Dave Gibbons

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and commentator who has been speaking about climate change in Ireland for over a decade. The Lie of the Land is his first book.

John Gibbons

Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

Stella Gibbons

Edward Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

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Rich Cohen

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. 
 
A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. 
 
Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

The Fish that Ate the Whale

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

Mário de Andrade

'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mário de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. 
 
Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.

The Apprentice Tourist

Tom Higham

50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters.

The World Before Us

How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

John James Audubon

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over. Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea-captain, he was raised in France and sailed to America at the age of 18 where he went into business and began his study of birds. In 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with no other prospects, he set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence while his devoted wife, Lucy, earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. Lionized as the 'American woodsman', he hit just the right Romantic note for the era, and was an overnight success, finding printers for his book first in Edinburgh, then London. It was a classic American tale of triumph over adversity. 
Here are vivid 'bird biographies', his correspondence with Lucy, journal accounts of his dramatic river journeys and hunting trips with the Osage Indians, and a generous sampling of brief stories that have long been out of print, 'The Burning of the Forests' and 'Kentucky Barbecue on the Fourth of July' among them. The Audubon Reader is an unforgettable encounter with early America: with its wildlife and birds, with its people and its primordial wilderness.

The Audubon Reader

Roy Kesey

John Segovia is many things - American, corpulent, shambolic, and obsessed with the history of South America. This history is what drew him to the city of Piura in the coastal desert of Peru, where every grain of sand teems with stories of Incas and conquistadors. Here, where past and present intermesh, he thought he'd finally found a life for himself. He met Pilar and he married her; they had a baby girl. But John is now a widower - and a killer remains at large. 
 
A foreigner in a riotous, mythic city, John must somehow learn to be a father to his infant daughter, to cope with the visceral trauma of loss, and to suppress a voracious desire for impossible revenge. His story features an extraordinary cast of characters (a one-eyed nanny, a collective of monk-like vigilantes, the conquistadors themselves); it travels centuries within sentences, encompasses slapstick and heartbreak, and takes John from bordellos to bat-infested cinemas and ancient burial grounds in his attempts to 'beat back death'. 
 
Alive with risk and innovation, Pacazo is a novel which maximises the freedom of fiction. It gives living form to anger and fear and desire, to courage and kindness, strength and love, and tells a story as richly entertaining as it is moving.

Pacazo

Lee Server

'A smile can get you far, but a smile with a gun can get you further.' 
- Al Capone 
 
Featured in Vice 
 
A man of singular influence in the American underworld, Johnny Rosselli's career flourished for half a century, from the bloody years of bootlegging in the Twenties - the last protégé of Al Capone - to the modern era of organised crime as a dominant corporate power. 
 
The Mob's 'Man in Hollywood', Johnny introduced big-time crime to the movie industry, corrupting unions and robbing moguls in the boldest extortion plot in history. Meanwhile, he consolidated his empire by smoothly befriending studio bosses and seducing their biggest stars, including Marilyn Monroe. 
 
In the 50s, Rosselli saw a new opportunity overseeing the birth and heyday of Las Vegas, and became the gambling mecca's behind-the-scenes boss, enjoying the Rat Pack night life with pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. 
 
Then, in the 60s, incredibly, he became the central figure in a bizarre plot involving the Kennedy Whitehouse, the CIA and an attempt to assassinate Castro. 
 
Based on years of research, this utterly compelling, richly detailed page-turner takes you inside American organised crime at the highest level. A story of extreme violence and superstar glamour - with Handsome Johnny in both roles.

Handsome Johnny

The Criminal Life of Johnny Rosselli, The Mob’s Man in Hollywood

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

Christopher Columbus

No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus's ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 - an event that paved the way for the conquest of a 'New World'. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his voyages throughout the Caribbean and finally to the mainland of Central America, although he still believed he had reached Asia. Columbus himself is revealed as a fascinating and contradictory figure, fluctuating from awed enthusiasm to paranoia and eccentric geographical speculation. Prey to petty quarrels with his officers, his pious desire to bring Christian civilization to 'savages' matched by his rapacity for gold, Columbus was nonetheless an explorer and seaman of staggering vision and achievement.

The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus

Robert Whitaker

In 1735 a team of French scientists set out on a daring expedition into the South American wilderness to resolve one of the great scientific challenges of the time: the precise size and shape of the Earth. Scaling the Andes and journeying along the Amazon, the mapmakers faced all manner of danger, while madness, disease and violent death each took their toll. However one, Jean Godin, fell in love with a local girl called Isabel Grameson. When the time came for the expedition to return to France, Godin travelled ahead to ensure the way was safe for his new family. But on reaching French Guiana, disaster struck: Spain and Portugal closed their borders and he was stranded, unable to return to Isabel. What followed lies at the core of this extraordinary tale - a heartbreaking 20-year separation that ended when Isabel, believing she might never see her husband again, decided to make her own way across the continent: a journey that began in hope but became hell on earth... 
Drawing on his own experience retracing Isabel's epic trek as well as contemporary records, Robert Whitaker recounts a captivating true story of love and survival set against the backdrop of what many still regard as 'the greatest expedition the world has ever known'.

The Mapmaker's Wife

A True Tale Of Love, Murder And Survival In The Amazon

Gruff Rhys

In 1792, John Evans, a young farmhand from Wales, travelled to America to discover whether there was, as widely believed, a tribe of Welsh-speaking native Americans still walking the great plains. 
 
In 2012, Gruff Rhys set out on an 'investigative concert tour' in the footsteps of John Evans, with concerts in New Orleans, Baltimore, St Louis, and more. 
 
American Interior is the story of these journeys. It is also an exploration of how wild fantasies interact with hard history and how myth-making can inspire humans to partake in crazy, vain pursuits of glory, including exploration, war and the creative arts.

American Interior

The quixotic journey of John Evans, his search for a lost tribe and how, fuelled by fantasy and (possibly) booze, he accidentally annexed a third of North America

The Quixotic Journey of John Evans

Lilia M. Schwarcz

Heloisa M. Starling

Since Europeans first reached Brazil in 1500 it has been an unfailing source of extraordinary fascination. More than any other part of the 'New World' it displayed both the greatest beauty and grandeur and witnessed scenes of the most terrible European ferocity. 
 
Brazil: A Biography, written by two of Brazil's leading historians and a bestseller in Brazil itself, is a remarkable attempt to convey the overwhelming diversity and challenges of this huge country from its origins to the 21st century - larger than the contiguous USA and still in some regions not fully mapped. The book's major themes are the near-continuous battles to create both political institutions and social frameworks that would allow stable growth, legal norms and protection for all its citizens. Brazil's failure to achieve these except in the very short term has been tragic, but even now it remains one of the world's great experiments - creative, harsh, unique and as compelling a story for its inhabitants as for outsiders.

Brazil: A Biography

Herbert Asbury

Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York and The Gangs of Chicago, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy underworld of San Francisco, from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. Houses of ill repute play host to shanghaied sailors, and the Chinese tong wars rage around the city. San Francisco's historic past is here brought to life in all its scintillating and infamous glory.

The Gangs Of San Francisco

Matthew Parker

As heard on the Empire podcast, the epic story of one of the most extraordinary engineering feats in world history: the building of the Panama Canal. 
 
'A completely wonderful book, beautifully written, amazingly researched' William Dalrymple 
 
'An excellent, excellent book’ Anita Anand 
 
Hell's Gorge traces a heroic dream that spanned four centuries: to build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans The human cost was immense: in appalling working conditions and amid epidemics of fever, tens of thousands perished fighting the jungle, swamps and mountains of Panama, a scale of attrition comparable to many great battles. 
 
Matthew Parker explores the fierce geo-political struggle behind the heroic vision of the canal, and the immense engineering and medical battles that were fought. But he also weaves in the stories of the ordinary men and women who worked on the canal, to evoke everyday life on the construction and depict the battle on the ground deep in 'Hell's Gorge'. Using diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers and previously unseen private letters, he draws a vivid picture of the heart-breaking struggle on the Isthmus, in particular that of the British West Indians who made up the majority of the canal workforce. 
 
Hell's Gorge is a tale of politics, finance, press manipulation, scandal and intrigue, populated by a dazzling cast of idealists and bullies, heroes and conmen. But it is also a moving tribute to the 'Forgotten Silvermen', so many of whom died to fulfil the centuries-old canal dream.

Hell's Gorge

The Battle to Build the Panama Canal

Tracy K. Smith

Even the men in black armor, the ones 
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else 
 
Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade 
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat? 
 
In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

Wade in the Water

Thomas Frank

Economic meltdown usually brings calls for change. Or it’s supposed to. 
 
But when Thomas Frank set out to find them in America today, all he heard were loud demands that the losers be hit harder and that the winners get more. 
 
Using first-hand reporting, a deep political understanding and a wicked sense of humour, Frank examines the weird double-think that has enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. Pity the Billionaire takes us on a wild road-trip through the strange landscape of the American Right, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, makes sense of a topsy-turvy world and shows how instead of complying with the new speed limit, conservative America has stamped hard on the accelerator. It is essential reading for understanding how we all got to where we are, and how we might get out.

Pity the Billionaire

The Unlikely Comeback of the American Right

Tom Feiling

For decades, Colombia was the 'narcostate'. Now it's seen as one of the rising stars of the global economy. Where does the truth lie? How did a land likened to paradise by the first conquistadores become a byword for hell on earth? And how is it rebuilding itself after decades of violence? 
Writer and journalist Tom Feiling has journeyed throughout Colombia, down roads that were until recently too dangerous to travel, talking to people from former guerrilla fighters to nomadic tribesmen and millionaires. Vital, shocking, wry and never simplistic, Short Walks from Bogota unpicks the tangled fabric of Colombia to create a stunning work of reportage, history and travel writing. 
 
Books of the Year 2012 Boyd Tonkin, The Independent 
 
'Creates a portrait of Colombia that is perceptive, unsensational, and full of humanity ... Feiling is a brilliant reporter, lucid, unflinching, morally engaged, and with an occasional deadpan sense of humour .. one of the most consistently intelligent and compelling books to have appeared on any South American country in recent years' Michael Jacobs, Independent 
 
'Tom Feiling takes us on an enlightening journey through a changing country that few understand' Rachel Aspden, Observer 
 
'A deeply political account of one man's journey to the violent heart of modern, rural, Colombia ... a must read' Kevin Howlett, Colombia Politics 
 
'Feiling... venture[s] into areas that have been off limits for decades ... the sense of a vibrant nation worth discovering peeks out' Siobhan Murphy, Metro 
 
'The best British travel writers like Norman Lewis or Bruce Chatwin give the reader more than simple travellers' tales. Feiling is of their company ... a brilliant, penetrating and highly readable account' Robert Carver, Spectator 
 
Some of the best insights in the book come from the people Feiling meets, and memorably portrays ... a well-written, thoughtful book David Gallagher, Times Literary Supplement 
 
Dramatic and captivating Wanderlust 
 
'Elegantly written and knowledgeable. Feiling writes with the eye of a seasoned journalist and the style of a travel writer' Carl Wilkinson, Financial Times 
 
Tom Feiling spent a year living and working in Colombia before making Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia, which won numerous awards at film festivals around the world, and was broadcast in four countries. In 2003 he became Campaigns Director for the TUC's Justice for Colombia campaign, which organizes for human rights in Colombia. His first book was The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over The World, which was based on over sixty interviews with people involved in all aspects of the cocaine business and the 'war on drugs,' and was published by Penguin in 2009.

Short Walks from Bogotá

Journeys in the new Colombia

Ernesto Che Guevara

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Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. His letters and diaries are those of a master narrator, characterized by a brutal honesty, a remarkable lack of ego, a razor-sharp wit, an iron will and a great capacity to express his love and affection for his closest friends and family. 
 
This selection of Che Guevara's correspondence, beginning with letters penned in his early travels around Latin America as a medical student, shows how he polished his unique style over the years. This selection maps the emergence of a dedicated revolutionary and original political thinker from the wide-eyed young Argentine who set out to discover Latin America. Covering the entirety of Che's life, from his famous motorcycle journey around South America to the Cuban Revolutionary War, from the setting-up of the pioneering communist state of Cuba to his revolutionary travels to the Congo and Bolivia. But it also reveals a more intimate, personal side to Che, including his letters to his mother, wife and children. 
 
In one of his last letters to his young children, Che advised them to 'always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.'

I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor

Letters 1947-1967

Deborah Blum

In Victorian Britain, a group of eminent scientists got together to found a society expressly to prove the existence of ghosts. 
 
The age of Darwin represented the greatest scientific advances known to man. The tension between science and religion was exposed by Darwin's On the Origin of the Species in 1859, which challenged the basic tenets of belief. 
 
Yet many of those in the forefront of the scientific revolution could not give up the idea of a higher reality. Life after death was the unknown frontier. Victorian society was full of mediums claiming they could communicate with the spirits of the dead. Baffling psychic phenomena occurred every day at séances: mysterious rappings were heard, furniture moved, ghostly forms appeared, the mediums spoke in the altered voices of the dead with information only their nearest could possibly know. Pyschometry involving locks of hair and watches and children's toys; telepathy; ouija boards; apparitions; astral projection: all were commonplace. 
 
In 1882 the Society of Psychical Research was founded in London to investigate all these phenomena: it was a group led by some of the greatest scientists of the age but its membership also included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, John Ruskin, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Six months later William James, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and the brother of Henry James visited London and went on to set up American branch. 
 
Their experiments went on for years. Many mediums, like the notorious Madame Blavatsky, were exposed as charlatans yet there were some mediums who continued to communicate directly with another world, who despite every rigorous scientific test seemed to prove that souls survived death. This is the story of this group of forward thinkers: many of whom were driven to the spirit world by personal tragedy, some whose feeling of loss lead to their own suicides. It is the story of the greatest ghost hunt of any age.

Ghost Hunters

Joe Sacco

In his first full-length work of journalism in a decade, the 'heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman' (Economist) brings his comics mastery to a story of indigenous North America, resource extraction, and our debt to the natural world 
 
*A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them, not the other way around-it is central to their livelihood and their very way of being. But the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories are also home to valuable natural resources, including oil, gas and diamonds. With mining came jobs and investment-but also road-building, pipelines and toxic waste, which scarred the landscape; and alcohol, drugs, and debt, which deformed a way of life. 
 
In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels the frozen North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development. Resource extraction is only part of Canada's colonial legacy: Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a residential school system that aimed to remove the Indian from the child; the destructive process that drove the Dene from the bush into settlements and turned them into wage labourers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture. 
 
Against a vast and gorgeous landscape that dwarfs all human scale, Paying the Land lends an ear to trappers and chiefs, activists and priests, telling a sweeping story about money and dependency, loss and culture, with stunning visual detail by one of the greatest comics reporters alive.

Paying the Land

Michael Palin

In February 2025, Michael Palin travelled to Venezuela to get a sense of what life is like in one of South America's most culturally rich, vibrant but also troubled nations. In the journal he kept during his trip he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited, the landscapes he travelled through, and the people he met. 
 
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

Michael Palin in Venezuela

Evan S Connell

On a scorching June Sunday in 1876, thousands of Indian warriors - Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho - converged on a grassy ridge above the valley of Montana's Little Bighorn River.  On the ridge five companies of United States cavalry - 262 soldiers, comprising officers and troopers - fought desperately but hopelessly.  When the guns fell silent, no soldier - including their commanding officer, Lt Col. George Armstrong Custer - had survived. Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history - 130 years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn.  Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as 'one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers', wrote what continues to be the most reliable - and compulsively readable - account of the subject.  Connell makes good use of his research and novelist's eye for story and detail to re-create the heroism, foolishness and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

Son Of The Morning Star

General Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn

David Roberts

At the end, in the summer of 1886, they numbered thirty-four men, women, and children under the leadership of Geronimo. This small group of Chiricahua Apaches became the last band of free Indians to wage war against the United States Government. The 'renegades', as white men called them, were mercilessly pursued by five thousand American troops (one quarter of the US Army) and by three thousand Mexican soldiers. For more than five months Geronimo's band ran the soldiers ragged. The combined military might of two great mations succeeded in capturing not a single Chiricagua, not even a child.' From the Preface. 
 
Of the many tales of conflict and warfare between the US Government and the Indian tribes, perhaps none is more dramatic or revealing than the story of the Apache wars. Those wars were the final episode of the US Government's subjugation of the indigenous peoples; the surrender of Geronimo in 1886 effectively ended the Indian wars. 
 
Once They Moved Like the Wind is the epic story of the Apache campagin, told with sympathy and understanding. Using historical archives and contemporary accounts, David Roberts has writeen an original, stirring account of the last years of the free Apaches.

Once They Moved Like The Wind 49

Cochise, Geronimo and the Apache Wars

Edwin Williamson

Now fully updated to 2009, this acclaimed history of Latin America tells its turbulent story from Columbus to Chavez. Beginning with the Spanish and Portugese conquests of the New World, it takes in centuries of upheaval, revolution and modernization up to the present day, looking in detail at Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Cuba, and gives an overview of the cultural developments that have made Latin America a source of fascination for the world. 
 
'A first-rate work of history ... His cool, scholarly gaze and synthesizing intelligence demystify a part of the world peculiarly prone to myth-making ... This book covers an enormous amount of ground, geographically and culturally' Tony Gould, Independent on Sunday

The Penguin History Of Latin America

New Edition

'All we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward' 
 
'In late 1951, Guevara and Alberto Granado set off on the 500cc Norton they nicknamed La Poderosa ('The Powerful One') with no other agenda than a lust for life and a desire to see it all. The Motorcycle Diaries offer a unique perspective on what led this would-be doctor from relatively affluent Argentina to become one of the 20th century's most important political figures ... genuinely exhilarating' Guardian 
 
'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time

The Motorcycle Diaries

Adrian Tinniswood

The Rainborowes bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World. 
 
Starting with William Rainborowe, a prominent merchant-mariner and shipmaster, and his equally formidable sons and daughters between 1630 and 1660, we follow their astonishing story through the Civil War, the Putney debates, and settling in America. The Rainborowes explains America and mourns England’s failed revolution. It spans oceans and ideologies and encompasses personal tragedies and triumphs, the death of kings and the birth of nations. 
 
Using rare printed material from the period and unpublished manuscripts from collections in Britain and America The Rainborowes recreates day-to-day life on both sides of the Atlantic during one of the most tumultuous periods in Western history. In their efforts to build a paradise on earth, the Rainborowes and their friends encounter pirates and witches, prophets and princes, Muslem militants and Mohican Indians. They build new societies. They are ordinary men and women, and they do an extraordinary thing. 
 
They change the world.

The Rainborowes

Tao Leigh Goffe

Our planet is on the precipice of dramatic ecological breakdown and climate despair is at an all-time high. But there are many communities who have survived beyond the environmental destruction wrought on them by colonialism – and they hold the solutions for climate repair. 
 
Using the Caribbean as a case study, Tao Leigh Goffe traces the vibrant and complex history of the islands back to 1492 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus when the Caribbean became the subject of Western exploitation. Charting the human and ecological forces that have shaped the islands, Goffe examines the legacy of fierce warrior Queen Nanny of the Maroons, engages in pressing cultural debate about stolen artefacts and human remains which are kept hidden in museum archives, and visits Indigenous farming cooperatives who are using ancestral knowledge to rebuild their communities. 
 
Using the Caribbean as a both a warning and a guide, Dark Laboratory takes hopeful and galvanizing teachings from the islands communities to offer illuminating solutions to the ecological crisis. From guano to sugarcane, coral bleaching to invasive mongoose populations, Dark Laboratory is a lyrical, vibrant and urgent investigation into the greatest threat facing humanity.

Dark Laboratory

On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

Fernando Cervantes

The 'conquistadores', the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and building an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who decimated the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas in their pursuit of gold and glory. 
 
In Conquistadores, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to immerse the reader in the world of the late-medieval imperialist. It is a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadores themselves. Drawing upon a wide range of sources including diaries, letters and chronicles, Cervantes reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World, set against the political and intellectual landscape from which its main actors emerged. From Columbus to Cortés, Pizarro and beyond, the explorers we think we know come alive in this thought-provoking and illuminating account of a period that irrevocably altered the course of world history.

Conquistadores

Augustine Sedgewick

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 400-year transformation into an everyday necessity. 
 
The story is one that few coffee drinkers know. It centres on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester, founded one of the world's great coffee dynasties. In the process, Hill helped to turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history, a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality and violence. 
 
The book follows coffee from the Hill family plantations into the supermarkets, kitchens and work places of the United States, and finally into today's omnipresent cafés. Sedgewick reveals the unexpected consequences of the rise of coffee, which reshaped large areas of the tropics, transformed understandings of energy, and ultimately made us dependent on a drug served in a cup.

Coffeeland

A History

Wade Davis

A captivating new book from Wade Davis - winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Into the Silence - that brings vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future. 
 
For Wade Davis, Colombia was the first country that captured his heart and gave him license to be free. Here, he tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of their remarkable land. 
 
Braiding together memoir, history and journalism, Magdalena is at once an absorbing adventure through a spectacular landscape and a kaleidoscopic picture of Colombia as it stands on the verge of a new period of peace. 
 
'Outstanding... Davis tells epic tales of passion, violence and ambition with tremendous narrative verve' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
'A wonderful evocation of a lifetime's travel in Colombia' Spectator, Books of the Year

Magdalena

River of Dreams

Kurt Andersen

You’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts 
 
Fantasy is the USA’s primary product. From the Pilgrim Fathers onward America has been a place where renegades and freaks came in search of freedom to create their own realities with little objectively regulated truth standing in their way. The freedom to invent and believe whatever the hell you like is, in some ways, an unwritten constitutional right. But, this do-your-own-thing freedom also is the driving credo of America's current transformation where the difference between opinion and fact is rapidly crumbling. 
 
So how did we get to this weird pseudo-reality, where science and objective facts are dismissed in favour of opinions and wild speculation, or indeed, fantasies? The post truth, fake news, free-for-all mentality isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. If you want to understand Trump's America, how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you have to go back to the very beginning and take a dizzying road trip across five centuries of crackpot delusion and make-believe from Salem to Scientology. 
 
Fantasyland is a journey that connects the dots between crazed franchises of true believers – a rich freak show tapestry from Mormons to Flat-Earthers and satanic panic, new age quacks to anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, creationists to climate change deniers, UFO-obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, all topped off with a dangerous dose of anti-government paranoia and pseudoscience. Along the way, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.

Fantasyland

How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

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