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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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Rory Cellan-Jones

‘Fills my heart with so much joy' Niall Harbison, bestselling author of Tina 
'In a dark time, a daily dose of hope’ Jojo Moyes 
 
How do you welcome someone new into your heart and home? A week before Christmas, newly retired BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones receives a special delivery that will change his life. 
 
This is the story of rescue dog #SophieFromRomania. 
 
In January 2022, the Cellan-Jones-Coyle family said goodbye to their beloved elderly Collie cross, Cabbage. She and Rory had become inseparable during daily pandemic walks, which alleviated his Parkinson’s symptoms. After a grief-stricken year, Rory and his wife Diane come across a listing for ‘a kind girl who loves everybody and is just looking for her forever home’. 
 
Bright-eyed, big-eared and trembling, Sophie arrives in London on 17 December 2022. Rory holds the Romanian rescue in his arms, excited for their first walk together – but the road ahead will be a long one . . . This book follows the real journey of Sophie’s adoption – from her battles with anxiety, to the joys of play and her first time outside – as Rory and Diane work with expert dog trainer Si to win Sophie’s trust and navigate Rory’s Parkinson’s disease. 
 
This is a moving story of love, kindness and a lot of patience, paying tribute to rescue dogs and their tender community.

Sophie From Romania

What a rescue dog taught me about patience, love and hope

A Year of Love and Hope with a Rescue Dog

Orlando Reade

**A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
‘Lively and humane… Reade’s enthusiasm and curiosity are winning’ GUARDIAN 
 
Summoned in Haiti’s struggle against colonial rule, read in prison by the young Malcolm X, and reimagined by Virginia Woolf - this is the revolutionary history of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost 
 
Orlando Reade shows the many different, surprising, and often contradictory ways in which Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost has been read across centuries and continents. 
 
Boldly original, lively, and far-reaching, What in Me Is Dark is the story of how a work of literature born in the ashes of a failed revolution became an indelible part of the modern imagination. 
 
Reade guides us through the epic, exploring how Milton came to write its dark and dazzling poetry, and offers us a new account of its radical, ever-evolving legacy. 
 
‘Clever, wide-ranging…witty and sardonic' NEW STATESMAN

What in Me Is Dark

The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

John Burnside

John Burnside recalls the failed relationship with his father, in the first of his trilogy of exquisite memoirs 
 
With a new introduction by Megan Nolan 
 
‘A master of language’ Hilary Mantel 
 
He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn’t seen his son for years. 
 
John Burnside’s extraordinary story of this failed relationship is a beautifully written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father’s world: men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. 
 
A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall apart, and about understanding that in order to have a good son you must have a good father. 
 
‘Memoir this good illuminates something larger than itself. It is an exercise in understanding, compassion and forgiveness’ Sunday Telegraph 
 
Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year

A Lie About My Father

The last of John Burnside’s three memoirs, I Put a Spell on You is an enthralling ode to love and wonder in all its forms 
 
With a new introduction by Seán Hewitt 
 
'A master of language' Hilary Mantel 
 
The first time he was played ‘I Put a Spell on You’, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song – it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him – love, possession, and danger. 
 
In this exquisite and haunting book, John Burnside evokes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge, and follows his drifting thoughts and memories along the way: from uncanny encounters with ‘lost girls’ to digressions on voodoo, acid, and insomnia, alongside a cast that includes Kafka, Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. 
 
The last of John Burnside’s three memoirs, I Put a Spell on You is a memoir of romance – of lost love and the love of being lost – darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour. 
 
'Astonishing… Not just brilliant, but essential reading' Independent 
 
'Exact and enthralling' Tessa Hadley

I Put a Spell on You

With wit, precision and grace, John Burnside's second memoir traces the aftershocks of a troubled childhood into troubled adulthood. 
 
With a new introduction by Sarah Perry 
 
‘Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ Andrew O’Hagan 
 
In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a ‘Surbiton of the mind.’ But the suburbs are not quite as normal as he had imagined, and he relapses into chaos. 
 
He encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms, as he drifts further into unreality. 
 
The second of John Burnside’s extraordinary trilogy of memoirs, Waking Up in Toytown is the story of one man’s search for sanity – but also the story of love that outgrows its restraints and a scorching enquiry into the soul, from one of our greatest contemporary writers. 
 
‘Burnside’s memoir deserves to become a classic. Has anyone written about the direct experience of mental illness with such scrupulous observation and wit?’ Daily Express

Waking Up in Toytown

A Memoir

Salman Rushdie

On the morning of 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage in upstate New York, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black – black clothes, black mask – rushed down the aisle towards him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are. 
 
What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey of healing and recovery. This is an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again.

Knife

Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Gaar Adams

An intimate and illuminating account of queer lives and migration, homemaking and community in the Gulf, from a brilliant new voice in narrative non-fiction 
 
'An eye-opening tour de force' ALEX ESPINOZA 
'Exhilarating' SUSAN ORLEAN 
'Tender and insightful' MOHAMED TONSY 
 
Upon moving to the Gulf States – where penalties for queer acts include deportation, imprisonment, torture and death – Gaar Adams wants to understand why LGBTQ+ migrants might choose to live amid such peril. He begins riskily gathering interviews outside the tightly controlled state media, leading with what he thinks is a simple question: 
 
Isn't it harder for you to make a life here? 
 
But as unforgettable residents share a kaleidoscope of stories – from uproarious Filipino salon workers throwing secret drag parties to a courageous Pakistani farmhand who helps his compatriots smuggle themselves across borders – deeper questions and fault lines begin to emerge alongside the halting steps into Gaar’s own clandestine relationship. 
 
Weaving intimate and illuminating memoir with unprecedented reportage, Guest Privileges is a decade-long journey of dislocation – not just through the Gulf States, but into the very nature of home, belonging and how we form a life and community. 
 
'Vividly reported and luminously reflective' NADIA OWUSU 
'I was captivated and carried' ADAM ZMITH 
‘Adams gives a voice to a queer community we hear much about, but little from…offering hope in a world witnessing the concerted rollback of queer rights' HUGO GREENHALGH

Guest Privileges

Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East

Dani Shapiro

The New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, sorrow and love. 
 
Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time - abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning - a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become. 
 
What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise - how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? 
 
Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers. 
 
‘A beautiful book by a writer of rare talent’ Cheryl Strayed

Hourglass

Time, Memory, Marriage

‘Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro’s long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between’ Jennifer Egan 
 
From Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers - and anyone with an artistic temperament - will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro shares her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.

Still Writing

The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

Nicholas Shakespeare

A fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers. 
 
*WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION* 
 
Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture, but Fleming’s life was more mysterious than anything he wrote. 
 
Ian’s childhood with his gifted brother and extraordinary mother established his ambition to be ‘the complete man’. Only a writer for his last twelve years, his dramatic personal experiences and career in Naval Intelligence put him at the heart of critical moments in world history, while also providing rich inspiration for his fiction. 
 
Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today. His talent for uncovering new material that casts fresh light on his subjects is fully evident in this masterful, definitive biography. 
 
‘Elegant and painstakingly researched’ Observer 
 
‘Marvellous…one of the most engaging portraits of a particular period of British history that I have read in a long time’ Antonia Fraser 
 
‘A book so buoyant and delicious that you feel it will be a friend for life' Telegraph 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY AWARD* 
 
*A The Times, Financial Times, Economist, Spectator and BBC History Magazine Book of the Year*

Ian Fleming

The Complete Man

Ann Wroe

The acclaimed biographer and obituarist for The Economist reflects on a career spent pursuing life and capturing it on the page 
 
'Lifescapes is the universe in miniature' 
DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
It is soul that I go looking for. Or, to put it another way, real life. 
 
'She's a genius, I believe' 
HILARY MANTEL, author of Wolf Hall 
 
'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, for all their understanding of how life manifests, thrives and evolves, have still not plumbed that fundamental question. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. 
 
In this dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry, Ann Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page. Through her experiences and those of others, through people she has known, studied or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after. 
 
Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.

Lifescapes

A Biographer’s Search for the Soul

Paolo Cognetti

An awestruck love letter to one of the most spectacular places on earth, from the author of international bestseller The Eight Mountains 
 
Paolo Cognetti marked his 40th birthday with a journey he had always wanted to make: to Dolpo, a remote Himalayan region where Nepal meets Tibet. He took with him two friends, a notebook, mules and guides, and a well-worn copy of The Snow Leopard. Written in 1978, Matthiessen's classic was also turning forty, and Cognetti set out to walk in the footsteps of the great adventurer. 
 
Without Ever Reaching the Summit combines travel journal, secular pilgrimage, literary homage and sublime mountain writing in a short book for readers of Macfarlane, Rebanks and Cognetti's own bestseller, The Eight Mountains. An investigation into the author's physical limits, an ancient mountain culture, and the magnificence of nature, it is an awestruck love letter to one of the most spectacular places on earth.

Without Ever Reaching the Summit

A Himalayan Journey

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

Laura Cumming

**WINNER OF THE SALTIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024** 
**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024** 
 
 
A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean. 
 
‘Brilliant’ Edmund de Waal * ‘Captivating’ Nina Stibbe * 'Extraordinary' India Knight 
 
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving behind his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch. 
 
Thunderclap explores what happened to Fabritius before and after the disaster whilst interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her painter father and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. It takes the reader from seventeenth-century Delft to twentieth-century Scottish islands, from Rembrandt’s studio to wartime America and contemporary London. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean, how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. 
 
‘Superb…this book taught me to see anew’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty’ Sunday Times

Thunderclap

A memoir of art and life & sudden death

Lauren Elkin

'Destined to become a new classic' Chris Kraus 
 
A dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them. 
 
For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? 
 
Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body. Weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers – from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography to Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits to Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures – Lauren Elkin shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political. 
 
‘The Susan Sontag of her generation’ Deborah Levy

Art Monsters

Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

Amy Key

Is it possible life without romantic love isn't so bad? 
 
An essential memoir about building life on your own terms 
 
***A SUNDAY TIMES AND INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'The book I've been waiting for my entire life' 
DOLLY ALDERTON, author of Everything I Know About Love 
 
'Marks an important shift in ideas about intimacy' 
OBSERVER 
 
'The harbinger of real talent' 
SUNDAY TIMES 
 
When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. 
 
Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed. 
 
With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a book which inspires us to live and love more honestly.

Arrangements in Blue

Notes on Love and Making a Life

Xiaolu Guo

The new memoir from prize-winning writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo - playful, provocative and original, it's her deeply personal take on striving for a life of her own 
 
'When it comes to spinning light and shadow on the complexities of living, loving and language, Xiaolu Guo is one of the most valuable writers in the world' DEBORAH LEVY 
 
The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have tried to call your own. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019 Xiaolu travelled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatens her sense of identity and throws her into a crisis - of meaning, desire, obligation and selfhood. 
 
This is a memoir about separation - by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. Xiaolu uses her exploration of language (one of the meanings of the word 'radical' is the graphic component, or root, of Chinese characters), and her own life, to create this unique text. At once a memoir, a dictionary, and an ardent love letter, it is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between. An archive of an artist's search for creative freedom, it is above all else an intimate account of her efforts to carve out a life of her own. 
 
'Radical in angle of attack, smart and brave' IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine

Radical

A Life of My Own

Sarah Watling

In our age of political divisions, this portrait of the women outsiders who took part in the Spanish Civil War asks questions of solidarity and resistance. 
 
'Glorious... so beautifully rendered, so powerful' 
ANNA FUNDER, author of Wifedom 
 
In the 1930s, women and men from across the world made their way to Spain to be part of what they saw as a historic fight for freedom from fascism. Tomorrow Perhaps the Future follows extraordinary outsiders who were determined to live out their lives with courage and conviction. 
 
Sarah Watling weaves together the experiences of a host of writers and activists, including Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, Jessica Mitford and Virginia Woolf, and searches out the stories of the photographer Gerda Taro and the Harlem nurse Salaria Kea. Throughout, she explores solidarity, art and resistance, finding answers that are as vital today as they were almost a century ago. 
 
&lsquo;A fascinating study&rsquo; 
OBSERVER 
 
&lsquo;Engrossing and impressive&rsquo; 
NEW STATESMAN 
 
* A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR *

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

Writers, Rebels and the Spanish Civil War

Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War

Claire Harman

** The Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023** 
** A Waterstones Best Book of 2023** 
 
'All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work' A.L. KENNEDY 
 
Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield’s career was short but dazzling. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, 'Where is she – our missing contemporary?' 
 
In this inventive and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s life and achievements, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield’s desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small.’ 
 
‘What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity… Brilliant’ Sunday Times 
 
‘A searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand’ Sunjeev Sahota

All Sorts of Lives

Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything

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

Daisy Hay

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize* 
 
In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. 
 
The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 
Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today. 
 
'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian 
 
'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

Lucasta Miller

'Outstanding... The best short introduction I have come across' Sunday Times 
 
When he died at the age of just twenty-five, few imagined John Keats would one day be considered among the greatest poets of all time. 
 
Taking nine of Keats's best-known poems, Lucasta Miller excavates their backstories and, in doing so, resurrects the real Keats: an outsider from a damaged family whose visceral love of language allowed him to change the face of English literature for ever. 
 
Combining close-up readings with the story of his brief existence, Miller shows us how Keats crafted his groundbreaking poetry and explains why it continues to speak to us across the centuries. 
 
'One never wants Keats's life to end so soon; I didn't want this book to end, either' TLS Books of the Year 
 
'Irresistible... [Miller]digs into the backstories of her subject's most famous poems to uncover aspects of his life and work that challenge well-worn romantic myths' Wall Street Journal

Keats

A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

Howard Jacobson

'One of the all-time great memoirs' Daily Telegraph 
'Wonderful...candid, shrewd and moving' William Boyd 
'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious' Simon Schama 
 
Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. 
 
Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. 
 
Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 
 
'Hilariously brilliant' David Baddiel 
 
'Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Mother's Boy

A Writer's Beginnings

Selina Hastings

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph 
 
Sybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. 
 
Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art. 
 
'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator 
 
'An extraordinary story' The Times 
 
'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year

Sybille Bedford

An Appetite for Life

Ann Morgan

'A brilliant, unlikely book' Spectator 
 
How can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world? 
 
In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics...and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe's 196 independent countries (plus one extra), sampling one book from every nation. It wasn't easy. Many languages have next to nothing translated into English; there are tiny, tucked-away places where very little is written down; some governments don't like to let works of art escape their borders. 
 
Using Morgan's own quest as a starting point, Reading the World explores the vital questions of our time and how reading across borders might just help us answer them. 
 
'Revelatory... While Morgan's research has a daunting range...there is a simple message: reading is a social activity, and we ought to share books across boundaries' Financial Times

Reading the World

How I Read a Book from Every Country

Confessions of a Literary Explorer

Sarah Ruhl

'Her story is intimate and revealing about what it is to smile and what it means when you can't' Cynthia Nixon 
 
The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing. 
 
With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery, like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theatre, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face - one that, while recognisably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. 
 
Smile is Ruhl's piercing, witty, lucid chronicle of her journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mother to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. 
 
Brimming with insight, humility, warmth and humour, Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

Smile

The Story of a Face

David Lodge

In a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has been one of Britain's best-loved and most versatile writers. 
 
 With Varying Degrees of Success he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. He describes the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres, his extensive travels around the world, and the hope and desire of writers to make a significant and positive impression on their readers and audiences. 
 
Varying Degrees of Success provides the reader with a privileged insight into the working practices and the creative life of a major British novelist. 
 
'Continuously engaging... Glimpses of the ambition and energy required to fuel the final stretch of his near 60-year career as the most dependable of novelist-critics' New Statesman 
 
'Lodge is the best British novelist never to have won the Man Booker prize' The Times

Varying Degrees of Success

The new memoir from one of Britain’s best loved writers

A Memoir 1992-2020

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
 The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It's also a turbulent time in the life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this year will become the turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives. 
 
The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens's London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him, and forever alter Britain's relationship with the world. 
 
'Sparklingly informative' Guardian 
 
'Wonderfully entertaining' Observer 
 
'It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens' New Statesman

The Turning Point

A Year that Changed Dickens and the World

Alison Bechdel

DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical. 
 
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times 
 
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this. 
 
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive. 
 
Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew. 
 
 
'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent 
 
'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Fun Home

A Family Tragicomic

Horst Krüger

'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times 
 
 'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary Mantel 
 
Twenty years after the end of the war, Horst Krüger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism. 
 
He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble. 
 
Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.

The Broken House

Growing up Under Hitler – The Lost Masterpiece

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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