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.

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Mary Portas

* THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * 
 
Young Mary Newton, born into a large Irish family in a small Watford semi, was always getting into trouble. When she wasn’t choking back fits of giggles at Holy Communion or eating Chappie dog food for a bet, she was accidentally setting fire to the local school. Mary was a trouble magnet. And, unlike her brothers, somehow she always got caught… 
 
Britain in the 1970s was a world where R White's lemonade was drunk in secret, curry came in a cardboard box marked Vesta and Beanz meant Heinz. In Mary’s family, money was scarce. Clothes were hand-me-downs, holidays a church day out to Hastings and meals were variations on the potato. But these were also good times which revolved around the force of nature that was Theresa, Mary’s mum. 
 
When tragedy unexpectedly blows this world apart, a new chapter in Mary’s life opens up. She takes to the camp and glamour of Harrods window dressing like a duck to water, and Mary, Queen of Shops is born…

Shop Girl

John Boyle

John Boyle was born and raised in Scotland but he could never feel Scottish. His parents were poor immigrants from the West of Ireland who came to Scotland to find work and eventually settled in Paisley, where John was the first of six children. 
 
Galloway Street beautifully captures the poverty and the rough humour of the family's life in the Paisley tenements, the songs and stories of their Irish Catholic relatives and the often uneasy relationships with their Scottish Protestant neighbours. It also shows how the boy is marked at the age of ten by an extended stay with his spinster aunt on the remote island of Achill, as he begins to understand the life his parents left behind. 
 
This is a book about exile and belonging, about the poignancy of growing up Irish in Scotland, so close to the place your mother still calls home. It is a truthful, funny and moving evocation of a unique place and time, experienced through the eyes of a child.

Galloway Street

Liza Campbell

Liza Campbell was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle, as featured in Macbeth. Her father Hugh, the 25th Thane of Cawdor, inherited good looks,wealth, an ancient title, three stately homes and 100,000 acres of land. But increasingly overwhelmed by his enormous responsibilities, Hugh turned to drink, drugs, and extramarital affairs. Until the castle was transformed into an arena of reckless profligacy, abuse and terrifying domestic violence, leading to the abrupt termination of a legacy that had been passed down through the family for six hundred years. 
 
Title Deeds is a dark yet funny, contemporary fairy story about growing up in an old family where ancient curses and grisly past events are matched by the turmoil of a confusing and frightening present. Liza Campbell shows how even enormous wealth and privilege can hide unspoken abuse and misery: and what it is like to watch your father destroy himself and everything he holds dear.

Title Deeds

Abbie Ross

In 1972 Abbie Ross’s cosmopolitan parents move the family from London to rural North Wales, exchanging a town house in Islington for a remote farmhouse on a hill. 
Abbie’s Liverpudlian grandparents – dedicated followers of Liberace, sleek in scented mohair and patent leather – are sure they’ve lost their minds. For Abbie, though, the only cloud on the horizon is the nearby hippy commune and its inhabitants. There are worrying signs that this is the sort of ‘better life’ that her parents have in mind. 
Brilliantly evoking a particular time and place, Abbie’s memoir re-creates a world of dens and pineapple chunks, of John Craven’s Newsround and fishing for sticklebacks – and the joy but also the burning powerlessness of being a child. Disgusted by her father’s ‘yogic flying’ and her mother’s taste for brown bread and billowing cheesecloth (with no bra), Abbie is desperate not to be different. Far better, she thinks, to fit in with shouting, pathologically nosy Sara across the fields,or stay close to Philip next door – paralysingly shy and with a preference for orange food and no trousers (‘nice to have a bit of air’) ... 
Rich with detail that reveals a whole world, Hippy Dinners is very funny and full of heart. It is also a delicate and astute portrait of the brutal realities of ‘a simple life’.

Hippy Dinners

A memoir of a rural childhood

Carolyn Slaughter

Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, but for the last twelve years she has been completely silent. She had become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This powerful memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her traumatic childhood. 
 
Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert. Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of the Kalahari itself for solace. 
 
The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book. What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father, siblings. Despite its sometimes harrowing contents, it is a work of great, dangerous beauty.

Before The Knife

Memories Of An African Childhood

Brian Castner

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. He and his team – his brothers – disarmed bombs. Sometimes they used robots and remote controls. Sometimes they set off controlled explosions. Sometimes one of the team would have to put on the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk, and disarm the device by hand. Often they were simply too late; arriving just in time to pick up the pieces. 
 
In a hailstorm of bullets, bomb fragments, body parts and the endless wailing of innocent civilians, the days rolled into nights, yesterday turned into tomorrow, and today never even happened. But after the tour, the celebrations and the long plane ride home, the real war was just beginning. The war against the fear, the confusion, the guilt and the memory loss. The war against the Crazy. 
 
This exhilarating, heartbreaking, searingly honest memoir exposes two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror, excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within.

The Long Walk

A Story of War and the Life That Follows

Richard Dawkins

Born to parents who were enthusiastic naturalists, and linked through his wider family to a clutch of accomplished scientists, Richard Dawkins was bound to have biology in his genes. But what were the influences that shaped his life? And who inspired him to become the pioneering scientist and public thinker now famous (and infamous to some) around the world? 
 
In An Appetite for Wonder we join him on a personal journey from an enchanting childhood in colonial Africa, through the eccentricities of boarding school in England, to his studies at the University of Oxford’s dynamic Zoology Department, which sparked his radical new vision of Darwinism, The Selfish Gene. Through Dawkins’s honest self-reflection, touching reminiscences and witty anecdotes, we are finally able to understand the private influences that shaped the public man who, more than anyone else in his generation, explained our own origins.

An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

John, a teenager, struggles with loneliness and alienation in Ferguslie Park, a rough housing scheme in 1950's Scotland. At school he makes friends with Laff, a Ferguslie boy who shares his dream of escape. Their friendship becomes a fortress against the mockery they face at school and the menace of 'Feegie' - and their dreams are only heightened when rock'n roll, jukeboxes and Teddy Boys erupt like a splash of technicolour into their monochrome lives. They yearn for sex, dream of romance, discover jealousy,get into fights... When tragedy intervenes, John is in danger of 'settling for less' - giving up on their youthful dream. But Laff's influence persists...

Laff

Susannah Walker

What do our possessions say about us? Why do we project such meaning onto them? What becomes of the things we leave behind? 
 
Only after her mother's death does Susannah Walker discover how much of a hoarder she had become. Over the following months, Susannah has to sort through a dilapidated house filled to the brim with rubbish and treasures - filling bag after bag with possessions. But what she's really in search of is a woman she'd never really known or understood in life. This is her last chance to piece together her mother's story and make sense of their troubled relationship. What emerges from the mess of scattered papers, discarded photographs and an extraordinary amount of stuff is the history of a sad and fractured family, haunted by dead children, divorce and alcohol. The Life of Stuff is a deeply personal exploration of mourning and the shoring up of possessions against the losses and griefs of life, which also raises universal questions about what makes us the people we are.

The Life of Stuff

Possessions, obsessions and the mess we leave behind

A memoir about the mess we leave behind

Jessica Pan

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat 
 
What would happen if a shy introvert lived as an out-and-out extrovert for one year? Jessica Pan is about to find out… 
 
* 
 
When she found herself jobless and friendless, sitting in the familiar Jess-shaped crease on her sofa, she couldn't help but wonder what life might have looked like if she had been a little more open to new experiences and new people, a little less attached to going home instead of going to the pub. 
 
So, she made a vow: to push herself to live the life of an extrovert for a year. She wrote a list: improv, a solo holiday and... talking to strangers on the tube. She regretted it instantly. 
 
Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come follows Jess's hilarious and painful year of misadventures in extroverting, reporting back from the frontlines for all the introverts out there. 
 
But is life actually better or easier for the extroverts? Or is it the nightmare Jess always thought it would be? 
 
* 
 
‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon 
 
‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan 
 
‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously

Carrie Fisher

When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved - plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Now her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her co-star, Harrison Ford. 
 With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time – and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candour and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into the type of stardom that few will ever experience.

The Princess Diarist

Candida Lycett Green

1949: one year in the childhood of Candida Lycett Green in the remote village of Farnborough in Berkshire. Here she lives with her father John Betjeman and her mother Penelope Chetwode, in one of the bleakest and highest spots on the windswept downland.Candida runs wild with the 'gang' of village children. Stimulated by regular excursions to the cinema in Wantage, Candida and her best friend June became fascinated by the idea of love. Their romantic imagination is fuelled by the beautiful Ruby Mason, who cleans the cottage of a reclusive scientist, Dr Fox, employed at the neighbouring Harwell Atomic Research Centre. They stealthily engineer a romance between the two - until it is revealed that none of the children's special adult friends are what they seem, and the real world shockingly intervenes to overturn their innocence.

The Dangerous Edge Of Things

Sarah Langford

'As thrilling as a detective novel.' The Times 
'Powerful, moving and often captivating.' Financial Times 
'A compelling read for anyone who cares about fairness, justice and humanity.' Observer 
 
The Sunday Times bestseller 
 
___ 
 
 
Sarah Langford is a barrister. Her job is to stand in court representing the mad and the bad, the vulnerable, the heartbroken and the hopeful. She must become their voice. Sarah weaves their story around the black and white of the law and tell it to the courtroom. These stories may not make headlines but they will change the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways. They are stories which, but for a twist of luck, might have been yours. 
 
With remarkable candour, Sarah describes eleven cases which reveal what goes on in our criminal and family courts: these are tales of domestic fall out, everyday burglary, sexual indiscretion, and children caught up in the law. They are sometimes shocking and they are often heart-stopping. She examines how she feels as she defends the person standing in the dock. She also shows us how our attitudes and actions can shape not only the outcome of a case, but the legal system itself. 
 
___ 
 
 
What readers are saying: 
 
***** 'Absolutely fascinating . . . thought provoking, powerful and a compelling read.' 
***** 'This book broke my heart at times but also contained humour and such poignant insights into the criminal justice system.' 
***** 'Sarah writes incredibly well - she's informative while maintaining suspense and tension, and conveys so much emotion in her writing

In Your Defence

True Stories of Life and Law

Selma van de Perre

Selma van de Perre was seventeen when the Second World War began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had been of no consequence. But by 1941 it was a matter of life or death. Several times, Selma avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. Then, in an act of defiance, she joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years 'Marga' risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as Aryan she travelled the country delivering newsletters, sharing information, keeping up morale  - doing, as she later said, what 'had to be done'. In July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück women's concentration camp as a political prisoner. Unlike her parents and sister - who, she later discovered, died in other camps - she survived by using her alias. It was only after the war ended that she was allowed to reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma. Now, at ninety-nine, Selma remains a force of nature. Full of hope and courage, this is her story in her own words.

My Name Is Selma

The remarkable memoir of a Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück survivor

Clover Stroud

'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 
'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times 
 
Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. 
 
My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. 
 
MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD: 
'Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes 
'As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know' - Rachel Joyce 
'Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life - and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free' - Elizabeth Gilbert 
'I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating' - Alexandra Heminsley 
 
Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child's life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to - not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

My Wild and Sleepless Nights

The brave, raw Sunday Times bestselling memoir

Carl Hiaasen

"Every weekend, thousands of otherwise rational men and women are cursing, kicking at divots and smashing expensively milled putters against the trunks of immovable hardwood trees. These players go home in a toxic funk to inflict gloom upon their loved ones until the following Saturday, when they rush back to the golf course and do it all over again." 
 
In the summer of 2005, Carl Hiaasen picked up a golf club again for the first time in 32 years. He was not the best of players in 1973, and had certainly not got any younger in the intervening period. Undeterred, and weighed down by an increasing quantity of golf equipment and game-enhancing products acquired from adverts on The Golf Channel, who can see a sucker coming, Carl was soon hacking and shanking his way around the courses of Florida, and his obsession with the sport was rekindled. Animals were harmed during the making of this book. 
 
Over the course of the next 18 months, Carl's game got better, then worse, then slightly better, then much worse again, and he even managed to jinx Tiger Woods. On the way to finally summoning up the courage to compete in an actual tournament himself, Carl details the hilarious consequences of his misguided belief that he could actually play the game. We also learn that Justin Timberlake has a better golf handicap (6) than Bob Dylan (17), that Eagle Trace golf course contains not one trace of an eagle, and that Mind Drive capsules are not necessarily a good idea. 
 
But through all the misery and frustration (save the odd glorious shot), golf took up residence in Carl's heart again. Fairway to Hell is the ultimate tale of the trials and tribulations of the amateur golfer, but also the heart-warming story of how the game brought together the generations of the Hiaasen family.

Fairway To Hell

Barry Norman

Barry Norman was one of the nation's most popular and enduring broadcasters. Journalist, writer and presenter, he was best known for having fronted the BBC's flagship Film programme for more than 25 years. 
 
While working as a gossip columnist for The Daily Sketch, Barry met a pretty, talented young journalist called Diana Narracott, when they were sent to cover the same news story. Within a year they were married, their union lasting until Diana's untimely death in 2011. 
 
In this heartfelt memoir, Barry introduces us to the remarkable woman he knew so well and loved so deeply. He traces their careers and lives together, describing how Diana moved from being an accomplished journalist, to mother-of-two, to best-selling author. Through his writing, we grow to love Diana's irrepressible nature, fierce intelligence, her sense of fun and even her stubbornness. 
 
Writing in his entertaining, inimitable style, Barry shows how, like any couple, he and Diana had their disagreements but that the deep-rooted love and respect they had for each other ultimately ensured a long and happy marriage. With heart-breaking honesty, he shares the difficulty he and their family faced while Diana was fighting ill-health, as well as the pain he still feels at the loss of his wife who he describes as 'the best friend a man could ever hope for'.

See You In The Morning

Richard Wollheim

The son of affluent parents - a distant, dandified impresario father he revered; a beautiful, mindless 'Gaiety Girl' mother he came to regret loathing - Richard Wollheim grew up in the English suburbia of the 1920s and 1930s. Germs is his account of those years. It is a book like no other; a remarkable exploration of childhood by one of the English-speaking world's most distinguished postwar thinkers.

Germs

A Memoir Of Childhood

Ruth McKernan

Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research it is Ruth McKernan's way. When her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse his medical condition. 
 
In this moving account of her father's last year, love, grief and hope are intertwined with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work. The result is an inspired blend where the contrasting view of scientist and daughter ultimately unite.

Billy's Halo

Edward Stourton

‘If you are accompanied by a dog you can talk to anyone, and anyone can talk to you – about anything …’ And they do. Edward Stourton’s walks with, Kudu, his dog, become an opportunity for wonderfully unlikely encounters, and reflecting on the world from the dog-walker’s perspective proves remarkably illuminating. Ed and Kudu’s small trips to the park offer up big insights into romantic attachment, honour and heroism, guilt and depression, our sense of duty, beauty and the hard facts of life’s pecking order. Diary of a Dog-Walker is witty, wise and will be utterly irresistible to any man or woman with a dog.

Diary of a Dog-walker

Time spent following a lead

John O'Farrell

'…as the Labour candidate I prepared for every possible question on the local radio Election Phone-In. What I had not prepared for was my mum ringing up to say that she agreed with John O’Farrell. On EVERYTHING.' 
 
Where Did We Go Right? is the personal story of one political activist helping Labour progress from its 1997 landslide to the unassailable position it enjoys today. 
Along the way, he stood for Parliament against Theresa May but failed to step into her shoes; he was dropped from Tony and Cherie’s Christmas card list after he revealed he always sent their card on to a friend from the SWP; and he campaigned for a new non-selective inner-city state school, then realised this meant he had to send his kids to a non-selective inner-city state school. 
 
The long-awaited sequel to the best-selling Things Can Only Get Better is for everyone who could use a good laugh after Brexit, Boris and Trump. A roller-coaster ride through the last two decades via the very best political jokes (excluding the ones that keep getting elected).

Things Can Only Get Worse?

Twenty confusing years in the life of a Labour supporter

Lucy Dent

At the curtain call of her thirties, Lucy Dent finds herself in a marriage where meaningful communication, sexual contact and friendship have all but disappeared. Craving comfort and attention, she turns to the internet to find companionship and finds fulfilment in online sexual liaisons. 
 
Lucy details her sexual encounters with searing honesty - but this book is so much more than a 'sex memoir'. It explores marital disharmony, loneliness, addiction and the ramifications of making the choice not to have children. In an age in which lives are played out via social networks, this compelling book exposes how the supposed security of online interaction doesn't, in fact, stay safe for very long.

Turned On

From her early childhood, when her inspirational mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of green lanes and tracks, of moving along at horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door. Her insatiable appetite for exploring unknown territory has led her to travel all over the country by horse for weeks at a time, and often these journeys have come at important turning points in her life. 
 
Lyrical yet down-to-earth, framed by a recent 150-mile journey through Yorkshire and Northumberland with a friend, Over the Hills and Far Away dips back into past journeys by horse that also reflect her idyllic childhood in the bohemian Betjeman household, a charmed youth in the Swinging Sixties, a year-long honeymoon journey overland to India, early days at Private Eye, and the ups and downs of thirty-nine years of marriage and motherhood. Her story is made all the more poignant by her recent fight with breast cancer.

Over The Hills And Far Away

Bill Bryson

From one of our most beloved and bestselling authors, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s. 
 
Born in 1951 in the middle of the United States, Des Moines, Iowa, Bill Bryson is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24 carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generation, Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around the house wearing a jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel round his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing evildoers (in his head) as The Thunderbolt Kid. 
 
Using his childhood fantasy life as a springboard, Bill Bryson recreates the life of his family in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality. In a period that saw the inexorable rise of television, the opening of Disneyland, the testing of the atomic bomb, and the explosion of choice in everything from food to cars, Bill Bryson's days followed in reassuringly cosy succession, enlivened by modest triumphs and disasters. 
 
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, The Rise and Fall of the Thunderbolt Kid is a modern classic, full of Bill Bryson's inimitable, pitch-perfect observations. 
........................................................................................................................................... 
'Seriously funny' The Sunday Times 
 
'A funny, effortlessly readable, quietly enchanted memoir' Daily Mail 
 
'A wittily incisive book about innocence, and its limits, but in no sense an innocent book... Like Alan Bennett, another ironist posing as a sentimentalist, Bryson can play the teddy-bear and then deliver a sudden, grizzly-style swipe' Independent 
 
'Outlandishly and improbably entertaining... inevitably [I] would be reduced to body-racking, tear-inducing, de-couching laughter' New York Times 
 
'Characteristic mixture of bemused wit, acerbic astonishment and sweet benevolence... His evocation of an era is near perfect: tender, hilarious and true' The Times

The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid

Travels Through my Childhood

Tom Cox

As a teenager in Nottingham, Tom Cox was possessed. Despite the best endeavours of his frankly rather groovy parents, nascent fashion sense and regular exposure to credible music from an early age, he was inexorably drawn into the bizarre, esoteric world that is golf, with its male-bonding rituals and strange trousers. And thus a strange hybrid was born -- from 1988 to 1995, Tom was Midlands golf's answer to Iggy Pop. 
 
Assisted by his fellow junior members at the local club, he cut a swathe through the golfing establishment, putting dead animals in his fellow golfers' shoes, setting fire to the club professional's shop, bringing Colin Montgomerie close to tears and repeatedly wearing the wrong colour of socks. On the golf course he felt simultaneously at home and somehow alienated. But Tom also wanted to be (and became) the best, taking five years out of normal adolescent existence to live, breathe, walk and talk nothing but the sport he loved. 
 
Nice Jumper is the story of how Tom tried to fit in, failed, got down to a handicap of two, tried to fit in again, got suspended from the club, got corrupted by rock and roll, then attempted to corrupt golf itself. Original, poignant and highly entertaining, it's a book about one teenager's obsessive attempts to attain sporting nirvana - despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fashion.

Nice Jumper

Anya von Bremzen

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR . 
 
In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Eddy de Wind

Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor and psychiatrist, was shipped to Auschwitz with his wife Friedel in 1943. They made it through the brutal selection process and were put to work. Each day, each hour became a battle for survival. For Eddy, this meant negotiating with the volatile guards in the medical barracks. For Friedel, it meant avoiding the Nazis' barbaric medical experiments. As the end of the war approached the Nazis fled, taking many prisoners with them. Eddy hid under a pile of old clothes and stayed behind. Finding a notebook and pencil, he began to write with furious energy about his experiences. Last Stop Auschwitz is the result - an extraordinary account of life as a prisoner, a near real-time record of the struggle to survive but also of the flickering moments of joy Eddy and Friedel found in each other. Documenting the best and the worst of humanity, it is a unique and timeless story that reminds us of what we as humans are capable of, but that there is hope, even in Hell.

Last Stop Auschwitz

My story of survival from within the camp

David Belton

'Tremendous. A moving and haunting tribute to the human spirit' WILLIAM BOYD 
 
Into the heart of a genocide that left a million people dead 
 
6 April 1994: In the skies above Rwanda the president’s plane is shot down in flames. 
 
Near Kigali, Jean-Pierre holds his family close, fearing for their lives as the violence escalates. 
 
 In the chapel of a hillside village, missionary priest Vjeko Curic prepares to save thousands of lives 
 
The mass slaughter that follows – friends against friends, neighbours against neighbours - is one of the bloodiest chapters in history 
 
 
Twenty years on, BBC Newsnight producer David Belton, one of the first journalists into Rwanda, tells of the horrors he experienced at first-hand. Now following the threads of Jean-Pierre and Vjeko Curic’s stories, he revisits a country still marked with blood, in search of those who survived and the legacy of those who did not. This is David Belton's quest for the limits of bravery and forgiveness.

When The Hills Ask For Your Blood: A Personal Story of Genocide and Rwanda

Pamela Druckerman

'Fascinating...gripping...extremely funny...I loved it. It made me want to move to Paris' - India Knight, Sunday Times 
_______ 
 
Do you want to learn the secrets of the parents of France's well-behaved children? 
 
How come French babies sleep through the night? 
Why do French children happily eat what is put in front of them? 
How can French mothers chat to their friends while their children play quietly? 
_______ 
 
Parents are saying MERCI to Pamela Druckerman! 
 
***** ‘Our parenting bible’ 
***** ‘You are not alone! … Brilliantly funny and really helpful.’ 
***** ‘Eye opening … it has changed the way I view and interact with my little one!’

French Children Don't Throw Food

The hilarious NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER changing parents’ lives

Jenni Murray

The only child of an electrical engineer and a mother who resented the fact that she'd never been to university, the broadcaster Jenni Murray grew up in a traditional household in the 1950s. But instead of becoming the conventional housewife her mother expected her to be, Jenni opted to forge her own path in both her career and her personal life. 
 
The resulting tensions have lasted as long as she can remember. How, she has often wondered, could two women be so close, so full of love for each other, and at the same time so full of hate that they broke each other's hearts? 
 
And so Jenni began her remarkable memoir - and continued to write throughout 2006 as her mother lay dying, and Jenni struggled to care for her and her beloved father while herself being treated for breast cancer. 
 
Filled with love and laughter, frustration and heartbreak, and with the courage 'to keep on keeping on' even in the darkest days, it will speak to every mother and daughter, dutiful or not.

Memoirs Of A Not So Dutiful Daughter

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The Fall of the West

Hunt the Villain

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

The Mortons

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Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes on tear-jerking books and what he’s reading

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16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

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24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

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Showing results for: ‘joseph delaney’

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