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

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Kenneth Roth

In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch conducted investigations in 100 countries to uncover abuses – and pressured offending governments to stop them. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, taken on the most ruthless oppressors of our time, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts. 
 
The son of a Jew who fled Nazi Germany just before the war began, Roth grew up knowing full well how inhumane governments could be. He has travelled the world to meet cruelty and injustice on its home turf: he arrived in Rwanda shortly after the genocide; scrutinized the impact of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait; investigated and condemned Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. He directed efforts to curtail the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims, to bring Myanmar’s officials to justice after the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, to halt Russian war crimes in Ukraine, even to rein in the U.S. government. Roth’s many innovations and strategies included the deployment of a concept as old as mankind – the powerful tool of ‘shaming’ – and here he illustrates its surprising effectiveness against evildoers. 
 
This is a story of wins, losses, and ongoing battles in the ceaseless fight for a more decent world.

Righting Wrongs

Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments

Sinclair McKay

Built by slave labour in the early years of the eighteenth century, Saint Petersburg was Peter the Great’s so-called ‘window on to Europe’, a city that would outdo all of Europe in its splendour. But a window works both ways, and as bestselling historian Sinclair McKay writes, St Petersburg has always been a city that has drawn Westerners who wanted to see into Russia. It is also a city where much has happened. It was St Petersburg until 1917, Petrograd after the revolution, Leningrad after Lenin’s death in 1924, and St Petersburg once again from 1991. 
 
This biography of a city stretches from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, who was born and made in St Petersburg. The story centres the ‘900 days and nights’ of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–44. Unlike Paris or Prague, the Nazis weren’t trying to take over, they wanted to wipe it off the map. According to some, this siege of 1.5 million people – including Putin’s mother – was an attempted genocide. Based on first-hand and many unpublished accounts from figures from all walks of life – irascible authors, factory workers, bakers, furriers, dancers, sailors, grandparents, children – this masterpiece reveals the central importance of St Petersburg over the centuries. This is the story of the city told from the perspective of the people who lived there.

Saint Petersburg

The City That Defied Hitler

Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler

Jason Allen-Paisant

The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England. 
 
Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today. 
 
Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world. 
 
The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.

The Possibility of Tenderness

A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams

Richard Coles

Charles Spencer

Cat Jarman

Join the trio behind the hit history podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives, Richard Coles, Charles Spencer and Cat Jarman in their first trivia book as they investigate weird and wonderful facts and stories rescued from obscurity. From the earliest recorded examples of practical jokes to a whistle-stop tour of the world's ghost towns to a history of red heads, The Rabbit Hole Book is a fascinating and entertaining dive into all the things you didn't know you wanted to know.

The Rabbit Hole Book

99 adventures into the history of stuff

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. 
 
The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. 
 
This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

More and More and More

An All-Consuming History

An All-Consuming History of Energy

Sunil Amrith

In this paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of the expansion of human freedom and its costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Spanish silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railways and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. He also reveals the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates, on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic – vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images – in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

The Burning Earth

An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Bible observes that God made humanity ‘for a while a little lower than the angels’. If humans are that close to angels, does the difference lie in human sexuality and what we do with it? In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history, bringing liberation for some and fury and fear for others. 
 
This book by Oxford's Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. It beckons us to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity, an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.

Lower than the Angels

A History of Sex and Christianity

Martin Daunton

This is the history of the institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy, from the World Monetary and Economic Conference in the wake of the Great Depression to the present, as leading nations tackle the fallout from Covid-19 and the threats of inflation, food security and climate change. Since the Second World War, organisations created at Bretton Woods - the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development - and afterwards - the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - have left an indelible mark on our contemporary world. 
 
Martin Daunton examines the swings of the pendulum over ninety years between the forces of democracy, national determination and globalization. He shows that the structures of economic government have been overwhelmingly shaped by 'first world' powers, often to the dismay of developing countries. He argues that whilst structures cannot be separated from the politics of and between the biggest economies, future global recovery rests on the reduction of inequality and that multilateral institutions are fundamental in fostering inclusive growth.

The Economic Government of the World

1933-2025

1933-2023

Jerry Brotton

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. 
 
In Four Points of the Compass, Jerry Brotton takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. He reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand.

Four Points of the Compass

The Unexpected History of Direction

Rebecca Hall

Hugo Martinez

Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. 
 
In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery, tells their story. With in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, she constructs the likely pasts of women rebels who fought for freedom on slave ships bound to America, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. Beneath both is Hall's own tale: of a life lived in the shadow of slavery and its consequences. 
 
Strikingly illustrated in black and white, Wake explores both a personal and a global legacy. Part graphic novel, part memoir, it is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake. 
 
'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' - Angela Davis

Wake

The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

Riccardo Falcinelli

Have you ever wondered why so many pencils are yellow? Why black is the colour of mourning? Or why carrots are orange? 
 
In Chromorama, acclaimed graphic designer Riccardo Falcinelli delves deep into the history of colour to show how it has shaped the modern gaze. With over four hundred illustrations throughout and with examples ranging widely across art and culture - from Flaubert's novels to The Simpsons, from Byzantine jewellery to misshapen fruit, from the black lines of Mondrian to the thrillers of Hitchcock - Falcinelli traces the evolution of our long relationship with colour, and how first the industrial revolution, and then the dawn of the internet age, changed it forever. 
 
Beautiful, warm and wise, taking in the lives of philosophers, entrepreneurs, designers, astrologists, shop assistants and pastry chefs, Chromoroma is an engrossing account of shade and light, of tone and hue, of dyes, pigments, and pixels. It is the story of why we now see the world the way we do.

Chromorama

How Colour Changed Our Way of Seeing

Helen Charman

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo. 
 
In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. 
 
Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Mother State

A Political History of Motherhood

Richard Whatmore

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure. 
 
By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states &ndash; and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife and liberty itself turned fanatic. 
 
The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent colonialism. 
 
Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured - especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.

The End of Enlightenment

Empire, Commerce, Crisis

Adrian Bliss

History belongs to the heroes. But to get the full story, sometimes you have to ask the side characters. 
 
The lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Henry VIII and Queen Victoria fill bookshelves and fascinate scholars all over the world. But little attention is given to the ferret who posed for the renaissance master, the servant who oversaw the Tudor’s toilet time, or the famous horse who thrilled the miserable old monarch. 
 
These supporting cast members have been waiting in the wings for too long, and Adrian Bliss thinks it’s high time they join their glory-hogging contemporaries in the spotlight. Fortunately, - thanks to some recently discovered ancient complaint letters, court transcripts and memoirs in bottles - now they can. 
 
Equal parts fascinating and hilarious, the Greatest Nobodies of History is a surreal love letter to life’s forgotten heroes featuring hitherto undocumented accounts from Ancient Greece to the frontlines of the Great Emu War. 
 
All that follows really happened, and some of it could even be true...

The Greatest Nobodies of History

Minor Characters from Major Moments

Richard Sennett

The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. 
 
The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing. 
 
This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.

The Performer

Art, Life, Politics

Jessica Rawson

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation still in place today. Records of these early achievements, and their diverse and unexpected expressions, often lie not in written history but in the ways people marked the end of their lives. 
 
Jessica Rawson here explores twelve grand tombs – each from a specific historical moment and place – showing how they reveal wider political, dynastic and cultural developments, culminating in the lavish ambition of the First Emperor's monument, guarded by his army of terracotta warriors. Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China illuminates a constellation of beliefs about life and death very different from our own and provides a remarkable new perspective on one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

Ekow Eshun

In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. 
 
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask? 
 
In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future. 
 
Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

The Strangers

Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them

Adam Higginbotham

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger space shuttle disaster based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research – riveting history that reads like a thriller 
 
On the morning of 28 January 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions around the world witnessed the tragic deaths of the crew, which included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in twentieth century history – one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened – and why – has never been told. 
 
Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space follows a handful of central protagonists – including each of the seven members of the doomed crew – through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a compelling tale of optimism and ingenuity shattered by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubristic ‘go fever’; and of an investigation driven by heroic leakers and whistle-blowers determined to bring the truth to light. 
 
With astonishing clarity and narrative verve, Adam Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster, as well as the designers, engineers and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space. A masterful blend of riveting human drama, fascinating science and shocking political infighting, Challenger brings to life a turning point in our history. The result is an even more complex and extraordinary story than any of us remembered – or thought possible.

Challenger

A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

Clare Hammond

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together. 
 
Her journey would take her from Myanmar's tropical south to the embattled mountain towns that border India and China. In dilapidated carriages, along tracks in disrepair, through contested ethnic states and former sites of forced labour, visiting temples, tea shops and festivals, Clare encountered a colourful and contradictory Myanmar through the stories of its people. Simultaneously a lush and evocative travelogue, an unsparing account of Myanmar's recent history, and an astonishing, conversation-shifting engagement with Britain's colonial legacy, On the Shadow Tracks is that rare and necessary thing: a book that finds and tells the truth.

On the Shadow Tracks

A Journey through Occupied Myanmar

Eugene Rogan

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. 
 
Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority. 
 
But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital. 
 
This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

The Damascus Events

The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World

Wright Thompson

Emmett Till’s murder is one of the most infamous in American history; a moment that, more than any other, awakened the world to the racism of the Deep South. Yet despite growing up just a few miles from where it happened, Wright Thompson knew nothing of it until he left Mississippi. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing. 
 
Over the course of five years’ research, Thompson has learnt that almost every part of the standard account of Till’s killing is wrong. In August 1955, after the two men charged with the murder were acquitted by an all-white jury, they gave a false confession to a journalist: one that was misleading about where the murder took place and who was involved. We now know that at least eight people were present, and many more complicit. And we now know precisely where it took place: inside a barn on a 36-square-mile grid called Township 22 North, Range 4 West. 
 
This book tells the story of that barn. It is the story of what really happened on the night of August 28, 1955, and of the individuals who have spent decades bringing the truth to light. And it is the story of the centuries-old forces that made that night inevitable: forces that, over the course of 200 years, transformed Township 22 North, Range 4 West from Choctaw land, to a slave plantation, to a sharecropper’s farm, to the site of the most significant murder in US history. 
 
The result is a revelatory work of investigative reportage and a panoramic new history of white supremacy in America. It maps the road that the US – and the world – must travel to heal its oldest, deepest wound.

The Barn

The Murder of Emmett Till and the Cradle of American Racism

Martin Clunes

Inspired by Martin Clunes' own adoption of a former guide dog, Meetings With Remarkable Animals celebrates the fascinating, moving and sometimes astonishing ways animals have enriched our lives. From search and rescue dogs to mine-sniffing rats, and life-saving dolphins to therapy horses and medal-winning cats and pigeons, the stories brought to life will charm, surprise and astonish in equal measure. 
 
Together with his own life-changing encounters with animals around the world, Martin has celebrated the intelligence, loyalty, and companionship of some truly extraordinary creatures whose lives have been entwined with our own. By turns heart-warming, inspiring and always fascinating, Meetings With Remarkable Animals gives us a chance to meet them too.

Meetings With Remarkable Animals

Beth Ashley

From award-winning journalist Beth Ashley comes a groundbreaking investigation into the history of slutshaming, how it continues to affect us today and what we can do to fight it. 
 
Whore. Hoe. Jezebel. Harlot. Slut. Five words. One meaning. 
 
But what exactly is a slut? How has the concept changed over time? And why is slutshaming so dangerous? 
 
In this groundbreaking investigation, Beth Ashley reveals the truth about slutshaming, gives us the tools to fight it, and encourages us all to have better conversations about sex. 
 
The fight starts now.

Sluts

The truth about sex shame and what we can do to fight it

The truth about slutshaming and what we can do to fight it

Shami Chakrabarti

Our human rights are endangered. After the devastation of World War Two the international community united to enshrine fundamental rights to refuge, health, education and living standards. They protected privacy, fair trials and free speech and outlawed torture, slavery and discrimination. Their goal was greater global justice, equality and peace. That settlement is now under attack from opponents on both left and right and populist and authoritarian movements worldwide. Simultaneously, we are threatened by war, inequality, new tech and climate catastrophe, crises human rights can help us address. 
 
In this urgent, powerful book, Shami Chakrabarti, demonstrates why human rights matter and why we need to secure further rights to deal with challenges of the present and future. Outlining the historic national and international struggles for human rights, from ancient Babylon to the present day, Chakrabarti is an indispensable guide to the law and logic underpinning human dignity and universal freedoms. This book equips supporters in the battle of ideas and will encourage doubters to think again. 
 
To believe in human rights is to believe in human beings. If they - and we - are to survive, these rights must be owned and understood by everyone.

Human Rights

The Case for the Defence

Corinne Fowler

The countryside is almost sacred to many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together, with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. 
 
Empire transformed rural lives: whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to link the lives of their descendants now. 
 
To give an honest account, to offer both affection and criticism, is a matter of respect: we should not knowingly tell half a history. This new knowledge of our island stories, once gained, can only deepen Britons' relationship with their beloved landscape.

Our Island Stories

Ten Walks through Rural Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire

Country Walks through Colonial Britain

Robert Darnton

‘Events do not come naked into the world. They come clothed – in attitudes, assumptions, values, memories of the past, anticipations of the future, hopes and fears and many other emotions. To understand events, it is necessary to describe the perceptions that accompany them, for the two are inseparable.’ 
 
When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, class conflict or Enlightenment ideology. Without denying any of these, Robert Darnton offers a different explanation: what Parisians themselves, those at the centre of the Revolution, thought was happening at the time and how it guided their actions. 
 
To understand the rise of what he calls ‘the revolutionary temper’, Darnton draws on a lifetime’s study of pamphlets, books, underground newsletters, songs and public performances, exploring Paris as an information society not unlike our own. Its news circuits were centred in cafes and market-places, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow, a favourite gathering-place for gossips. He shows how the events of forty years – from disastrous treaties, official corruption and royal scandal to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and a new conception of the nation – all entered the collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As news and opinion travelled across this profoundly unequal society, public trust in royal authority eroded, its legitimacy was undermined, and the social order unravelled. 
 
Much of Robert Darnton’s work has explained the hidden dynamics of history, never more so than in this exceptional book. It is a riveting narrative, but it adds a new dimension, the perceptions of contemporary Parisians, which allows us to see these momentous decades afresh.

The Revolutionary Temper

Paris, 1748–1789

Liam O’Callaghan

Liam O'Callaghan's revelatory Blood and Thunder shows that the rise of Irish rugby is inextricable from the tensions, debates and divisions – of politics, religion and class – that have defined modern Irish history. 
 
Despite the political partition of the island, Ireland competes at rugby internationally with an all-island team – and with a bespoke anthem that nobody loves but everyone tolerates. Ireland has become a leading rugby nation despite its tiny population and the fact that the sport is only the fourth most popular team game on the island by participation. 
 
In Blood and Thunder, O’Callaghan traces the dramatic evolution whereby a rugby nation that was deeply attached to amateurism has made such a dramatic success of professionalism. From the sequence of events that led Ireland's private Catholic secondary schools to embrace rugby, to the controversies and crises that have shaken Irish rugby – including the Northern Troubles, the Belfast rape trial, and the rising toll of head injuries – Blood and Thunder tells the rich and fascinating story of Irish rugby. 
 
Blood and Thunder is more than a social and political history of Irish rugby. It is also a shadow-history of modern Ireland, rooted in brilliant original research and packed with terrific stories.

Blood And Thunder

Rugby and Irish Life: A History

Jack Cornish

Hundreds of thousands of miles of paths reach into, and connect, communities across England and Wales. More than just a practical way for us to walk, ride and cycle around, they are an inheritance from the past, revealing how our ancestors interacted with and shaped their landscapes. But thousands of miles are still missing from our maps. 
 
Exploring the deep history of these pathways, Jack Cornish uncovers how this millennia-old network was created and has evolved - from prehistoric trackways to the modern creation of towns - reflecting the contours of the past and the changing fortunes of society.

The Lost Paths

A History of How We Walk From Here To There

Simon Jenkins

The story of Britain is revealed through its buildings, and yet the language of architecture is a mystery to all but a few. In this enlightening history, spanning castles and cathedrals to factories and railway stations, Jenkins translates the hidden narratives infused in the facades we walk past every day. 
 
Britain’s history has been formed by its politics, religion and society and these influences can be seen in the architectural styles that have shaped its landscape. From pre-Roman and the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, Classical and Gothic styles surged and retreated from favour only to then be challenged by a new player: Modernism, a style that reflected the stunning technological advances of the second half of the twentieth century. 
 
In this narrative history, Simon Jenkins – the bestselling champion of our national heritage – introduces us to the singular, eccentric and sometimes rather ordinary characters who shaped Britain. Jenkins teaches readers to see the world anew, demystifying the elitist language of architecture so that we can all appreciate the buildings around us.

A Short History of British Architecture

From Stonehenge to the Shard

Angela Y. Davis

An icon of revolutionary politics, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for prison abolition for over fifty years. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis&rsquo;s essays, conversations, and interviews over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. 
 
Davis traces a genealogy of the penal system, from slavery to the prison industrial complex, offering a trenchant analysis of the relationship between the prison system and capitalism, both in the US and on a global scale. Combining decades of analytical brilliance and lessons from organising both inside and beyond prison walls, Davis addresses the history of abolitionist practice, details the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and offers the radical tools we need for revolutionary change. 
 
Powerful and rewarding, filled with insight and provocation, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, is essential reading for anyone seeking to imagine a world without prisons.

Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

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