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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Andrew Barrow

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

Animal Magic

A Brother's Story

Helen Smith

THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 
 
Over a career spanning nearly fifty years Edward Garnett – editor, critic and publisher’s reader – would become one of the most influential men in twentieth-century British literature. Famed for his incisive criticism and unwavering conviction in matters of taste, Garnett was responsible for spotting and nurturing the talents of a constellation of our greatest writers. 
 
In The Uncommon Reader Helen Smith brings to life Garnett’s fascinating, often stormy, relationships with those writers – from Joseph Conrad to John Galsworthy, D.H. Lawrence to T.E. Lawrence, Henry Green to Edward Thomas. All turned to Garnett for advice and guidance at critical moments in their careers, and their letters and diaries offer an insight into their creative processes, their hopes and fears. 
 
Addressing questions of culture, fame and success, this absorbing portrait of a man who shaped the literary landscape as we know it asks us to consider genius – what it is, where it comes from and to whom it belongs.

The Uncommon Reader

A Life of Edward Garnett

Mimi Pond

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

Do Admit

The Mitford Sisters and Me

Anne Enright

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

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

Mark Doty

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

What is the Grass

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