Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

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Michael Meyer

‘Makes the case for Annie Besant as a truly eminent Victorian, as brilliant and fearless as she was beautiful’ The Times 
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London, 1877. A petite young woman stands before an all-male jury, about to risk everything. She takes a breath, and opens her defence. 
 
Annie Besant and her confidant Charles Bradlaugh are on trial for the crime of publishing a birth control pamphlet. Remarkably, Annie is defending herself against obscenity charges 45 years before women can practice law in England. At a time when women were expected to be obedient, Annie’s fearless voice was a sensation and spotlighted issues of sex, censorship and morality. 
 
A Dirty, Filthy Book tells the gripping story of a little-known pioneer who refused to accept the role that the establishment assigned her, and chose instead to resist.

A Dirty, Filthy Book

Annie Besant’s Fight for Reproductive Rights

Sex, Scandal, and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century

Alex McBride

A respectable solicitor in the town of Hay-on-Wye, harried by his troubled wife, slowly and carefully poisons her to death. Pleased with the results, he sees an opportunity for another quick-fix solution and turns his murderous attentions to his business rival... 
 
Trapped in a marriage of convenience to an aging man almost thirty years her senior, thirty-eight year-old Alma falls in love with seventeen year-old George, when he answers her advertisement for a 'willing lad' to do the housework. It's the perfect set up - a well-disposed husband and a passionate lover - until George destroys it all by trying to get the husband out of the way... 
 
These two classic cases of spousal murder - one chillingly domestic, the other bizarre and touching - took place in 1922 and 1935. In these brilliant reconstructions, they continue to confound our expectations of how murderers are meant to proceed.

Famous Trials: Unwanted Spouses

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 
 
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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. 
 
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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

Nineteen year-old Madeleine Smith may have been charged in 1857 with poisoning her lover, Emile L'Angelier, but her real sin was having sex - a lot of sex - out of wedlock. Her mistake was to write him frank and passionate letters, described by the trial judge as 'without any sense of decency', which L'Angelier threatened to send to her father when she cooled on the idea of marriage, having secretly engaged herself to someone else. 
 
Some fifty years later, the trial of Robert Wood, a respectable, hard-working illustrator by day, who frolicked with prostitutes by night, including the unfortunate Emily Dimmock, also hinged on a dangerous correspondence. Dimmock's murderer had evidently ransacked her rooms for a postcard written by Wood. Was there something he was desperate to hide? The author of his trial is certain he was guilty. 
 
But both escaped conviction - in Wood's case, thanks to the defence of the best defence barrister in the land. In Madeleine Smith's, the three judges ruled two-to-one to exclude from evidence L'Angelier's pocket book, which recorded her meetings with him on the day of the murder. These two salacious and controversial trials demonstrate how the dramatic difference between 'guilty' and 'not guilty' can sometimes be decided by a mere scrap of paper.

Famous Trials: Lucky Escapes

Isabel Buchanan

Winner of the Saltire Society First Book Award 2016 
An Economist Book of the Year 2016 
A Spectator Book of the Year 2016 
 
In 2011, Isabel Buchanan, a twenty-three-year-old Scottish lawyer, moved to Pakistan to work in a new legal chambers in Lahore. The chambers was run by a determined thirty-three-year-old Pakistani lawyer, Sarah Belal, who had finally found her calling in defending inmates on Pakistan’s death row. 
 
Belal and Buchanan struck up an unlikely friendship, forged through working in a system that was instinctively hostile to newcomers – and doubly so if they were female. At Sarah’s side, and with the help of Nasar, the firm’s legendary clerk, Buchanan plunged into the strange and complex world of Pakistan’s justice system. The work was arduous, underfunded, and dangerous. But for a young Scottish lawyer like Buchanan it was an unparalleled education, offering a window onto a much-misunderstood country and culture. Filled with beautifully drawn characters, she creates a narrative brimming with ideas and bursting with humanity. It is a story of Pakistan, but it is also a universal story of the pursuit of justice in an uncertain world.

Trials

On Death Row in Pakistan

T. Christian Miller

Ken Armstrong

Random House presents the audiobook edition of A False Report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, read by Hillary Huber with an epilogue read by Ken Armstrong and an authors' note read by T. Christian Miller. 
 
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists uncover the true story of Marie. She said she was raped; police said she lied. It was an easy case to close until two detectives cracked it back open. 
 
 On 11 August 2008, eighteen-year-old Marie reported that a masked man had broken into her home and raped her. Within days, police – and even those closest to Marie – became suspicious of her story: details of the crime just didn’t seem plausible. Confronted with the seeming inconsistencies, Marie broke down and said her story was a fabrication – a bid for attention. The police convicted her of making a false report. She was vilified as a liar. 
 
 More than two years later, some 1,600 kilometres away, detective Stacy Galbraith was assigned to a case of sexual assault. It bore an eerie resemblance to a rape that had taken place months earlier in a nearby town. Galbraith contacted the detective on that case, Edna Hendershot, and they joined forces. 
 
 Galbraith and Hendershot soon realised they were dealing with a serial rapist: a man who took calculated steps to erase all physical evidence, who photographed each of his victims, threatening to release the images online if the women went to the police. After weeks of meticulous investigation, they had a name. But they also had yet another victim – a young woman whose identity was a mystery, a possible missing link. It was imperative they find her. 
 
 Based on investigative files and extensive interviews with those involved, A False Report is a serpentine tale of doubt, lies and a hunt for justice. It unveils the disturbing reality of how sexual assault is investigated and the long history of scepticism towards its victims. But it is also the story of two women whose determined resolve and detective brilliance finally brought the truth to light.

A False Report

The chilling true story of the woman nobody believed

Karen Farrington

Five Women. Five families’ search for justice. 
 
All Sarah Chesham wanted was to survive, at a time when crops were poor and money was tight. By the time she died she was branded a merciless child killer. 
 
All Emily Swann wanted was the love of a man who wouldn’t abuse her. By the time she died she was depicted as a vengeful, drunken hussy. 
 
All Edith Thompson wanted was a romance with a man who adored her. By the time she died she was seen as a scheming and manipulative adulteress. 
 
All Louie Calvert wanted was to be heard. Yet when she died she slipped almost immediately into the shadows, like thousands of other women like her. 
 
All Charlotte Bryant wanted was a distraction from a dreary life. By the time she died she was deemed a seductress and an arch poisoner. 
 
No one wants to believe that their mother, sister or daughter is capable of murder. When a woman is charged with a killing, we judge more harshly and punish more severely than when a man does the same. 
 
Murder, Mystery and My Family explores five historical true-crime tales from the hit BBC series, each with a woman at the heart of the story, from a case of ‘poison panic’ in the 19th century to a post-war murder that gripped the nation. Tales of infidelity and greed, corruption and deceit run throughout – but was justice served for all? Descendants of those convicted revisit each case in search of answers. 
 
Based on extensive research, including original court records and interviews with descendants, Murder, Mystery and My Family delves deeper into each crime, while also looking at our changing attitudes to women who have found themselves at the centre of our darkest dramas.

Murder, Mystery and My Family

A True-Crime Casebook from the Hit BBC Series

Helena Kennedy

Eve Was Framed offers an impassioned, personal critique of the British legal system. Helena Kennedy focuses on the treatment of women in our courts - at the prejudices of judges, the misconceptions of jurors, the labyrinths of court procedures and the influence of the media. But the inequities she uncovers could apply equally to any disadvantaged group - to those whose cases are subtly affected by race, class poverty or politics, or who are burdened, even before they appear in court, by misleading stereotypes.

Eve Was Framed

Women and British Justice

Matt Taibbi

‘A brilliant work of narrative nonfiction’ – Booklist 
‘Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power’ – Bernie Sanders 
‘A searing exposé’ – Kirkus Review 
‘Taibbi may be the only political writer in America that matters’ – Hartford Advocate 
 
 
The incredible story of the death of Eric Garner, the birth of the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement and the new fault lines of race, protest, policing and the power of the people. 
 
On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died in New York after a police officer put him in a "chokehold" during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of his life were captured on video and seen by millions – his agonised last words, “I can’t breathe,” becoming a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. 
 
Matt Taibbi, bestselling author and “the best polemic journalist in America”, tells the full story of the man who inspired a movement – neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street, this powerful narrative of urban America is a riveting work of literary journalism and a scathing indictment of law enforcement in the twenty-first century. I Can’t Breathe tells the story of one man to tell the story of countless others, and the power of people to rise up against injustice.

I Can't Breathe

The Killing that Started a Movement

Carmen Callil

'A triumphant family memoir' Hallie Rubenhold 
'Powerfully told...an impressive work' The Times 
'Oh Happy Day gives a voice to the voiceless' Australian Book Review 
 
In this remarkable book, Carmen Callil discovers the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her great-great grandmother Sary Lacey, born in 1808, an impoverished stocking frame worker. Through detailed research, we follow Sary from slum to tenement and from pregnancy to pregnancy. We also meet George Conquest, a canal worker and the father of one of Sary's children. George was sentenced - for a minor theft - to seven years' transportation to Australia, where he faced the extraordinary brutality of convict life. 
 
But for George, as for so many disenfranchised British people like him, Australia turned out to be his Happy Day. He survived, prospered and eventually returned to England, where he met Sary again, after nearly thirty years. He brought her out to Australia, and they were never parted again. 
 
A miracle of research and fuelled by righteous anger, Oh Happy Day is a story of Empire, migration and the inequality and injustice of nineteenth-century England. 
 
'A remarkable tale...drawing chilling parallels to the inequalities of our times' Observer

Oh Happy Day

Those Times and These Times

Helen Thorn

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Helen is the woman I want in my life when the shit hits the fan' - Bryony Gordon 
 
What do you do when your relationship suddenly ends? How do you cope when the cosy 'coupley' future you had planned disappears? 
 
Join comedian Helen Thorn from The Scummy Mummies as she haphazardly takes the plunge into single life for the first time in twenty-two years. 
 
 Helen shares her own roller coaster journey from the initial shock of a surprise separation, the messy months hanging out in her PJs through to the highs of rediscovering online dating, tiny pants, rock-solid female friendships and the glorious joy of just being by herself. 
 
With the help of relationship experts and an army of women "who know", Get Divorced, Be Happy will show you that going it alone isn't the end, it is just the beginning, and you will come out the other side, stronger, happier and goddamn sassier than ever before.

Get Divorced, Be Happy

How becoming single can turn out to be your happy ever after

How becoming single turned out to be my happily ever after

Danielle Keats Citron

'Devastating and urgent, this book could not be more timely' Caroline Criado Perez, award-winning and bestselling author of Invisible Women 
 
Danielle Citron takes the conversation about technology and privacy out of the boardrooms and op-eds to reach readers where we are - in our bathrooms and bedrooms; with our families and our lovers; in all the parts of our lives we assume are untouchable - and shows us that privacy, as we think we know it, is largely already gone. 
 
The boundary that once protected our intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, we have embraced a vast array of technology that enables constant access and surveillance of the most private aspects of our lives. From non-consensual pornography, to online extortion, to the sale of our data for profit, we are vulnerable to abuse -- and our laws have failed miserably to keep up. 
 
With vivid examples drawn from interviews with victims, activists and lawmakers from around the world, The Fight for Privacy reveals the threat we face and argues urgently and forcefully for a reassessment of privacy as a human right. As a legal scholar and expert, Danielle Citron is the perfect person to show us the way to a happier, better protected future.

The Fight for Privacy

Protecting Dignity, Identity and Love in the Digital Age

Denise Mina

Denise Mina examines the most famous - and infamous - cases in Scottish legal history, and participates in a mock trial 
 
Denise Mina is well known for her bestselling 'Tartan Noir' novels. She has twice won the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award, and her 'Paddy Meehan' series has been adapted for BBC TV. Before becoming a novelist, she studied law, and she has a particular interest in true crime. 
 
In these six episodes, she uncovers some of Scotland's most dramatic trials that continue to fascinate us years later. Also included is a bonus documentary, The Street Lawyer. 
 
The Paisley Snail - 1928. When May Donoghue pours ginger beer into her ice-cream float and a decomposed snail slithers out of the bottle, it sparks a case that will make legal history... 
 
Oscar Slater - Rich spinster Marion Gilchrist is brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908. The hunt for her killer leads to Scotland's most dramatic miscarriage of justice: the Oscar Slater trial. 
 
The Douglas Cause - In this notorious 18th Century cause célèbre, two leading aristocratic families go head-to-head in a scandalous inheritance battle involving a secret elopement and stolen babies. 
 
The Moorov Doctrine - Glasgow, 1930, and a #MeToo-style case of sexual harassment in the workplace establishes one of the most important legal principles in Scottish law today. 
 
Madeleine Smith - In 1857, socialite Madeleine Smith is on trial for murder, accused of poisoning her French lover Emile L'Angelier. But did she do it, or not? 
 
Burke and Hare - Denise Mina looks at the notorious 19th Century murderers, talking to fellow authors Marisa Haetzman and Ian Rankin about the legalities of body snatching and the legacy of Burke and Hare's grim deeds. 
 
The Street Lawyer - Mina joins street lawyer Emmanuel De Abreu and sixth-formers from Glasgow's Lochend Community High School as they take on the roles of defence and prosecution to simulate a famous US murder case. 
 
 
Credits 
 
Denise Mina's Case Histories 
Presented by Denise Mina 
Legal consultant: Andrew Tickell 
Produced by Liza Greig 
Edited by Heather Kane 
Senior Producer: Lynsey Moyes 
 
With Katie Barclay, Alice Bowman, John Cairns, Clare Connelly, Owen Dudley Edwards, Lindsay Farmer, Pamela Ferguson, Michael Fry, Eleanor Gordon, Marisa Haetzman, Martin Hannan, David Hay, Andy Hughes, Helena Kennedy, Bruno Longmore, Hamish MacPherson, Nadine Martin, Mandy McIntosh, Allan Nicol, Janet Philip, Ian Rankin, Alison Rosie and Susanne Tanner 
 
First broadcast BBC Radio Scotland, 1 May - 27 December 2019 
 
The Street Lawyer 
Presented by Denise Mina 
With Emmanuel De Abreu and pupils from Lochend Community High School 
 
First broadcast BBC Radio Scotland, 2 April 2019 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Denise Mina’s Case Histories

A BBC Radio True Crime Series

Theresa Murphy

This is the story of an arena of crime and degradation, of infamy and human suffering. It is the history of the Old Bailey, an institution as flawed as all man-made attempts at justice are doomed to be. 
 
In the beginning there was barbarity and injustice. The court was packed with a restless, muttering mob, eager for the verdicts of 'Guilty' so they could enjoy public executions, hurling abuse and missiles at those with the noose around their neck. Today we fool ourselves that we have evolved beyond barbarism, but are made uneasy by the continuing exposure of miscarriage of justice. If we use the Old Bailey as a yardstick, it is possible to argue that mankind has not made much progress through the centuries. 
 
In these pages, we tour the courts of long ago, meeting the Dracula-garbed court chaplains, drunken, brutal judges and cold-blooded hangmen. With wit and skill, Theresa Murphy brings to life a cast of hundreds, from the well-known to the less imfamous, who together make up the harrowing history of the Old Bailey.

The Old Bailey

Eight Centuries of Crime, Cruelty and Corruption

John Lewis-Stempel

Everybody thinks they know what sheep are like: they're stupid, noisy, cowardly ('lambs to the slaughter'), and they're 'sheepwrecking' the environment. 
 
Or maybe not. Contrary to popular prejudice, sheep are among the smartest animals in the farmyard, fiercely loyal, forming long and lasting friendships. Sheep, farmed properly, are boons to biodiversity. They also happen to taste good and their fleeces warm us through the winter - indeed, John Lewis-Stempel's family supplied the wool for Queen Elizabeth's 'hose'. 
 
Observing the traditional shepherd's calendar, The Sheep's Tale is a loving biography of ewes, lambs, and rams through the seasons. Lewis-Stempel tends to his flock with deep-rooted wisdom, ethical consideration, affection, and humour. This book is a tribute to all the sheep he has reared and sheared - from gregarious Action Ram to sweet Maid Marion. In his inimitable style, he shares the tales that only a shepherd can tell.

The Sheep’s Tale

The story of our most misunderstood farmyard animal

Jacqueline Pascarl

In Once I Was a Princess, Jacqueline Pascarl related the gripping story of her abusive childhood and her subsequent teen marriage to a prince. What should have been a fairy tale with a happy ending deteriorated into a nightmare of deceit and betrayal - ending in the kidnapping of her two small children by her former husband, who spirited them back to Malaysia. 
 
In Since I Was a Princess, Pascarl peels back the layers of her life after the abduction. She tells how she channelled her grief, forging an existence as an aid worker and humanitarian ambassador in war-torn countries and working with refugees and the dispossessed. She describes how she persuaded some of the world's most influential figures to support her aid work and became a human rights activist on the international stage, championing the cause of other parents whose children had been kidnapped and reuniting scores of families. 
 
Pascarl also explains how she lived frenetically as she painfully rebuilt her life and re-evaluated her relationships, grappling with the emotional complexities of a new pregnancy and beginning a second family. And she reveals for the first time the dramatic details of how, at last, she was able to be reunited with her long-lost children and make her family whole. 
 
Candid and compelling, Since I Was a Princess is an unforgettable ride through tragedy, loss and, finally, triumph.

Since I Was a Princess

The Fourteen-Year Fight to Find My Children

Edward Pearce

There may be a civil war, starting in the Midlands. The Birmingham garrison have rough-sharpened their swords and barricades have gone up in the town. Wellington is trying to form a government without a majority. The Duke says 'The English people are usually quiet; if not, there are ways of making them.' These are the Days of May, High Summer of English Reform.  The new Whig government has staggered everyone with a reform bill more drastic than all expectations, one to wipe out rotten boroughs and enfranchise industrial towns. It has passed the Commons, been thrown out by the Lords, then, in an election, is massively endorsed. Now in May 1832, the Lords are again blocking it. Political unions formed to promote reform are denounced for Jacobinism and revolution.  One Tory, John Croker, hopes that 'the coming revolutionary regime' will let Princess Victoria 'live quietly as Miss Guelph'.  King William IV, influenced by the Court and Queen Adelaide, refuses to make new peers; stalemate may turn into street fighting. The struggle is recorded here. The players, painted vividly, speak in their own voices from 170-year-old Hansards: the radicals, Cobbett and Hunt; the Ultras, Wetherell and Eldon, resisting all reform; Lord Chancellor Brougham, drunk and brilliant in a great speech; Lord Alport, who manages the nightmare legislative struggle, tempted by suicide; a mad backbencher demanding a day of fasting and penitence.  Here too are the riots and the quiet politics of British constitutional reform.  The outcome - the 1832 Act - is the most important event in the last 300 years of parliamentary history.

Reform!

The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act

John Preston

The bestselling book that inspired the Bafta-winning BBC drama 
 
Corruption. Blackmail. Conspiracy to murder. A Very English Scandal has all the hallmarks of a classic thriller with one difference. It's all true. 
 
In the late 1960s Jeremy Thorp, the charismatic leader of the Liberal Party, was at the height of his political career. But homosexuality had only just been legalized, and a former relationship with a younger man named Norman Scott threatened to destroy Thorp's carefully curated facade. Helped by fellow politicians, Thorpe schemed, deceived and embezzled until he saw only one way to silence his ex-lover for good. 
 
Meticulously researched and endlessly extraordinary, Thorp's trial captured the moment that British society discovered the truth about its political class - and learned just how far the Establishment will go to protect its own. 
 
'Gripping. A story of cack-handed assassins, buffoonish policemen, dodgy Home Secretaries' Daily Telegraph 
 
'I loved it; eccentric, dark, humane and English in the very best sense' Alain de Botton 
 
'Retold with masterful skill . . . It grips like a detective story' Daily Mail, Book of the Week

A Very English Scandal

Now a Major BBC Series Starring Hugh Grant

Shami Chakrabarti

On Liberty is the story of today's threats to our freedoms and a highly personal, impassioned plea in defence of fundamental rights, from Shami Chakrabarti, Britain's leading human rights campaigner 
 
On 11 September 2001, our world changed. The West's response to 9/11 has morphed into a period of exception. Governments have decided that the rule of law and human rights are often too costly. In On Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti explores why our fundamental rights and freedoms are indispensable. She shows, too, the unprecedented pressures those rights are under today. Drawing on her own work in high-profile campaigns, from privacy laws to anti-terror legislation, Chakrabarti shows the threats to our democratic institutions and why our rights are paramount in upholding democracy. 
 
'Probably the most effective public affairs lobbyist of the past 20 years' - David Aaronovitch, The Times 
 
'The undaunted freedom fighter' - Observer 
 
'The most dangerous woman in Britain' - Sun

On Liberty

Catherine Laylle

In 1984, Catherine Laylle, a Frenchwomen living in London, met and married a German medical student, Dieter. The couple had two sons, Alexander and Constantin. When, however, at Dieter's insistence, they moved back to his home town in Germany, the marriage began to fall apart. Dieter refused to get a job, Catherine found living with his family oppressive and eventually, she returned to London with the children. The boys spent term time with their mother, holidays with their father - until the summer of 1994, when Dieter decided that his sons should be raised as Germans and, with the support of the local judge, defied the London court ruling that gave Catherine custody. Catherine went to the courts in London, Germany and the Hague - but it seemed that no court outside the jurisdiction of Lower Saxony would overrule the decision. Today, Alexander is eleven and Constantin is nine. Catherine has barely seen them in the two years since Dieter kidnapped them - and then only under the supervision of one of his friends. This is the harrowing story of a mother's attempts to regain her children, and of her desperate struggle against a tyrannical family and the blind injustice of the courts in Europe.

Two Children Behind A Wall

Thomas Cream, erstwhile Sunday school teacher and serial poisoner, has an unsettling air and wonky eye. He also happens to be a doctor, which provides him with ample means and an ideal cover for his murderous activities. His victims are vulnerable young women, whose trust he gains with drinks and trips to the music hall, before offering them pills or swigs from a medicine bottle. A few hours later, they are dying in agony. 
 
The Honourable Thomas Ley, meanwhile, has an even better disguise: he's the former Justice Minister for New South Wales and a successful businessman, albeit with a shady past. Rumours abound when a political opponent disappears without trace and a business partner winds up at the bottom of a cliff. 
 
Neither killer can help themselves - and this, in the end, leads to their downfall - and both defy our comprehension. Brilliantly reconstructed here, their trials, in 1892 and 1947, reveal a deeply sinister conundrum: by the time you've discovered the secrets in their heart, it's inevitably much too late.

Famous Trials: Thrill-Killers

Colin Elford

Colin Elford spends his days alone - alone but for the deer, the squirrels, the rabbits, the birds, and the many other creatures inhabiting the woods. 
 
From the crisp cold of January, through the promise of spring and the heat of summer, and then into damp autumn and the chill winds of winter, we accompany the forest-ranger as he goes about his work - stalking in the early morning darkness, putting an injured fallow buck out of its misery, watching stoats kill a hare, observing owls, and simply being a part of the outdoors. 
 
A Year in the Woods is an enthralling journey deep into the heart of the English countryside.

A Year in the Woods

The Diary of a Forest Ranger

Farida Khalaf

Andrea C. Hoffmann

In August 2014, Farida, like any ordinary teenage girl, was enjoying the summer holidays before her last year at school. But Farida lived in the mountains of northern Iraq — and what happened next was unimaginable. Her village was an ISIS target. 
 
ISIS jihadists murdered the men and boys, including her father and brother, before taking Farida and the other women prisoner. This is the story of what happened to Farida after she was captured: the beatings, the rapes, the markets where ISIS sold women like cattle, and Farida's realisation that the more resistant she became, the harder it was for her captors to continue their atrocities against her. So she struggled, she bit, she kicked, she accused her captors of going against their religion, until, one day, the door to her room was left unlocked. She took her chance and, with five younger girls in her charge, fled into the Syrian desert. 
 
Farida showed incredible courage in the face of the unthinkable, and now with The Girl Who Beat ISIS she bravely relives her story to bear witness. Searing and immediate, this is the first memoir by a young woman that shows first-hand what life is like for innocents caught up in the maelstrom of day-to-day life with ISIS.

The Girl Who Beat ISIS

Farida's Story

John Grisham

__________________ 
***NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES*** 
 
A gripping true-crime story of a shocking miscarriage of justice, from international bestselling thriller author John Grisham. 
 
In the baseball draft of 1971, Ron Williamson was the first player chosen from Oklahoma. Signing with Oakland, he said goodbye to his small home town and left for California to pursue his dreams of glory. 
 
Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits - drinking, drugs and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept 20 hours a day on her sofa. 
 
In 1982, a 21 year-old cocktail waitress, Debra Sue Carter, was raped and murdered, and for five years the crime went unsolved. Finally, desperate for someone to blame, police came to suspect Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with murder. 
 
With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. 
 
Ron Williamson was sent to Death Row. 
 
But as Grisham methodically lays out, there was no case against him. Ron Williamson was wrongly condemned to die. 
 
If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you. 
__________________ 
In 2018, THE INNOCENT MAN was adapted by Netflix into a gripping six-part true crime series. 
__________________ 
‘A master at the art of deft characterisation and the skilful delivery of hair-raising crescendos' – Irish Independent 
 
'John Grisham is the master of legal fiction' – Jodi Picoult 
 
'The best thriller writer alive' – Ken Follett 
 
‘John Grisham has perfected the art of cooking up convincing, fast-paced thrillers’ – Telegraph 
 
‘Grisham is a superb, instinctive storyteller’ – The Times 
 
‘Grisham's storytelling genius reminds us that when it comes to legal drama, the master is in a league of his own.’ – Daily Record 
 
‘Masterful – when Grisham gets in the courtroom he lets rip, drawing scenes so real they're not just alive, they're pulsating’ – Mirror 
 
‘A giant of the thriller genre’ – TimeOut

The Innocent Man

A gripping crime thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of mystery and suspense

Nicholas Shaxson

This is a book that none of us can afford to ignore – an agenda-setting, campaigning investigation that shows how global finance works for the few and not the many. 
 
** A Financial Times Book of the Year ** 
‘Essential reading’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS 
 
We need finance – but when finance grows too big it becomes a curse. 
 
The City of London is the single biggest drain on our resources, sucking talent out of every sphere, siphoning wealth and hoovering up government time. Yet to be ‘competitive’, we’re told we must turn a blind eye to money laundering and appease big business with tax cuts. 
 
Tracing the curse back through economic history, Nicholas Shaxson uncovers how we got to this point. Moving from offshore tax havens to the bizarre industry of wealth management, he tells the explosive story of how finance established a stranglehold on society – and reveals how we can begin to break free. 
 
‘A radical, urgent and important manifesto for improving our country’ 
 Oliver Bullough, Observer 
 
‘Superbly written… A must-read’ 
 Misha Glenny, author of McMafia 
 
‘Hard-hitting, well written and informative’ 
 Financial Times

The Finance Curse

How global finance is making us all poorer

Aldous Huxley

A gripping biography by the author of Brave New World 
 
In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns. 
 
Grandier maintained his innocence to the end but four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

The Devils of Loudun

Harriet Wistrich

For more than quarter of a century Harriet Wistrich has fought the corner of people from all walks of life let down by our justice system. 
 
When Sally Challen won her appeal to overturn her conviction for the murder of her coercively controlling husband, it was with Harriet Wistrich at her side. 
 
When victims of taxi driver and serial rapist John Worboys successfully took the Metropolitan Police to court for their investigative failures, and then, four years later, helped to hold the Parole Board to account for their decision to grant his early release from prison, the solicitor acting for them was Harriet Wistrich. 
 
It was Harriet who represented a pioneering group of the women caught up in the ‘spy cops’ scandal – women deceived into forming long-term relationships with men later revealed to be undercover police officers embedded within their communities. 
 
In a remarkable legal career, Harriet has been at the forefront of some historic and ground-breaking legal victories. Frequently working with women who have survived male violence or abuse, sometimes with the bereaved families of those who did not survive, her work has led her to challenge the police, CPS, government departments and the prison and immigration detention system. 
 
In Sister in Law, she tells the shocking stories of some of those who have come to her for assistance and shines a feminist light on the landscape of arcane laws and byzantine systems, skewed towards male behaviour and responses, through which she has steered them. 
 
Litigation can be a long and rocky path of pitfalls and dead ends and there are defeats as well as gains, hours of painstaking work as well as courtroom drama. It takes collaboration, extraordinary tenacity and huge compassion, but Harriet Wistrich is proof that it is possible to demand better justice and to bring about important change.

Sister in Law

Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men

Wendy Joseph KC

What is justice? Do our legal courts dispense it? Has our judicial process improved, for the victims, the accused and for society? What more must be done to ensure genuine justice is carried out in future? 
 
Following on the heels of her bestseller Unlawful Killings, Old Bailey judge Wendy Joseph KC skilfully reconstructs courtroom dramas affecting society’s most vulnerable - so often women and children, drawing on her many years’ experience as a murder trial judge, and asking the key questions of the institutions tasked to deliver what is right and fair. 
 
From the trial of a child charged with disposing of dismembered body parts, to the woman accused of killing her own husband, Joseph is utterly compelling as she sets out how our justice system works. But, as she compares these modern courtroom tales with eerily similar cases and miscarriages of justice from years ago, might the most chilling story of all be that the lessons of the past have yet to be learned? 
 
Incisive, masterfully crafted, Rough Justice illuminates the struggles of any one of us caught up in our legal system – but particularly the marginalized and the easily exploited – and grapples with the concept of ‘justice for all’ so that we might demand better.

Rough Justice

Do we have the law we deserve?

Deric Henderson

'It was a dance between control and manipulation' - Colin Howell at the trial of Hazel Stewart 
 
May 1991. The location: a quiet seaside town. The scene: two bodies in a car filled with carbon monoxide. Police officer Trevor Buchanan and nurse Lesley Howell have apparently taken their own lives, unable to live with the pain of their spouses' affair with each other. 
 
Their adulterous pair - Sunday school teacher Hazel Buchanan and dentist Colin Howell - had met in the local Baptist Church. Following the apparent double-suicide, they continue their affair but later marry other people. 
 
A series of disasters in Howell's life - bereavement, financial disaster, sexual scandal - prompt him share his darkest secrets to the elders of his church. He reveals that he and Hazel Stewart had conspired to murder their spouses nearly two decades earlier. 
 
That confession leads to two of the most sensational murder investigations ever seen in the UK, Howell's conviction for murder in December 2010 and Stewart's in March 2011. She continues to protest her innocence.

The Secret

Don Weber

Charles Bosworth

In June 1986 the police in Jersey County, Illinois accepted Paula Sims's story of a masked kidnapper who snatched her baby girl Lorelei from her bassinet. Three years later her second newborn daughter suffered an identical fate and this time the police were unable to stop searching until they had discovered the whole, horrifying truth. 
 
This is the full terrifying story of twisted sexuality and hate seething below the surface of a seemingly normal family, and of the massive investigation and nerve shattering trial that made the unthinkable a reality. Written by the lawyer who won the case and the reporter who covered its entirety, the reader is given a unique close-up of the riveting drama that unfolds, painting a dark picture of the depraved family who lived with a murderous secret.

Precious Victims

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