant thunder even when the skies were clear. 
 
As the Rwandan civil war raged, Clemantine and her sister Claire were forced to flee their home. They ran for hours, then walked for days, not towards anything, just away. they sought refuge where they could find it, and escaped when refuge became imprisonment. Together, they experienced the best and the worst of humanity. After spending six years seeking refuge in eight different countries, Clemantine and Claire were granted refugee status in America and began a new journey. 
 
Honest, life-affirming and searingly profound, this is the story of a girl's struggle to remake her life and create new stories - without forgetting the old ones. 
____________________________________ 
'Extraordinary and heartrending. Wamariya is as fiercely talented as she is courageous' JUNOT DIAZ, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 
 
'Brilliant ... has captivated me for a couple of years' SELMA BLAIR

The Girl Who Smiled Beads

David Vann

David Vann has loved boats all his life. So when his academic career seems to be stuck in the doldrums, he leaps at the opportunity to start an educational charter business, teaching creative writing workshops aboard a sailboat. But a trip to Turkey seems him dreaming bigger - and before he knows it, he is at the helm of his own ninety-foot boat, running charters along the Turkish coast. 
 
And here his troubles begin. Sinking deep into debt, and encountering everything from a lost rudder to freak storms, Vann is on the verge of losing everything - including his life. 
 
Part high-seas adventure, part journey of self-discovery, A Mile Down is a gripping and unforgettable story of struggle and redemption, by a writer at the top of his game.

A Mile Down

The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

Charlotte Gordon

***AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4*** 
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER 
 
'A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time.' Amanda Foreman 
 
English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and author Mary Shelley were mother and daughter, yet these two extraordinary women never knew one another. Nevertheless, their passionate and pioneering lives remained closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies eerily similar. 
 
Both women became famous writers and wrote books that changed literary history, had passionate relationships with several men, were single mothers out of wedlock; both lived in exile, fought for their position in society, and interrogated ideas of how we should live. 
 
Romantic Outlaws takes the reader on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England to explore in this ground-breaking dual biography of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the author who wrote Frankenstein - mother and daughter - a pair of visionary women, who should have shared a life, but who instead share a powerful literary and feminist legacy.

Romantic Outlaws

The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Andrew Lycett

The definitive biography of Wilkie Collins: the Victorian novelist, playwright, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, who lived a life of sensation. 
 
Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, was the master of the Victorian sensation novel, but he also had a complex private life that could have come straight out of one of his bestselling novels. While his books focused on uncovering family secrets, Wilkie was determined to keep his own unconventional domestic arrangements – living with two women, neither of them his wife – hidden from the outside world. 
 
In this colourful investigative biography, set against the backdrop of Victorian London, Andrew Lycett brings to life one of England’s greatest writers and reveals a brilliant, contrary and sensual man, deeply committed to his work.

Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

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