82ASK

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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Charlotte Lydia Riley

Suzanne Nossel

Intelligence Squared

Two leading thinkers present alternative answers to one of the most difficult and divisive questions of our times: Is free speech under threat? 
 
Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the leading free expression organisation, argues that alongside the necessary and long-overdue elevation of minority voices in recent years, there has also arisen an uncompromising intolerance – most notably on university campuses and online – that wrongly equates a wide range of offensive speech with violence and seeks to shut it down. This has led to an escalating free speech arms race, from which everyone loses. 
 
Charlotte Lydia Riley, historian of empire and editor of The Free Speech Wars, argues that accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are too often disingenuous attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important realignment in which hateful speech is at last being called out for what it is and the right to free expression is being extended to more people than ever before. 
 
Published in conjunction with Intelligence Squared, the world’s leading curator of debate, this book is part of the THINK AGAIN series: short books that present two expert, contrasting but equally persuasive views in a single volume that can be read from either end.

Is Free Speech Under Threat?

Russ Buettner

Susanne Craig

Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit. 
 
The devastating exposé of Trump’s financial failings that you need to read to understand the man whose deals are destroying the world economy. 
 
'A first-rate financial thriller' NEW YORK TIMES 
'Damning' SUNDAY TIMES 
'Devastating ... thrilling' GUARDIAN 
 
Donald J. Trump once declared life has ‘not been easy for me’. He spun a fable of how he turned a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar empire and argued this made him singularly qualified to lead. 
 
Except none of it was true. 
 
A meticulous masterpiece based on Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, this is the definitive true accounting of Trump and his money – what he had and what he lost. 
 
'Strikes at the heart of the Trump myth' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'Groundbreaking reporting ... comprehensive, persuasive' NEW YORKER

Lucky Loser

How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

Maggie Nelson

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide – from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Kara Walker to Bjork – but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. 
 
The collection is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Like Love is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Like Love

Essays and Conversations

Peter Englund

An intimate history of the most important month of the Second World War - perhaps the century - as experienced by those who lived through it, completely based on their diaries, letters and memoirs. 
 
At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could win the war; at the end of that month, it was obviously just a matter of time before they would lose. 
 
In between came el-Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea, and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. In this innovatively kaleidoscopic and riveting historical marvel, Peter Englund reduces these epoch-making events to their basic component: the individual experience. 
 
In thirty memorable days we meet characters including a Soviet infantryman at Stalingrad; an Italian truck driver in the North African desert; a partisan in the Belarussian forests; a machine gunner in a British bomber; a twelve-year-old girl in Shanghai; a university student in Paris; a housewife on Long Island; a prisoner in Treblinka; Albert Camus, Vasily Grossman, and Vera Brittain - forty characters in all. We also witness the launch of SS James Oglethorpe; the fate of U-604, a German submarine; the building of the first nuclear reactor; and the making of Casablanca. 
 
Not since Englund's own The Beauty and the Sorrow has a book given us one of the most dramatic periods of human history in all its immensity and emotional range.

November 1942

An Intimate History of the Turning Point of the Second World War

Elena Kostyuchenko

**WINNER OF THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2024** 
 
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. Here is Russia as it really is. 
 
'Important ... this is the Russia we need to understand' TIMOTHY SNYDER 
'A haunting book of rare courage' CLARISSA WARD 
'Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIVICH 
 
Part memoir, part collection of Elena Kostyuchenko’s fearless reporting, I Love Russia introduces us to places we’ve never seen and to people who’ve been systematically, brutally erased from view by Putin’s regime. We enter secretive state-run facilities for disabled people, abandoned buildings haunted by suicide and violence, and a schoolyard marked by unacknowledged massacre. We meet village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, and patients and doctors on a Ukrainian maternity ward. 
 
The result is a singular, uncompromising, and profoundly humane portrait of a nation – and of an extraordinary woman who refuses to be silenced. 
 
'Shocking and moving ... [a] gritty insider's take on Russia' SUNDAY TIMES 
'Reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER 
'Deeply personal, beautifully written' IPAPER 
 
*A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*

I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

Zahra Hankir

'Fascinating' Nigella Lawson 
'Awe-inspiring' Funmi Fetto 
'A treat to read' Kassia St Clair 
 
A Sunday Times Style Barometer and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick 
 
For centuries, humans have been drawn to lining our eyes. The aesthetic trademark of icons from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse, eyeliner is one of our most enduring cosmetic tools: ancient royals and Gen Z influencers alike have harnessed its power. 
 
Through Zahra Hankir&rsquo;s kohl-lined eyes, this ubiquitous product becomes proof of the stunning variety among cultures across time and space. Exploring intimate conversations &ndash; with Chadian nomads, Japanese geisha, Indian dancers, New York&rsquo;s drag queens and more &ndash; Eyeliner embraces the profound significance of its namesake, especially among communities of colour. 
 
What emerges is a delightful and unexpectedly moving journey through streets and stages around the world, and a stirring reclamation of a key piece of our collective history. 
 
Featuring stunning portrait illustrations by Mercedes deBellard

Eyeliner

A Cultural History

Sabrina Imbler

Join science journalist Sabrina Imbler on an astonishing journey which will completely redefine the way you think about nature and the ocean 
 
'An astonishing debut' GUARDIAN 
'Reveals just as much about our fascinating, mysterious world as it does about our fascinating, mysterious selves' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
In My Life in Sea Creatures we encounter: the mother octopus, starving herself while watching over her eggs; the yeti crab, thriving in crushing pressure and oppressive darkness; the cuttlefish, able to change its appearance in a fraction of a second; and many other creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean. 
 
Imbler's work weaves the wonders of marine biology with their own identity as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer. They implicitly connect endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and shatter our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive. 
 
'A miraculous, transcendental book' ED YONG 
'Profound, surprising and thrillingly strange. I love it' SY MONTGOMERY 
'Astounding' PHILIP HOARE 
'A revelation' ISABELLA TREE 
 
***LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER***

My Life in Sea Creatures

A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean

Marie-Elsa R. Bragg

A unique, intimate and beautiful exploration of grief, loss, healing and faith 
 
'This is a beautiful book, a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance. You have to read it' EDMUND DE WAAL 
 
We sat in the kitchen across the small wooden table from each other. She cried like banks bursting, then silence; like winds blowing through her shoulders, chest bouncing, then long shallow breaths. She ruptured and I watched, still, emotionless. 'You must stop crying.' 
 
When Marie-Elsa was just six years old, her mother took her own life. Now, many years later, she returns to that night. Going back to that moment, inhabiting this defining tragedy, allows for an exploration of the grief but also brings healing. 
 
Written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa&rsquo;s own faith. It is an unforgettable book, with a luminous sense of a daughter&rsquo;s loss. 
 
With a Foreword by Rowan Williams 
 
&lsquo;Truly remarkable... This book carries its readers to a place where inhibitions and fears about loss and death give way to something more hopeful and, in their own way, real&rsquo; Daily Telegraph

Sleeping Letters

On Grief, Loss, Healing and Faith

Robert Crawford

The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources. 
 
In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. 
 
This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life. 
 
From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces. 
 
He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets. 
 
Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

Eliot After The Waste Land

Andy Mitchell

Psychedelics have made a comeback, but the truth is they remain a mystery. 
 
In this daring, profound and wildly entertaining investigation, clinical neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell tests the claims being made for these substances by taking ten different psychedelics in ten different settings. 
 
Journeying from a neuroimaging lab in London to the Colombian Amazon via Silicon Valley and his friend&rsquo;s basement kitchen, his encounters with scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and con men, psychonauts and shamans, and above all with the drugs themselves, take us beyond the hype and reveal the reality of psychedelics &ndash; that they are as enchanting but ultimately unfathomable as experience itself.

Ten Trips

A Psychedelic Adventure

The New Reality of Psychedelics

Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability in our society. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture? 
 
As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.

Who Gets Believed?

When the Truth Isn’t Enough

Celia Paul

A unique combination of memoir and artistic biography, interspersed with original artworks, from the acclaimed artist and author of SELF-PORTRAIT. 
 
We are both painters. We can connect to each other through images, in our own unvoiced language. But I will try and reach you with words. Through talking to you I may come alive and begin to speak. 
 
Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others. 
 
Letters to Gwen John is Paul&rsquo;s imagined correspondence with this groundbreaking painter. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters offer a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art. 
 
'Beautiful, tender, and riveting. I have taken this book into my heart' 
CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT 
 
'A beguiling, singular work of art &ndash; a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space' 
DAILY TELEGRAPH

Letters to Gwen John

Timothy Garton Ash

'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free 
 
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe. 
 
Drawing on half a century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered. 
 
Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe. Highly personal and deeply felt, this book is also full of vivid experiences, encounters and anecdotes: from his father's memories of D-Day to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo, and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe and the US. 
 
Homelands is both a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. At its heart, this book is an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

Homelands

A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

A Personal History of Europe

Kate Strasdin

The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life told through her unique scrapbook. 
 
In 1838, Anne Sykes was given a diary on her wedding day. Using it to collect snippets of fabric, she created a record of her life and times. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of fashion historian Kate Strasdin who spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within its pages. 
 
Piece by piece, she charts Anne's life and times. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear. 
 
&lsquo;Flawless&rsquo; Amber Butchart 
&lsquo;Fascinating&rsquo; Clare Hunter 
&lsquo;Irresistible&rsquo; The Times

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe

Rachel Aviv

There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which&hellip; 
 
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities? 
 
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.

Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

Haruki Murakami

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles. 
 
'You end this collection…vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again' Guardian 
 
Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his beautifully surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing. 
 
In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. 
 
'Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers' New York Times Book Review 
 
'A fascinating glimpse of the peculiar writerly life' Sunday Times 
 
** A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES and NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR**

Novelist as a Vocation

Margaret Atwood

The Sunday Times bestselling collection of funny, endlessly curious and uncannily prescient essays from cultural icon Margaret Atwood. 
 
In it she seeks answers to Burning Questions such as: 
 
Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? 
How can we live on our planet? 
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? 
 
In Burning Questions Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe. 
 
 
INCLUDES NEW ESSAYS FOR PAPERBACK 
 
'Brilliant and funny' Joan Didion 
 
'She's taken our times and made us wise to them' Ali Smith 
 
'Lights a fire from the fears of our age . . . Miraculously balances humor, outrage, and beauty' New York Times Book Review 
 
'All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood's name is written at the top of it' Anne Enright, Guardian 
 
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times

Burning Questions

The Sunday Times bestseller from Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood

Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004–2021

Édouard Louis

Édouard Louis is one of the most important literary voices of his generation' Guardian 
 
One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago: a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. But growing up, Édouard only knew his mother's sadness - what happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, Édouard's mother frees herself from this oppression, to start a new life in Paris. 
 
A Woman's Battles and Transformations reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives - and with the possibility of escape. It is a tender portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery as she chooses to live on her own terms. 
 
 
'Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'A tenderness of observation' New York Times 
 
'Incandescent...Louis's most hopeful book to date' Los Angeles Times 
 
Translated from the French by Tash Aw

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Salman Rushdie

From 'Best of the Booker' winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture. 
 
'One of the greatest writers of our age' Neil Gaiman 
 
Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, he shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Rushdie considers, too, the nature of truth and looks afresh at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. 
 
'Essential reading... Powerful' Financial Times 
 
'Rushdie is vital, expansive, the critic as storyteller, championing his subjects with gusto' TLS

Languages of Truth

Essays 2003-2020

Filled with empathy and wisdom, personal experiences and creative inspiration, this is a vital collection of essays on the power of literature and the craft of writing from an international array of writers of colour. 
 
'Electric essays that speak to the experience of writing from the periphery . . . a guide, a comfort, and a call all at once' Laila Lalami, author of Conditional Citizens 
 
'A whip-smart collection' Kamila Shamsie, author of Best of Friends 
 
What if we reconsidered our assumptions about how fiction should be written? And can we then apply our discoveries to both what we read and how we read? This book explores these questions and encourages us into a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, featuring: 
 
• Taymour Soomro on resisting rigid stories about who you are 
• Madeleine Thien on how writing builds the room in which it can exist 
• Amitava Kumar on why authenticity isn't a license we carry in our wallets 
• Tahmima Anam on giving herself permission to be funny 
• Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the bodily challenge of writing about trauma 
• Zeyn Joukhadar on queering English and the power of refusing to translate ourselves 
• Kiese Laymon on hearing that no one wants to read the story that you want to write 
• Deepa Anappara on writing even through conditions that impede the creation of art 
 
Plus essays from Tiphanie Yanique, Xiaolu Guo, Jamil Jan Kochai, Vida Cruz-Borja, Femi Kayode, Nadifa Mohamed in conversation with Leila Aboulela, Myriam Gurba, Mohammed Hanif and Sharlene Teo. 
 
'This book is essential' Nikesh Shukla 
 
'Bracing and moving . . . No one interested in how we read and should read fiction can afford to miss this' Pankaj Mishra, author of Run And Hide

Letters to a Writer of Colour

Ben Rawlence

A ground-breaking and beautifully written investigation into the Arctic Treeline with an urgent environmental message. 
 
'Evocative, wise and unflinching' Jay Griffiths, author of Wild 
 
The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years already. 
 
Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always evolved with trees and The Treeline asks us where our co-evolution might take us next. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 
 
'A moving, thoughtful, deeply reported elegy for our vanishing world and a map of the one to come' Nathaniel Rich, author of Losing Earth 
 
'A lyrical and passionate book... The Treeline is a sobering, powerful account of how trees might just save the world, as long as we are sensible enough to let them' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Ben Rawlence circumnavigates the very top of the globe - returning with a warning, in this enthralling and wonderfully written book' Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees

The Treeline

The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

Karl Ove Knausgaard

A brilliantly wide-ranging essay collection from the author of My Struggle, spanning literature, philosophy, art and how our daily and creative lives intertwine. 
 
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English, and these brilliant and wide-ranging pieces meditate on themes familiar from his groundbreaking fiction. 
 
Here, Knausgaard discusses Madame Bovary, the Northern Lights, Ingmar Bergman, and the work of an array of writers and visual artists, including Knut Hamsun, Michel Houellebecq, Anselm Kiefer and Cindy Sherman. 
 
These essays beautifully capture Knausgaard's ability to mediate between the deeply personal and the universal, demonstrating his trademark self-scrutiny and his deep longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world. 
 
'Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive' New York Times

In the Land of the Cyclops

Essays

Jeanette Winterson

'Joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' Observer 
 
How is artificial intelligence changing the way we live and love? Now with a new chapter, this is the eye-opening new book from Sunday Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson. 
 
Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about AI, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now. 
 
With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points - from the weirdness of backing up your brain and the connections between humans and non-human helpers to whether it's time to leave planet Earth. 
 
'Very funny... A kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories' Spectator 
 
'Refreshingly optimistic' Guardian 
 
A 'Books of 2021' Pick in the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard

12 Bytes

How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

How do we shape a better world for LGBTQ+ people? Olly Alexander, Peppermint, Owen Jones, Beth Ditto, Shon Faye and more share their stories and visions for the future. 
 
'A vital addition to your bookshelf' Stylist, 5 Books for Summer 
 
'Captivating... A must-read' Gay Times, Books of the Year 
 
In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices - actors, musicians, writers, artists and activists - answer this vital question, at a time when the queer community continues to suffer discrimination and extreme violence. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they present a powerful manifesto for how - together - we can change lives everywhere. 
 
'Powerful, inspiring...urgent' Attitude 
 
'Read and be inspired' Peter Tatchell 
 
'Illuminating' Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk 
 
'Friendly and fierce' Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

We Can Do Better Than This

An urgent manifesto for how we can shape a better world for LGBTQ+ people

Rachel Kushner

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000–2020

Anselm Kiefer

Knausgaard Seasons Quartet Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Summer is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter, with stunning artwork by Anselm Kiefer. 
 
'Knausgaard unearths the mysteries of the commonplace' Observer 
 
 In Summer, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about long days full of sunlight, eating ice cream with his children, lawn sprinklers and ladybirds. He experiments with the beginnings of a novel and keeps a diary in which the small events of his family's life are recorded. Against a canvas of memories, longings, and experiences of art and literature, he searches for the meaning of moments as they pass us by. 
 
'Wondrous... There are blissful glimpses of nature's mystery and balance' Financial Times

Summer

Elizabeth Kolbert

The author of the international bestseller The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: after doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? 
 
Meet the biologists trying to save the world's rarest fish; the engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone; the researchers trying to develop a 'super coral'; and the physicists contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. 
 
Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most important writers on the environment. Here she investigates the immense challenges humanity faces as we scramble to reverse, in a matter of decades, the effects we've had on the natural world and asks - can we save the natural world in time? 
 
'Important, necessary, urgent' Helen MacDonald 
'Meticulously researched and deftly crafted' Guardian

Under a White Sky

Can we save the natural world in time?

The Nature of the Future

Ibram X. Kendi

Keisha N. Blain

*THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* 
 
Four Hundred Souls is an epoch-defining history of African America, the first to appear in a generation, told by ninety leading Black voices -- co-curated by Ibram X. Kendi, author of the million-copy bestseller How To Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. 
 
In chronological chapters, each by a different author and spanning five years, the book charts the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans to the present - a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles and stunning achievements. 
 
Contributors include some of today's leading writers, historians, journalists, lawyers, poets and activists. Together - through essays and short stories, personal vignettes and fiery polemics - they redefine America and the way its history can be told. 
 
'A vital addition to the curriculum on race in America... Compelling' Washington Post 
 
'A resounding history...that challenges the myths of America's past... Fresh and engaging' Colin Grant, Guardian

Four Hundred Souls

A Community History of African America 1619-2019

Horatio Clare

'Deeply moving, darkly funny and hugely powerful' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'A brave, lit-up account of going mad and getting better' Jeanette Winterson 
 
After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we may heal. 
 
'One of the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us now to that most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with such wit, warmth and humanity' Reverend Richard Coles

Heavy Light

A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

Heather Clark

The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath. 
 
'Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath' Ali Smith 
 
 *WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021* 
 *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES* 
 *FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 2021* 
 
Drawing on a wealth of new material, Heather Clark brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath. Refusing to read Plath's work as if her every act was a harbinger of her fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century as she thoroughly explores Sylvia's world. We see Plath's early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; we witness her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and, through clear-eyed portraits of the demonised players in the arena of her suicide, we gain a deeper understanding of her final days. 
 
Featuring illuminating readings of Plath's poems, Red Comet brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women the world over. 
 
'A first-class biography . . . Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel . . . I couldn't put it down' The Times

Red Comet

The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

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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