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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Lanre Bakare

**AN OBSERVER, GQ, ESQUIRE AND INEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
This is the lost story of a hidden Britain. A Black Britain. One that existed outside London and rewrites our idea of British culture. 
 
Rocked by economic turmoil, the rise of the National Front, heavy-handed anti-immigration policies and widespread civil unrest, Thatcher’s Britain was in tumult. And yet, all around this nation, Black creativity, community and resistance flourished like never before. 
 
From Bradford’s towering mills and Northern Soul’s euphoric dance floors to the multicultural docks of Cardiff Bay and rolling hills of rural Britain, from Rastafarians and rugby stars to artists and activists, Lanre Bakare unearths the overlooked places and people who made Britain what it is today. Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There is a dazzling, profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain and a shared legacy which belongs to us all.

We Were There

How Black culture and community shaped modern Britain

How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain

Emily P Webber

The story of the last generation of British miners: fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs. 
 
'A compelling, unflinching account…full of tales of tragedy, gallows humour and camaraderie’ The Times 
 
What happened to Britain's last generation of miners? Combining new personal interviews with extensive archival research, Emily P. Webber illuminates the extraordinary history of the industry once considered the backbone of Britain. 
 
By situating the miners’ strike of 1984–85 in a longer history of the coalfields, we can understand why miners and their families fought so hard against pit closures, and what happened after the pit wheels stopped turning. Vivid, evocative and richly alive with minute detail, Mining Men explores what the mining industry once meant to its workers and their communities, and what Britain lost when it was gone. 
 
'Fascinating... An engaging history of post-war British mining' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Absorbing and enjoyable...an illuminating peek into the lives of those who risked everything to warm our hearths' The Herald

Mining Men

Britain’s Last Kings of the Coalface

Pankaj Mishra

Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the ‘darker peoples’, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world. 
 
The World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population. 
 
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis – about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.

The World After Gaza

Afua Hirsch

Our bodies tell our story. 
 
Upon turning forty, Afua Hirsch had an encounter that forever altered her preconceived notions of ancestry and body image, making her question everything from body-modification rituals such as tattoos and piercings to the foundations of sexuality. 
 
Decolonising My Body charts her year-long journey of radical unlearning. Bringing together global scholarship, on-the-ground reportage, personal anecdotes and interviews with beauty experts, practitioners and service users, Hirsch reassesses notions of body image beyond those of the colonial, patriarchal gaze. Taking us from puberty to end-of-life, she shows us that the ways in which we adorn and present ourselves have spiritual implications and shape the possibilities we see for ourselves in the world.

Decolonising My Body

On Ancestry, Tradition and Cultural Reinvention

A radical exploration of rituals and beauty

Charles King

'A delicious history of music, power, love, genius, royalty and adventure. Unforgettable' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFORE 
 
'A mesmerising journey through one of the most fascinating and creative moments in human history' AMANDA FOREMAN 
 
London - Dublin, 1741-42. 
An actress mired in scandal plans her escape from an abusive husband. 
A penniless sea captain sets out to rescue the city’s abandoned infants. 
An African Muslim and former captive in the colonies becomes a celebrity. 
A grieving political dissident seeks release from his torment. 
And a great composer to kings – George Frideric Handel – now ill and straining to keep an audience’s attention, faces a decision that will secure his place in history. 
 
'An absolute delight, beautifully told' PETER FRANKOPAN 
 
Evoking a pivotal moment at the birth of modernity, a time of fear, conspiracy and uprising, and featuring some of the most unusual and brilliant personalities of the eighteenth century, Every Valley is a cinematic and moving drama of hope in the darkness and the entangled lives that shaped a masterpiece. 
 
'Fascinating...cinematic...truly informative, imaginative and engaging' Financial Times

Every Valley

The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah

The Story of Handel’s Messiah

Yuval Noah Harari

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – an alien information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? 
 
Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has brought us here. Taking us from the Stone Age through the canonisation of the Bible, the invention of print, the rise of mass media and the recent resurgence of populism, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how systems like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. 
 
Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes and, in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Nexus

A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Timothy Snyder

A brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival – by the acclaimed, bestselling author of On Tyranny. 
 
Freedom is the great Western commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means – and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government interference. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. 
 
Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers and his own experiences, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes – the habits of mind – that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions but also the role of institutions. Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity and grace. 
 
Snyder’s book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.

On Freedom

Joseph Hone

‘A page-turner about page-turners’ Janice Hallett 
‘The perfect piece of armchair detection’ Ruth Ware 
‘Hugely entertaining and unexpectedly gripping’ London Review of Books 
 
A true detective story from the age of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: the literary crime that fooled the world - and the daring young booksellers who uncovered it 
 
London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. 
 
One night, two young booksellers stumble upon a strange discrepancy leading them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem. Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core. 
 
‘A thrilling unravelling of bookish fraud that reads like a detective story from the golden age’ Roland Philipps, author of A Spy Named Orphan 
 
‘Hone is a lively and fluent writer, ratcheting up the temperature with snappy sentences and chapters ending on cliffhangers’ Sunday Telegraph

The Book Forger

The true story of a literary crime that fooled the world

Laurence Blair

Stretching from the edge of Antarctica to the shores of the Caribbean, South America is a continent of stunning natural beauty and biodiversity, a cultural and culinary powerhouse that feeds, fuels and cools the planet. Yet this vast region remains an enigma to many outsiders, its 450 million inhabitants often forgotten, or stereotyped as eternal victims of colonialism, crime and corruption. 
 
Patria reveals an alternative history of South America, spanning thousands of miles and five centuries to the present. Looking beyond modern borders, Laurence Blair takes as his waymarks nine countries that can’t be found on a map: vanished realms, half-imagined utopias and dismembered homelands. He travels to each in turn – on foot and horseback, by rail and river – to trace their rise, fall and unexpected afterlives. 
 
Blair goes in search of ancient Amazonian civilisations, a rebel Inca dynasty in the jungle, and the Patagonian power that defeated Imperial Spain. His journey ranges from a seafaring Peruvian kingdom made rich by bird droppings, to a fearsome nation of fugitives that defied slavery in Brazil, and an insurgent desert confederation that went down fighting with an Andalusian conman. He falls in with Bolivia’s landlocked navy, the African freedom fighters who marched over the Andes to liberate the hemisphere, and the New World Napoleon who led Paraguay to its ruin. 
 
Patria incorporates groundbreaking recent scholarship, striking archaeological discoveries and vivid eyewitness reporting – including encounters with drug lords, Indigenous leaders, refugees bound for the United States and former guerrillas – to weave an epic of survival, resistance and revolution. This is the story of South America as is rarely told: at the epicentre of global history and the forging of the modern world.

Patria

Lost Countries of South America

Roland Philipps

Celebrated reformer and proud Irish nationalist, romantic radical and vilified traitor, Roger Casement was a man of many, often contradictory, parts. 
 
It was a life caught between fault lines. Casement exposed the horrors of the Belgian Congo on behalf of the British establishment, championing the colonially oppressed and pioneering modern human rights. He fought passionately for Irish independence, even as each step led towards martyrdom. And, desperate for love but forced to hide his sexuality, his deepest relationship became treacherously entangled in espionage and sabotage, isolating him and carrying him to an unmarked prison grave. 
 
Masterfully drawing on his letters, diaries and new archival material, Broken Archangel uncovers the extraordinary life and legacy of Roger Casement – one of the 20th century’s most complex and compelling individuals.

Broken Archangel

The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement

Kapka Kassabova

‘A classic for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY 
 
‘Haunting, beautiful… Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN 
 
'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN 
 
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. 
 
She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. 
 
Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. 
 
‘An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us’ THE TABLET

Anima

A Wild Pastoral

Gareth Harney

* A Financial Times Book of the Year * A Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday Summer Read * 
 
HOLD THE POWER AND GLORY OF ANCIENT ROME IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND. 
 
A wild she-wolf tenderly nurses infant twins Romulus and Remus. 
Marcus Junius Brutus looks out over chaos and conflict, flaunting the bloodied daggers with which he murdered Julius Caesar. 
Trumpets blare, crowds roar, gladiators enter the grand Colosseum. Let the games begin. 
 
Frescoes fade and books vanish, but the story of Rome’s epic rise and fall survives in scenes struck in gold, silver and bronze. Told through the lives of twelve remarkable coins, this is ancient Rome as you’ve never seen it before. 
 
* A Financial Times Book of the Year * A Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday Summer Read *

Moneta

Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins

A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins

Tabitha Stanmore

Cunning Folk transports us to a time when magic was used to solve life’s day-to-day problems – as well as some of deadly importance. 
 
‘A brilliant book, written with wit and vigour’ MALCOLM GASKILL, author of The Ruin of All Witches 
 
‘Absolutely fascinating’ IAN MORTIMER, author of The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England 
 
It’s 1600 and you’ve lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they’ve been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you’re facing trial. Maybe you’re looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do? In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might well have been cunning folk: practitioners of magic who were a common, even essential part of daily life, at a time when the supernatural was surprisingly mundane. 
 
Charming, thought-provoking and based on original research, Cunning Folk is an immersive reconstruction of a bygone world by an expert historian, as well as a commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human. 
 
‘I adore Cunning Folk. A truly fascinating and human book’ Ruth Goodman, author of How To Be a Tudor 
 
‘Packed with vivid historical anecdotes, this is an intriguing insight into the magical lives of past people and the history of our own superstitions today’ Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft 
 
‘Fascinating . . . opens a window into another world’ Tracy Borman, author of Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I 
 
‘Full of such magical tips and colourful vignettes . . . crackles with incident’ Kate Maltby, Financial Times 
 
‘Spirited and richly detailed’ New York Times

Cunning Folk

Life in the Era of Practical Magic

David Van Reybrouck

A story of staggering scope and drama, Revolusi is the definitive account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonisation of the modern world. 
 
On a sunny morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and announced the birth of a new nation: Indonesia. For three and a half centuries, its people had been subject to Dutch colonial rule. It would take another four years of guerrilla warfare and resistance – the ‘Revolusi’ – to finally win their freedom, blazing a trail that would reshape the world. 
 
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eye-witness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck’s superbly woven narrative is alive with human detail at every turn, showing Indonesia’s struggle for independence to be one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century.

Revolusi

Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World

Richard Flanagan

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
**Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024** 
 
From one kiss comes a chain reaction – a masterpiece of memoir from the winner of the Baillie Gifford and the Booker prize 
 
‘Extraordinary’ Sarah Perry 
‘Masterpiece’ Colm Tóibín 
‘Wholly original. I absolutely loved it’ David Nicholls 
‘A brilliant, brilliant book’ James Rebanks 
 
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima, this chain of events culminates in a young man finding himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die… 
 
‘The strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent' Tim Winton 
 
‘Flanagan’s finest book... A brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence’ Guardian 
 
‘Flanagan’s portrayal of his quiet, brave father and his loving, resilient mother is exquisite. His evocation of the texture of life in rural Tas­mania is masterful’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question’ Observer 
 
‘Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body… A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the 20th century... It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound' Anna Funder

Question 7

Graeme Lawson

Wonderfully engaging, expansive and ambitious, Sound Tracks tells the history of our relationship with music in sixty detective stories, each focusing on the discovery of a musical instrument - or its fragments - in archaeological digs around the world. Taking us from the present day - finding a 100-year-old wax cylinder recording on a flea market - all the way back to the dawn of time - the thrilling discovery of a prehistoric flute - long-lost music is itself reconstructed as we enter the worlds of those who created it. 
 
We feel the delight of a child in Peru in 700 AD, playing with a water-filled pot designed to chirp like a bird; we appreciate the difficult task of a soldier sending signals by trumpet to the next watchtower on Hadrian's Wall; we can almost hear the sounds of the sixty-four bells buried in a tomb in China in the 5th century BC. 
 
Graeme Lawson takes us on a grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries, revealing that music is part of human DNA - not just in its role as pastime, entertainment or religious expression but also as a medium in which we commemorate our pasts, communicate with each other, and shape our identities, relationships and communities. 
 
Written with verve and passion and brimming with astonishing insights, Sound Tracks is an enthralling alternative history of humanity in which the silences of the past are filled with a wonderful treasure hoard of forgotten sounds and voices.

Sound Tracks

A Musical Detective Story

Uncovering Our Musical Past

Adam Smyth

The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and American Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the early twentieth century and the fifteenth. Others have been forgotten. We don't remember Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library – and the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare’s First Folio, and then disappeared from history.The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes you inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows – from 1492 Fleet Street to 2023 New York. It’s a story of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. The Book-Makers is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and it shows why the printed book will continual to flourish.

The Book-Makers

A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives

Phoebe McIntosh

'A must-read... compulsively timely novel' Stylist 
 
When Layla and Andy first meet, they can't believe they have the same surname. It feels like fate… 
 
Sera, Layla’s best friend, has her doubts about Andy. As the couple fall deeper in love, Sera becomes more and more vocal about Layla settling down with a white boy. And then, only a few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a devastating discovery – could their families be linked in the worst possible way? 
 
What seemed like a fairy-tale romance is rapidly derailed as Layla begins to uncover parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined – or, perhaps, had simply learnt to ignore. 
 
And now, she faces an impossible choice. 
 
**A STYLIST UNMISSABLE BOOK FOR 2024** 
 
‘A warm, sweet love story, and a thought-provoking examination of the British slave trade and its legacy’ MARIAN KEYES 
 
'I loved this book' JACQUELINE CROOKS, author of Fire Rush 
 
'So kind and smart and clear-eyed' HOLLY GRAMAZIO, author of The Husbands 
 
READERS LOVE DOMINOES: 
‘Tender, thought-provoking and hard-hitting’ 
‘Kept me second guessing how things would turn out until the very end’ 
‘Incredibly thought-provoking’ 
‘Such an important novel’ 
‘I laughed, I cried, I learned A LOT’ 
‘So much more than a love story’

Dominoes

Xiaolu Guo

‘This is urgent, compelling but also delightful writing’ Lauren Elkin 
 
In the depths of winter, Xiaolu Guo moves into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront – a room of her own where she can spend time writing, liberated from her domestic responsibilities in London. 
 
She immerses herself in the English landscape and its past and becomes preoccupied by the violence between Normans and Saxons. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging My Battle of Hastings is a chronicle of Xiaolu’s life in Hastings and a portrait of a dislocated artist seeking to connect with her local environment in the hope of finding a deeper connection to her adoptive nation. 
 
'Magnificent, brutal and poetic' Iain Sinclair 
 
‘There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… With My Battle of Hastings, Guo shows us the effort that it takes to truly put down roots in a culture so different from the one she was born into’ The Times

My Battle of Hastings

Chronicle of a Year by the Sea

Caroline Elkins

The twentieth anniversary edition of Caroline Elkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé, now with a new introduction 
 
After decades of British rule in Kenya, 1952 saw the start of the Mau Mau uprising – a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million. Detainees in their thousands – possibly a hundred thousand or more – died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold. 
 
Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors. A groundbreaking account of Kenya’s fight for independence and its violent suppression, Britain's Gulag details the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to uphold its empire. 
 
'An extraordinary act of historical recovery' New Yorker 
'Disturbing and horrifying...important and memorable' Caroline Moorehead

Britain's Gulag

The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

Michael Taylor

Impossible Monsters is the captivating story of the discovery of the dinosaurs and how it upended our understanding of the origins of the world. 
 
‘An astonishing book about an extraordinary subject' PETER FRANKOPAN 
'As thrilling as it is sweeping' TOM HOLLAND 
'This book dazzles in its originality . . . a triumph’ SATHNAM SANGHERA 
 
In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline - and so sparked a crisis that would engulf science and religion for the next six decades. By its end, the literal reading of the Bible had been overturned, science had been liberated from religion and the secular age had begun. Impossible Monsters takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women whose discovery of the dinosaurs revolutionised our understanding of the world, as well as those who resisted them and those, like Charles Darwin, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It is the riveting story of a group of people who dared to think impossible things and then showed them to be true. 
 
‘Truly marvellous ... an intellectual thriller’ RICHARD HOLMES 
‘A stunning work ... of surprises and revelations’ STEVE BRUSATTE

Impossible Monsters

How the Discovery of Dinosaurs Changed the World

Livia Manera Sambuy

A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War 
 
‘Remarkable and compelling’ Edmund de Waal 
 
‘Thoroughly engaging’ Kamila Shamsie 
 
In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever. 
The caption claims that the Punjabi princess Amrit Kaur sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year. 
 
For Livia, this marks the beginning of a compulsive search for the truth as she delves into the history of the British Raj, the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, and the lives of extraordinary figures: bankers, jewellers, explorers and spies. 
 
‘An ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes’ Jhumpa Lahiri 
 
‘A tantalizing true story . . . In Search of Amrit Kaur plunges into the glittery world of Indian royalty’ New York Times Book Review

In Search of Amrit Kaur

An Indian Princess in Wartime Paris

Elena Kostyuchenko

**WINNER OF THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2024** 
 
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. Here is Russia as it really is. 
 
'Important ... this is the Russia we need to understand' TIMOTHY SNYDER 
'A haunting book of rare courage' CLARISSA WARD 
'Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIVICH 
 
Part memoir, part collection of Elena Kostyuchenko’s fearless reporting, I Love Russia introduces us to places we’ve never seen and to people who’ve been systematically, brutally erased from view by Putin’s regime. We enter secretive state-run facilities for disabled people, abandoned buildings haunted by suicide and violence, and a schoolyard marked by unacknowledged massacre. We meet village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, and patients and doctors on a Ukrainian maternity ward. 
 
The result is a singular, uncompromising, and profoundly humane portrait of a nation – and of an extraordinary woman who refuses to be silenced. 
 
'Shocking and moving ... [a] gritty insider's take on Russia' SUNDAY TIMES 
'Reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER 
'Deeply personal, beautifully written' IPAPER 
 
*A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*

I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

Sarah Ogilvie

**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024** 
 
‘Unmissable’ Stephen Fry 
'A delight' Katherine Rundell 
‘Illuminating’ Susie Dent 
'Brilliant' Philippa Perry 
'Enthralling' Jeanette Winterson 
 
What do three murderers, Karl Marx's daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? 
They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. 
 
The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By 1928, its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from astronomers to murderers, naturists, pornographers, suffragists and queer couples. 
 
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people's history of the OED. Here, she reveals, for the first time, the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world - and celebrates the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People. 
 
'An astonishing book' Sunday Times 
 
'Utterly fascinating, entertaining, astonishing and as clever as a box of monkeys ... I completely love it' Joanna Lumley 
 
‘A fascinating and delightful exploration of the Victorian world … Wonderful’ Nicola Shulman, TLS Podcast 
 
** A Financial Times, TLS and Daunt Books Book of the Year **

The Dictionary People

The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary

Zahra Hankir

'Fascinating' Nigella Lawson 
'Awe-inspiring' Funmi Fetto 
'A treat to read' Kassia St Clair 
 
A Sunday Times Style Barometer and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick 
 
For centuries, humans have been drawn to lining our eyes. The aesthetic trademark of icons from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse, eyeliner is one of our most enduring cosmetic tools: ancient royals and Gen Z influencers alike have harnessed its power. 
 
Through Zahra Hankir&rsquo;s kohl-lined eyes, this ubiquitous product becomes proof of the stunning variety among cultures across time and space. Exploring intimate conversations &ndash; with Chadian nomads, Japanese geisha, Indian dancers, New York&rsquo;s drag queens and more &ndash; Eyeliner embraces the profound significance of its namesake, especially among communities of colour. 
 
What emerges is a delightful and unexpectedly moving journey through streets and stages around the world, and a stirring reclamation of a key piece of our collective history. 
 
Featuring stunning portrait illustrations by Mercedes deBellard

Eyeliner

A Cultural History

Tahir Hamut Izgil

A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history 
 
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK* 
*WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE PRIZE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WRITING 2024* 
 
'Essential reading' 
AI WEIWEI, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows 
 
'Deserves to be read widely' 
FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
As his friends disappeared one by one, it became clear to Tahir Hamut Izgil that fleeing his home in Xinjiang was his family’s only hope. 
 
In this unforgettable story of courage and survival, Tahir charts the Chinese government’s ongoing destruction of the Uyghur community and way of life in spare, gripping, finely tuned prose. 
 
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is an urgent call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe, and a moving tribute to those Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

Joya Chatterji

This book tells the story of South's Asia's twentieth century in eight chapters. Unlike standard narrative histories of the subcontinent that concentrate exclusively on politics, here nature, objects, technologies, cultures, and people's changing relationships to them and to each other, are central preoccupations. 
 
The structure of the book is unorthodox. Unusually for a work of this kind, it is thematic rather than chronological. Chapters address specific questions that might arise in the minds of a 'lay', but thoughtful, reader; but each chapter is chronological within itself, analysing change over a century in one particular sphere. This format allows the reader to explore particular issues - say, the changing character of nationalism, migration or consumption - over time and in depth. 
 
Shadows at Noon is a bold and innovative work that pushes back against standard narratives of 'inherent' differences between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The purpose of the book is to make contemporary South Asia intelligible, while sharing with the reader its infinite colour and excitement. The book does not 'talk down' to the reader or attempt, in facile ways, to simplify the history of a vast, and almost mythically intricate, society.

Shadows At Noon

The South Asian Twentieth Century

Charlotte Lydia Riley

Imperial Island shows how empire, its disintegration and its ever-present aftermath have profoundly shaped the British people, their culture, society and politics, throughout the last seventy years. 
 
Drawing on a mass of new research, from personal letters to pop culture, it tells a story of immigration and fractured identity, of social strife and communal solidarity, of people on the move and of a people wrestling with their past. 
 
It is the story that best explains Britain today.

Imperial Island

A History of Empire in Modern Britain

Rory Stewart

THE NO. 1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF POLITICS ON THE EDGE 
 
Rory Stewart and his father are undertaking their final walk together along the Marches – the frontier that divides Scotland and England. 
 
‘Travel writing at its best’ OBSERVER 
‘Profoundly moving’ SPECTATOR 
 
On their six-hundred-mile, thirty-day journey, the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape. Their odyssey develops into a history of nationhood, an anatomy of the landscape, a chronicle of contemporary Britain and an exuberant encounter between a father and a son. 
 
‘A bewitching book’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘An unforgettable tale’ NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 
 
‘Deeply moving, honest and loving’ COUNTRY LIFE 
 
GUARDIAN READERS’ BOOK OF THE YEAR 
OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF THE HUNTER DAVIES LAKELAND PRIZE 
 
Please note: The book cover received may differ from the cover displayed here.

The Marches

Border walks with my father

Roger Domeneghetti

A social history of 1980s Britain, told through the sport of the time. 
 
Travel back to the 1980s - to Botham's Ashes and the Brixton riots; the Moscow Olympics and the miners' strike; the Crucible Theatre and the Falklands - to explore how we got to where we are now. Discover how sport became fully entwined in our national story; how sporting heroes were made, and destroyed; how 'wars' were fought on the pitch; and how sport responded to - and drove cultural change in - our society. 
 
From Sebastian Coe to Margaret Thatcher, John Barnes to the ZX Spectrum, Martina Navratilova to Section 28, Everybody Wants to Rule the World speaks to our treasured memories of eighties sports while also throwing light on where things went deeply wrong. In so doing it tells nothing less than the story of how British sport came into the modern era.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Britain, Sport and the 1980s

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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