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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Ron Chernow

Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influen­tial, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Mark Twain went west and accepted a job at the local newspaper, writing dis­patches that attracted attention for their brashness and humour. It wasn’t long until the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance.In this rich and nuanced portrait of Twain, Ron Chernow brings his powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a jour­nalist, satirist, and performer, and a family man, Twain went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the epicentre of American culture, emerging as the nation’s most notable political pundit and the only white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him and led him and his family to nine years of exile between London, France, Germany and Italy. During this time, he lost his wife and two daughters – the last stage of his life marked by heartache, politi­cal crusades, and eccentric behaviour that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, includ­ing thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow here captures the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in literary history, reminding us why Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated and quoted over a hundred years after his passing.

Mark Twain

Tom Overton

Tom Overton got to know John Berger around 2010, after he gave his archive to the British Library: a kind of homecoming to the city of his birth, after a life lived mostly in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France. Curious about the origin of a piece of writing or art, Tom would scan something in and email it. Then there’d come a call, very early, very late. ‘Hello? Is that Tom? This is John. John Berger. Can I tell you a story?’ Tom realised he was bringing this archive back into John’s life, peering together through holes in time, remembering things he couldn’t himself. And then, at the beginning of 2017, John died. 
 
In this extraordinary new book, Overton explores the life and work of one of the great cultural figures of the last century, who came of age in a world threatened by nuclear apocalypse, and grew old in a world dominated by the idea that human life should be ordered with the logic of profit, always looking forward, never back. Berger’s work reimagined the relationship between art and technology; charted the disappearance of peasants from the world and documented migrant labour; explored with huge compassion the AIDS crisis; was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s and the War on Terror and passionately committed to the Palestinian cause. There were so many different subjects to his work; so many precisely chosen forms. 
 
Cutting through the reverence that can build around any writer of his scope of achievement and drawing on both personal memory and a vast and previously unseen trove of material, Overton comes face to face with John Berger, showing the continued importance of a figure, whose work focused on the creating and recreating of communities past and present. For at the centre of this book, above all, is the idea that John Berger wants our company, and we need his.

John Berger

From Life

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