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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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

Stefan Aust

The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of post-war Europe. A group of young people, most of them from solid, middle-class backgrounds, took the law into their own hands, and by means of arson, bombing, kidnap and murder sought to alter the direction of national, and indeed international, politics. 
 
Rooted in the student protest movement of the late 1960s, the story of the group begins in May 1970 with the freeing of Andreas Baader - imprisoned for planting fire bombs in protest against the Vietnam War - by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and others. They spent the years that followed requisitioning apartments from left-wing sympathisers, stealing cars and robbing banks in preparation for attacks on US military bases. 
 
After an intense manhunt, the ringleaders of the group, which now called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), were finally captured in 1972. Their prolonged trial began in 1975 and lasted for almost 2 years, in the course of which Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell. The other members of the group were convicted and received life sentences. 
 
The 'war of six against sixty million' (Heinrich Böll) reached its climax in the autumn of 1977 when supporters tried to secure their release by kidnapping the president of the German Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, and later by hijacking a Lufthansa jet, which was eventually captured by German special forces at Mogadishu airport. On the morning the rescue was announced, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were all found dead in their cells. The 'German Autumn' marked the violent peak of a journey that had begun with peaceful protests against the American war in Vietnam : moral outrage had turned into blatant immorality. 
 
Stefan Aust's utterly absorbing account of these events reads like a first-class thriller. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is the definitive chronicle of seven years that changed Germany.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Simon Schama

Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Simon Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history of Britain, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. 
 
What makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain - one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it? 
 
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I. 
 
The first in a series, this volume paints a rich and vivid portrait of the life of the British people and their nation.

A History of Britain - Volume 1

At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

The final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain spans centuries, crosses the breadth of the empire and covers a vast expanse of topics - from the birth of feminism to the fate of freedom. 
 
The Fate of the Empire asks crucial questions about the nature of empire, journeying from celebrations of industrial and imperialist power at the Great Exhibition, to the catastrophic Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Through the military and economic shocks and traumas of our past, Schama asks the question that is still with us - is the immense weight of our history a blessing or a curse, a gift or a millstone around the neck of our future? 
 
This third and final volume in the series is a vast compelling history, made more so by the lively storytelling and big bold characters at the heart of the action. But alongside flamboyant heroes, like Nelson and Churchill, Schama recalls unsung heroines and virtually unknown enemies. Alongside the grand ideas, he exposes the grand illusions that cost untold lives.

A History of Britain - Volume 3

The Fate of Empire 1776-2000

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

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

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

Simon Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. 
 
From the beginning of July 1637, battles raged on for 200 years - both at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe, America and India. Most would be wars of faith - waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'. 
 
The British Wars is a story of revolution and reaction, inspiration and disenchantment, of progress and catastrophe, and Schama's evocative narrative brings it vividly to life.

A History of Britain - Volume 2

The British Wars 1603-1776

Rachel Morley

A transporting and gloriously entertaining journey through the hidden lives of England’s rural parish churches 
 
The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a deserted rural church only to see it transform – through her expert eyes – into a portal to the past, one that brings England’s people and history to life in the most colourful, moving and unexpected ways. 
 
Through their wall-paintings and monuments, their graffiti and plaques, carved beams and crypts, their jumble of furniture and oddities, Morley shows these buildings to be the living expression of centuries of communal history and folk culture, time capsules of wonder and connection. The stories they contain are both boisterous and tender, raucous and sublime, transporting us to the ancient and medieval past, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble. 
 
Often the oldest and most significant building in a settlement, churches are where for centuries births have been celebrated, relationships consecrated and deaths memorialised, where the great and enduring mysteries have been contemplated, and where the ghosts of countless, unnamed, normal lives are to be found. As Rachel Morley shows, the concentration of human experience within their walls is so rich and so layered, that they offer as close an encounter with the past as it is possible to get.

Church Crawling

The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches

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