Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Simukai Chigudu

In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’. 
 
Simukai Chigudu was one of the first generation to be born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Growing up he heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, how his father had been imprisoned and tortured as a student before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerilla, and how his mother had thrown off the strictures of the past to build a successful career helping other women do the same. Yet Simukai’s early life was also steeped in British tradition. With his classmates he sang English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket. 
 
Then, in 2002, he was one of thousands to leave the country as it descended into political violence and economic collapse. His new home: a boarding school in the north of England. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself. 
 
Chasing Freedom is his profound and remarkably moving story – that of a boy shaped through his parents’ buried trauma by the great currents of late-twentieth century history. It is the story of a family haunted by the cause of liberation, and of a new generation, still searching for their promised freedom.

Chasing Freedom

Coming of Age at the End of Empire

Louise Brangan

When the gates of the last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996, Ireland moved on. Or so it seemed. 
 
'Compelling, measured and deeply felt' ANNE ENRIGHT 
'A terrific yet harrowing unearthing of Ireland's shadowland. A landmark book' RORY CARROLL 
 
Following independence in 1922, Ireland began to chase a dream: to become the perfect Catholic nation. But purity had a price. Throughout the twentieth century, thousands of women and girls who did not conform – the wayward, the poor, the disabled, the abused – were sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Each was perceived to have fallen in some way. Once locked inside, their hair was shorn off, their names were erased – and then they were put to work. They washed, they scrubbed and they prayed, labouring in an attempt to salvage their souls. 
 
This remains one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the last Laundry’s closure, The Fallen is the forgotten story of the Magdalene Laundries, told through the voices of the women who endured them, the nuns who presided over them and the communities that lived alongside them. 
 
Unflinching and compassionate, Louise Brangan draws on archives and survivors’ testimonies to dismantle long-held myths about what the Laundries were, who was sent to these places of violence and secrecy, and why. As we move from the past into the present, Brangan compels us not only to confront this shameful history, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember? 
 
'Critical, informed and beautifully written' MÁIRÉAD ENRIGHT 
'Breaking silence is a catalyst for change' CAELAINN HOGAN 
 
Winner of the 2024 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award

The Fallen

The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence

James Fox

Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores. 
 
Travelling the length of Britain, from the Scilly Isles to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox seeks out the country’s last remaining master craftspeople. Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bell-founders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life — one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could shape our future. 
 
For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, enriching even the most modest things. And in this increasingly digital age, it is perhaps more valuable than ever. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

Craftland

A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

Michael Taylor

The Order of the Illuminati was a secret society of intellectuals, judges, soldiers, politicians and poets who genuinely sought to infiltrate and overturn the system of world power from within. Their ambitions were progressive and democratic at a time, the late eighteenth century, when Church and monarchy were all powerful. Dukes and Princes, the likes of Goethe and Mozart, joined – but in reality their effects were minimal. Within a few years of its founding, the order was outed and banned, its leaders prosecuted, exiled and shamed, and its life was over. But shortly after came the French Revolution, and so shocking was the upheaval and carnage that, in the absence of an adequate-seeming explanation, the Illuminati were blamed – and so the conspiracy theory was born. 
 
Grippingly told, richly peopled and based on original research, this is the true story that lies behind the original conspiracy theory from which all others have since derived, as well as the story the theory itself as it recurred over and over again – in Britain, Ireland, America and Europe. Through the great upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it shows how the theory became entwined with antisemitism and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, gained momentum through the rise of America’s Christian Right and even infused the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, before finding new leases of life in the paranoid thinking of 9/11 Truthers, Qanon, the ’Great Reset’ and the Manosphere. 
 
The Illuminati has a deep and unsettling hold on the public imagination and has done for centuries. This book, the first full account of its kind, explains how and why the myth was born and presents a disturbing account of its wholly undiminished power.

Illuminati

The History of a Conspiracy Theory

Ian Mortimer

This book tells the story of Mearsdon, the house where Ian Mortimer lives in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor. We very rarely have a continuous account of a particular place over a long stretch of history, but Mortimer has a documentary record of all the owners who lived there since the 1260s – although the origins of the building probably date back to the eleventh century. 
 
Blending the broadest national history and the most intimate local events with a description of changing daily life from the Norman Conquest to the present day, Mortimer acquaints us with the people who passed through the house – from its first known owner, John the Palmer, to the folklore collector Charlie Laycock, who turned the house into a museum in the early twentieth century, to Mortimer’s family living there today. And along the way he shows how national events – from the Black Death to the Prayerbook Rebellion, from the Civil Wars to the two world wars – affected a rural community in deepest Devon over a time span of 900 years. 
 
The result is fascinating social history like no other. Bringing to it the brilliant imagination and storytelling gifts that made his Time Traveller’s Guides such a huge success, Mortimer introduces us to lords and merchants, ale brewers and peasants, clergymen and murderers, to create a continuously evolving story. Seeing through its windows, we not only glimpse at the people who lived in the house over the ages; we also see through their eyes as they look out at the changing world around them.

Through the Windows of an Ordinary House: A History of England

Simon Morrison

An erudite and entertaining history of Moscow, a city whose rich past offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics 
 
Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, eleven time zones, and nearly one hundred and fifty million people, some thirteen million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a ‘big village’ – the demeaning nickname the St. Petersburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbour – into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. 
 
That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic – not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back to the city’s founding as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of external forces – from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler – set their sights on Moscow, bolstering its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defence and resurrection. 
 
Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, Morrison shows us that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past, but also to grasp the grim logic of its present. 
 
A Kingdom and a Village is a magisterial biography of a place – and an essential guide to a people and a nation.

A Kingdom and a Village

A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

Stephen Greenblatt

Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. 
 
From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s inspiration and rival, who helped to bring England out of the cultural darkness and into the light. 
 
In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry – which to him is a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. 
 
What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of many others, including his youthful collaborator William Shakespeare. By the time of his murder in a Deptford tavern in 1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe will be the most celebrated dramatist of his time. 
 
Stephen Greenblatt grippingly reconstructs the involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his masterpieces about power and its costs. And he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world – involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still. 
 
Dark Renaissance is a scintillating life of a writer whose blazing talent catapulted England from cultural backwater to crucible of creativity.

Dark Renaissance

The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe

Jerry White

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert. 
 
London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. 
 
In Jerry White’s acclaimed history of London’s magnificent and boisterous rebirth we witness the astonishing drama of daily life in the midst of this burgeoning city.

London In The Eighteenth Century

A Great and Monstrous Thing

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