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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

Patrick Maguire

Gabriel Pogrund

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power. 
 
From electoral wipeout in 2019 to landslide victory in 2024 and on into Labour’s first hundred days in government, Get In is a blistering exposé of the most significant and ruthless political transformation in a generation. 
 
At its heart is Morgan McSweeney, a mastermind of political subterfuge and author of a strategy to eviscerate the party, bury the left and rebuild it as a vote-winning machine. In Starmer he saw the perfect vessel for his vision: a man with no political identity but burning with ambition and a single all-consuming principle: to win. 
 
Drawing on unrivalled access throughout the party and extensive leaks of internal party documents and WhatsApp messages, Get In shows how together they betrayed and marginalised Corbyn and his followers, then forged a path in which promises, and at times principles, were readily discarded in pursuit of power. 
 
Richly peopled with the major figures of Labour present and past, this is the coming-of-age story of Britain's government. In an era in which faith in politics has plummeted, this is how to game your way to the ultimate prize. But what on earth do you do when you get there? 
 
'The book about Keir Starmer we have all been waiting for' TIM SHIPMAN 
 
'Stuffed full of scoops . . . revealing who's really in charge' LAURA KUENSSBERG 
 
'A remarkable piece of journalism' RORY STEWART

Get In

The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer

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

Katherine Bucknell

An engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters. 
 
Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazis, and circled the globe before finally settling in Hollywood. There he adopted a new religion and continued to form the friendships – including an astounding number of romantic and sexual ones, often with other celebrated artists – through which he discovered himself. 
 
Isherwood repeatedly fictionalised his friends and himself – from the detached ‘Christopher Isherwood’ of Goodbye to Berlin to George, the unapologetic middle-aged lover of men, in A Single Man, and the boldly out narrator of Christopher and His Kind. He was determined to portray his milieu appealingly to mainstream audiences in lucid, entertaining, often hilarious prose. Frankness about his sexuality, political beliefs and religion made him both a figurehead for the left and a target for the right. All the while, among the many public, constructed selves, an inmost self remained hidden. 
 
Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out reveals the drama and complexity of Isherwood’s interior world. It tells how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit unflinchingly to a sexually open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a ‘grand old man’ of the gay rights movement in the 1970s. 
 
With this new biography, enriched by unlimited access to Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspiring personal life. He effected lasting change in our culture, through both his literary works and the way he lived.

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

Edwin Frank

For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger than Fiction, he offers a legendary editor’s survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel. 
 
Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence; Colette and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles; and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Frank also shows how Japan’s Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe adapted European models to their own ends – and how Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante did the same as they attempted to reckon with the traumas of World War II. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and WG Sebald. 
 
In the manner of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.

Stranger Than Fiction

Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Emmanuel Carrère

On 13 November 2015, nine attackers wearing suicide bombs killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded at sites in and around Paris in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War. V13 was the code name for the much-awaited trial of those who helped to carry out these attacks. Lasting nine months, from September 2021 to June 2022, it consisted of 14 defendants, 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers and a file 53 metres high. 
 
In V13, Emmanuel Carrère follows this landmark trial from its first day to its last, taking us behind the scenes to the lawyers, survivors, family members and the defendants. He assembles, in painstaking and subtle detail, a human portrait of the crime – a study of good and evil, and the philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. 
 
Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre, fusing passion, curiosity and a profoundly humane intellect, making him one of the most distinctive and important literary voices today.

Chronicle of a Trial

Nick Davies

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING TRUE STORY BEHIND ITV’S THE HACK** 
 
WITH EXPLOSIVE NEW EVIDENCE, THIS IS THE UPDATED EDITION OF THE BOOK THAT EXPOSED THE PHONE HACKING SCANDAL 
 
Crime, conspiracy, abuse of power – this is the inside story of the scandal that blew the lid off Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Nearly twenty years since one of Murdoch’s reporters was caught eavesdropping on Buckingham Palace, the revelations keep coming. And Nick Davies is still digging out new evidence. 
 
Hack Attack is the story of how Davies and a network of rebel lawyers, MPs and celebrities took on one of the most powerful men in the world and uncovered a web of crime and cover-up reaching from the Murdoch newsrooms to Scotland Yard and Downing Street. It was a scandal that shocked the British elite. And it’s not over yet. 
 
'A colossal service to Britain's democracy' Financial Times 
 
'As exciting as a thriller but far more important' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A masterly summary of the hacking affair, as well as the ingenuity and persistence that lead to great journalism' Observer

Hack Attack

How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch

Sammy Wright

School should equip children for adulthood. In reality, it means one thing: exams. Exam Nation sets out a better way – and, crucially, shows us how we might get there. 
 
Educationalist and Head of School Sammy Wright argues that grades, rankings and Ofsted reports all miss the point of school, and together they are undermining our whole approach to education. Rather than sorting pupils into winners and losers, we need to think differently about what our schools are actually for – to see them as communities not factories – if we are to give all young people the opportunities and future they deserve.

Exam Nation

Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School

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

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

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

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

Torsten Bell

‘No one has done more to re-inject sanity into our national policy’ Emily Maitlis 
‘A dose of Torstenomics is the only thing that can give us hope’ Amol Rajan 
 
There are few who are better placed to investigate Britain’s plight than Torsten Bell, Labour MP for Swansea West and former Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation. 
 
In Great Britain? he offers both a clear-eyed diagnosis of the problems facing our country – a uniquely toxic combination of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a bold vision for the alternative. 
 
In his treasure trove of enlightening and original analysis, Torsten Bell argues that our era of chaos and cynicism needs neither utopianism nor nostalgia, but a practical patriotism to raise living standards and create a more equal country. This is a book bursting with ideas and infectious hope: Bell passionately points us towards a Britain that we can actually build – a future worth fighting for.

Great Britain?

How We Get Our Future Back

Matthew Longo

A gripping reconstruction of the daring escape to freedom of hundreds of East Germans in the summer of 1989 and how it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. 
 
In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The stage was set for the greatest border breach in Cold War history. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union - the so-called end of history - all would flow from what happened next. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved, Matthew Longo reconstructs this world-shaping event and its tumultuous aftermath.

The Picnic

An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain

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

Peter Englund

An intimate history of the most important month of the Second World War - perhaps the century - as experienced by those who lived through it, completely based on their diaries, letters and memoirs. 
 
At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could win the war; at the end of that month, it was obviously just a matter of time before they would lose. 
 
In between came el-Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea, and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. In this innovatively kaleidoscopic and riveting historical marvel, Peter Englund reduces these epoch-making events to their basic component: the individual experience. 
 
In thirty memorable days we meet characters including a Soviet infantryman at Stalingrad; an Italian truck driver in the North African desert; a partisan in the Belarussian forests; a machine gunner in a British bomber; a twelve-year-old girl in Shanghai; a university student in Paris; a housewife on Long Island; a prisoner in Treblinka; Albert Camus, Vasily Grossman, and Vera Brittain - forty characters in all. We also witness the launch of SS James Oglethorpe; the fate of U-604, a German submarine; the building of the first nuclear reactor; and the making of Casablanca. 
 
Not since Englund's own The Beauty and the Sorrow has a book given us one of the most dramatic periods of human history in all its immensity and emotional range.

November 1942

An Intimate History of the Turning Point of the Second World War

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

Clinton Heylin

In 2016 it was announced that Bob Dylan had sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin - author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone) - to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa - as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office - so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers - Dylan himself included - have said is wrong; often as not, a case of, Print the Legend. 
 
This is the second instalment of the definitive biography (following A Restless Hungry Feeling) of one contemporary culture's most iconic and mysterious figures - musical revolutionary, Nobel Prize-winner, chart-topping recording artist. 
 
Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021

‘Far away from Myself’

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

Roger Moorhouse

Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable - and until now, completely unknown - humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they masterminded a systematic programme of forging passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust. 
 
While the Nazis unleashed their murderous fury, they retained a strange legalism that respected the citizens and passport holders of neutral countries. At first, these Jews were interned, in relative comfort, to be exchanged for German citizens held in these countries. Yet when it became obvious that the Latin American states were unwilling to honour these illegally issued documents, the 'Exchange Jews' gradually lost the protection that had saved them from the death camps. 
 
With the international community failing to act, the operation was one of the largest actions to aid Jews of the entire war. The Forgers tells this extraordinary story for the first time. We follow the desperate bids of Jews to obtain these life-saving documents; we witness their painful uncertainty over whether they will offer the desired protection, as the Nazi death machine draws ever closer. And we witness the quiet heroism of a group of ordinary men who decided to do something rather than nothing and saved thousands of lives.

The Forgers

The True Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation

The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation

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

Rory Stewart

The searing inside story of our broken politics from the former Cabinet minister and co-host of The Rest Is Politics. 
‘The most exceptional political memoir I’ve ever read’ 
ALAN JOHNSON 
‘An instant classic’MARINA HYDE 
‘At last a politician who can write’SEBASTIAN FAULKS 
 
Over the course of a decade, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister – before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. 
 
Uncompromising, honest and darkly humorous, this is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life. Instantly praised as a new classic, it is an astonishing portrait of our turbulent times. 
 
‘Genuinely eye-opening…always riveting, often horrifying’ 
iNEWS 
 
‘Beautifully written’ 
GUARDIAN 
 
‘Hugely entertaining’ 
EVENING STANDARD 
 
BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 
 
* A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE FT, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, TIMES, OBSERVER, i NEWSPAPER, NEW STATESMAN, PROSPECT, CHURCH TIMES AND SCOTSMAN * 
Politics on the Edge was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller from 09.09.23–16.09.23, 09.12.23–16.12.23, 30.12.23–06.01.24 and 11.06.24—25.06.24.

Politics On the Edge

Tony Judt

The definitive history of Europe’s rebirth. 
 
From the ruins of war to the rise of the European Union, Postwar tells the sweeping story of Europe’s transformation in the 20th century. Historian Tony Judt draws on a lifetime of scholarship to chart how nations reckoned with totalitarianism, and forged a new vision of democracy and cooperation. 
 
Combining intellectual depth with narrative power, Judt’s masterpiece offers profound lessons about memory, identity and resilience. Postwar is not only an essential work of history - it’s a guide to understanding the political and cultural foundations of modern Europe. 
 
‘A real masterpiece’ Ian Kershaw 
‘History-writing with a human face and brainpower’ Norman Davies 
‘The standard reference work on European post-war history’ Misha Glenny

Postwar

A History of Europe Since 1945

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

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

Julie McDowall

The first book to tell the story of day-to-day life on the nuclear home front - from the host of #1 podcast Atomic Hobo 
 
**A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK and GUARDIAN BEST PAPERBACK FOR APRIL 2024** 
 
'So entertaining' THE TIMES 
'Cracking' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 
 
The atomic bombs of 1945 changed everything. For the next forty years, the mushroom cloud loomed large in public imaginations and fear of the blast&rsquo;s apocalyptic power coloured every aspect of British daily life. 
 
From makeshift shelters and herbal remedies to sirens that offered four-minute escapes, ordinary people were taught how to save themselves in the face of a catastrophe that was not survivable. Meanwhile, bunkers were readied for those officials and experts who would ensure life continued after Armageddon. 
 
At once chilling and darkly funny, this is the story of how Britain braced for nuclear conflict &ndash; and of how, so long as nuclear weapons exist, the threat of total annihilation will always be with us. 
 
'Thrilling and profoundly important' JULIET NICOLSON 
'Simultaneously horrifying, weirdly nostalgic and darkly hilarious' MARK HADDON

Attack Warning Red!

How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War

Timothy Garton Ash

'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free 
 
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe. 
 
Drawing on half a century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered. 
 
Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe. Highly personal and deeply felt, this book is also full of vivid experiences, encounters and anecdotes: from his father's memories of D-Day to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo, and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe and the US. 
 
Homelands is both a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. At its heart, this book is an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

Homelands

A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

A Personal History of Europe

Martin Amis

THE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR WINNING FILM 
 
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. 
 
But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll. 
 
As Thomsen and Doll&rsquo;s wife pursue their passion &ndash; the gears of Nazi Germany&rsquo;s Final Solution grinding around them &ndash; Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him. 
 
&lsquo;It is exceptionally brave&hellip;. Shakespearean&hellip;. It&rsquo;s exciting; it&rsquo;s alive; it&rsquo;s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it is dreadfully interesting.&rsquo; Sunday Times

The Zone of Interest

Sarah Watling

In our age of political divisions, this portrait of the women outsiders who took part in the Spanish Civil War asks questions of solidarity and resistance. 
 
'Glorious... so beautifully rendered, so powerful' 
ANNA FUNDER, author of Wifedom 
 
In the 1930s, women and men from across the world made their way to Spain to be part of what they saw as a historic fight for freedom from fascism. Tomorrow Perhaps the Future follows extraordinary outsiders who were determined to live out their lives with courage and conviction. 
 
Sarah Watling weaves together the experiences of a host of writers and activists, including Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, Jessica Mitford and Virginia Woolf, and searches out the stories of the photographer Gerda Taro and the Harlem nurse Salaria Kea. Throughout, she explores solidarity, art and resistance, finding answers that are as vital today as they were almost a century ago. 
 
&lsquo;A fascinating study&rsquo; 
OBSERVER 
 
&lsquo;Engrossing and impressive&rsquo; 
NEW STATESMAN 
 
* A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR *

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

Writers, Rebels and the Spanish Civil War

Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War

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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