About 	 Lucy Rycroft: Lucy is the founder of The Hope-Filled Family, a ministry encouraging Christian parents, carers and all those investing in the younger generation. She is the author of several books for adults and children, including Busy Family Devotional and the Mighty Girl, Mighty God series. She is mum to four children ages 11 to 16, who arrived by birth and adoption, and is married to Al, a church leader in York, England.

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A A Gill

About A D Swanston: 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.

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A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

About A J Baime: 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

About A J Pollard: 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.

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A J Rochester

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

A K Benjamin

About A L Berridge: 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

About A L Gaylin: 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.

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A P Wavell

About A S Webb: 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

About A. A. Dhand / A. A. Dhand: 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.

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A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

About A. B. Poranek / A. B. Poranek: 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

About A. C. Grayling / A. C. Grayling: 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

About A. D. Miller / A. D. Miller: 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. 
 
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Noemi Orvos-Toth

Inherited Fate

Family trauma and the ways of healing

James Aldred

Join James Aldred on a captivating journey, encountering master craftsmen, British wildlife, and a deep passion for a remarkable landscape. 
 
There are some moments in childhood that are frozen in time, vivid and vital, an anchor. When James Aldred tracked down an old horse-drawn wagon he once played in, he found himself inside one such moment again. Though brambles had overtaken its rotted boards and its wheels were barely there, it transported him to a magical summer in the New Forest forty years ago and awakened in him the possibility of reliving it with his young family. Pairing an ambition to restore the wagon to its former glory with a determination to share the Forest with his children, he embarked on a remarkable journey. 
 
In his evocative memoir, Aldred chronicles his return to a cherished childhood landscape, rich with the history of the Romani families who once roamed freely there. As he painstakingly restores the wagon, Aldred delves into both the New Forest's natural history and storied past, tracing its roots back to the 16th century and even further to the time of William the Conqueror. Camera traps reveal otters hunting in the brook, while the nearby goshawk nest and fox earth speak to the area's thriving wildlife. 
 
Masterfully observed, A Wagon in the Woods is a celebration of both people and place, and the timeless bond between land, history and the enduring spirit of adventure.

A Wagon in the Woods

Pursuing a dream in an ancient forest

Malcolm Gaskill

Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy, and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he’d faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail… 
 
What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian Alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War. 
 
Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it’s a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle’s path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?

The Glass Mountain

Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy

Joe Dunthorne

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. 
 
The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew… 
 
Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it? 
 
Children of Radium is a remarkable, searching meditation on individual and collective inheritance. Witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising, it considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

Alistair Wood

As a boy, Alistair Wood lived within the walls of an MI6 training camp. After all, he was family. His mother was one of a handful of women to have operated behind the lines in post-war Berlin. His father, once one of Britain’s most highly-regarded intelligence officers, was an absent and perplexing figure, the reasons for his sudden departure from the Service still classified to this day. 
My Family and Other Spies is a gripping exploration of an extraordinary family, a globe-trotting spy story spanning pre-Second World War to the fall of Communism, and a son’s reckoning with the secrets of the past.

My Family And Other Spies

Simon Weisz

For the first eighteen years of Simon Weisz’s life his parents were at pains to keep their past concealed from him. All he knew for sure was that they had grown up in Hungary and that they had arrived in Britain after the Second World War. It was only as he reached manhood that they started to confide their carefully guarded secrets to him: that they were Jewish, and that his mother had experienced the appalling horrors of Nazi persecution.In conversations over the following decades, Simon’s mother gradually, often reluctantly, revealed more of her past: from the growing oppression her family had had to endure in the late 1930s, to her deportation first to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbrück, to the brutal death march she withstood from the ruins of Berlin in 1945. As he pieced her testimony together, Simon came to realise how the memories she had fought so hard to suppress continued to haunt her in the form of terrifying flashbacks and moments of extreme frustration and anger. And he started to understand how her concealed trauma had, in turn, shaped his own development and the course of his life.Himmler’s Curtains is both a visceral account of a Holocaust survivor’s experiences, and an impressive study of the impact of suffering on two generations of a family. It also movingly reveals the high psychological price exacted by silence.

Himmler’s Curtains

A Memoir of Loss and Concealment

Jarred McGinnis

There is no meant to be but the love I’ve known has made it hard to believe that. 
 
Jarred McGinnis was born to a Southern US clan where masculinity, resilience and physical violence were intertwined. In There Is No Meant to Be he unearths the legends, secrets and scars that have shaped his family line, from his outlaw Irish ancestors to his mother Momo’s gift of foresight, and the ghosts – both real and remembered – that follow him into adulthood.Two decades on from the near-fatal accident that left him in a wheelchair, McGinnis is married and the father of two girls, living first in East London and now Marseille. He writes about love within the context of care and of the particular vulnerability that comes from being a parent with a disability. In a daring imaginative leap, he writes of the end of life too, reaching beyond his own death to look at what truly makes a life.Inventive, funny and deeply moving, this is a family epic unlike any other: part love story, part elegy, part reminder that even in the mess of family and memory there is something to laugh about.

There Is No Meant to Be

A Family Story

Mark Wolynn

'Groundbreaking' – Tara Brach, psychologist and bestselling author of Radical Acceptance 
 
The bestselling guide to transforming traumatic family legacies, from the acclaimed psychologist 
 
Depression. Anxiety. Chronic pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the root of these difficulties may reside in the traumas of our parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents. The latest research affirms that traumatic experience is passed on to future generations and that this emotional inheritance, hidden in everything from our gene expression to everyday language, plays a greater role in our health than ever previously understood. 
 
Building on the work of leading experts in neuroscience and posttraumatic stress, Mark Wolynn has developed a pioneering approach to identifying and breaking these inherited family patterns. Having worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for more than twenty years, It Didn't Start With You is his accessible, pragmatic and transformative guide to a method that has helped thousands of people reclaim their lives.

It Didn't Start With You

How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle

Lea Ypi

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?

Indignity

A Life Reimagined

Cédric Sapin-Defour

Having a dog as company makes nothing feel excessive – not time or space. It's not even about passing time, but being of it. 
 
A tiny ad in a local newspaper catches Cédric Sapin-Defour’s eye: a litter of Bernese Mountain Dog puppies need homes. A lonely, single, sports teacher and mountain climber in the French Alps, Cédric visits the dogs and immediately falls for the puppy with a blue collar. 
 
Named Ubac, French for the north side of the mountain – the rainy, cloudy slope – the puppy quickly upends Cédric’s life. They go on hikes together, taking to the hills and exploring, forging a bond that brings joy and a sense of fulfillment and adventure. They brave the world together, hate to be apart, crave the mountains and the natural world; they protect each other. 
 
Over the course of thirteen years, their pack expands to include Mathilde, Cédric’s wife, and more dogs. Ubac and Me is an intimate meditation on a joyous life lived too fast, the aching pain of separation, and the transformative effect of unconditional love. A dog named for the rainy side of the mountain is an inspiring lesson in how walking the rocky, cloudy hills together can bring the greatest light, the sunniest joys, even if the shared journey is unbearably short. 
 
 
‘Not just a tribute to the love humans feel for their pets but also a means of voicing the deep grief that can be felt after a dog’s death, when all that is left is a collar and hairs, and the house seems too big without them.’ Guardian 
 
Ubac and Me has been a surprise bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation in France, championed by indie booksellers, selling 400,000 copies. 
 
Translated by Adriana Hunter.

Ubac and Me

A Life of Love and Adventure With a French Mountain Dog

Clair Wills

How far would you go for the missing? 
 
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. 
 
How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? 
 
To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. 
 
There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

Neil Oliver

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. 
 
Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.. 
 
Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

Michael Palin

Discover Michael's new travel adventure, Michael Palin in Venezuela, available now. 
 
'I cannot remember the last time I read a book so immediately absorbing and affecting. Michael Palin has never been better – which is, of course, saying a great deal.' BILL BRYSON 
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From the time, many years ago, when Michael Palin first heard that his grandfather had a brother, Harry, he was determined to find out more about him. 
 
The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work. Michael dug out every bit of family gossip and correspondence he could. He studied every relevant official document. He tracked down what remained of his great-uncle Harry's diaries and letters, and pored over photographs of First World War battle scenes to see whether Harry appeared in any of them. He walked the route Harry took on that fatal, final day of his life amid the mud of northern France. And as he did so, a life that had previously existed in the shadows was revealed to him. 
 
Great-Uncle Harry is an utterly compelling account of an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. A blend of biography, history, travelogue and personal memoir this is Michael Palin at his very finest. 
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PRAISE FOR EREBUS: 
 
'Beyond terrific. I didn't want it to end.' BILL BRYSON 
 
'Magisterial . . . Palin brings energy, wit and humanity to a story that has never ceased to tantalise people.' THE TIMES 
 
'Everybody's talking about it . . . A brilliant book.' CHRIS EVANS 
 
'I absolutely loved it: I had to read it at one sitting.' LORRAINE KELLY

Great-Uncle Harry

A Tale of War and Empire

Bernard Wasserstein

Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town forty miles west of Lviv where his family, especially his grandfather Berl, originated: Krakowiec (Krah-KOV-yets). In this book he recounts its dramatic and traumatic history. 'I want to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the shape of our times affected ordinary people.' 
 
Wasserstein traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict, as armies of Cossacks, Turks, Swedes and Muscovites rampaged through the region. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish magnate Ignacy Cetner built his palace at Krakowiec and, with his vivacious daughter, Princess Anna, created an arcadia of refinement and serenity. Under the Habsburg emperors after 1772, Krakowiec developed into a typical shtetl, with a jostling population of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In 1914, disaster struck. 'Seven years of terror and carnage' left a legacy of ferocious national antagonisms. During the Second World War the Jews were murdered in circumstances harrowingly described by Wasserstein. After the war the Poles were expelled and the town dwindled into a border outpost. Today, the storm of history once again rains down on Krakowiec as hordes of refugees flee for their lives from Ukraine. 
 
In the lives of Wasserstein's own family and the many others he has rediscovered, the people of Krakowiec become a prism through which we can feel the shocking immediacy of history. Original in conception and brilliantly achieved, A Small Town in Ukraine is a masterpiece of recovery and insight.

A Small Town in Ukraine

The place we came from, the place we went back to

Colin Grant

A memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, which build into a poignant, insightful and unforgettable testimony of West Indian British experience. 
 
***A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Grant is a natural storyteller... Compelling and charming' 
BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
'Grant's most revealing work' 
NEW STATESMAN‘I’m black, so you don’t have to be,’ Colin Grant’s uncle Castus used to tell him. If Colin – born in Britain to Jamaican parents – worked hard and became a doctor, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden his parents’ generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. 
 
This is a memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, including of Grant’s mother Ethlyn, his father Bageye, his sister Selma, and his great uncle Percy. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant’s own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively, these stories build into an unforgettable testimony of black British experience.

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be

A Memoir in Eight Lives

Oliver Darkshire

Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for their bookselling apprenticeship, a decision which has bedevilled him ever since. He'd intended to stay for a year before launching into some less dusty, better remunerated career. Unfortunately for him, the alluring smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap proved irresistible. Soon he was balancing teetering stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows with a ten-foot pole and trying not to upset the store's resident ghost (the late Mr Sotheran had unfinished business when he was hit by that tram). 
 
For while Sotheran's might be a treasure trove of literary delights, it sings a siren song to eccentrics. There are not only colleagues whose tastes in rare items range from the inspired to the mildly dangerous, but also zealous collectors seeking knowledge, curios, or simply someone with whom to hold a four hour conversation about books bound in human skin. By turns unhinged and earnestly dog-eared, Once Upon a Tome is the rather colourful story of life in one of the world's oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.

Once Upon a Tome

The misadventures of a rare bookseller

John Lewis-Stempel

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
 'Lewis-Stempel is one of our finest nature writers ... He writes with delicate observation and authority, giving us in Woodston a book teeming with fascinating details, anecdotes and penetrating insights into the real cost of our denatured countryside.' - Sunday Times 
 
 'The English countryside is 'a work of human art, done by the many and the nameless' and John Lewis-Stempel wanted to celebrate it. He has succeeded admirably.' - Daily Mail 
 _________________ 
 In the beginning was the earth... 
 
 From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm. 
 
 With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives, and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia. Through Woodston's life, we feel the joyful arrival of oxen ploughing; we see pigs rootling in the medieval apple orchard; and take in the sharp, drowsy fragrance of hops on Edwardian air. He draws upon his wealth of historical knowledge and his innate sense of place to create a passionate, fascinating biography of farming in England. 
 
 Woodston not only reminds us of the rural riches buried beneath our feet but of our shared roots that tie us to the land.

Woodston

The Biography of An English Farm – The Sunday Times Bestseller

Claire Ratinon

A powerful work of memoir and storytelling that will change the way we think about the natural world. 
 
Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire Ratinon grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. She lived in cities, reluctant to be outdoors and stuck with the belief that success and status could fill the space where belonging was absent. 
 
But a chance encounter with a rooftop farm was the start of a journey that caused her to rethink the life she'd been creating and her beliefs about who she ought to be. Enlivened, she turned her hand to growing food in London before finding herself yearning for a small parcel of land to call her own. 
 
Unearthed tells the story of her leaving the city for the English countryside - and her first garden - in the hope of forging a pathway towards the embrace of the natural world and a sense of belonging cultivated on her own terms. 
 
'Ratinon's story will change hearts and minds' Alice Vincent 
 
'A beautiful book about nature...I recommend it' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

Unearthed

On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong

Angela Findlay

'Fascinating ... an extremely courageous work.' The Lady 
'Absolutely extraordinary ... Findlay reveals a vast, hidden European story that few nations have ever been brave enough to confront' Keith Lowe' 
'Beautifully written, poignant and acutely perceptive' Sinclair McKay 
'Moving and powerful' Julia Samuel 
 
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In My Grandfather's Shadow is an unflinching, thought-provoking fusion of memoir and history, and an exploration of the hidden scars left across generations by the conflict and horrors of the Second World War. 
 
In a quest to discover the truth about her German grandfather, first a proud Wehrmacht General serving on the Eastern front, then a broken POW on trial for Nazi war crimes, Angela Findlay travels across Europe and Russia to uncover the untold story of millions of Germans long buried not only in guilt and shame but also trauma. 
 
Carefully breaking the silence surrounding so many of World War Two's perpetrators, she challenges widespread binary narratives and offers a way forward that allows the intergenerational wounds to heal and us all to grasp the urgent lessons of the darkest episode in modern history. 
 
Brave, profoundly insightful and moving, In My Grandfather's Shadow is a courageous look at a taboo subject and raises important questions about how and why we should remember the past.

In My Grandfather’s Shadow

A story of war, trauma and the legacy of silence

Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin reflects on Britain's customs, attitudes and social and supernatural phenomena in these six BBC Radio series 
 
Drawn from Radio 3's The Essay strand and presented by journalist and award-winning author Andrew Martin, this beguiling collection brings together his witty, Alan Bennett-esque observations on England's disappearing pastimes, rituals and beliefs. 
 
Yorkshire sees him musing on the county of his birth and upbringing, as he considers his 'Tyke' identity and the ancient rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire; chews over questions of class in 'God's Own County'; ponders its past and future; and recalls the coastal jaunts of his youth. In Hanging On, Martin celebrates five aspects of British life that are still with us - just, as he raises a toast to the boating pond; the ventriloquist's doll; the telephone; the milkman and sex shops. 
 
The Lost Hours memorialises the staging posts of the day that are gradually fading away, such as elevenses and the cocktail hour; while England Ejects explores the inclinations and habits that no longer seem so vital nowadays, including modesty, gentility and Sunday church-going. The Further Realm sees Martin contemplating whether he believes in ghosts; reflecting on mediaeval and modern sightings and telling tales of the undead from resonant times of the year. Finally, in The Sound and the Fury, he discusses the noises that annoy us, from piped music to public transport announcements, asking 'how do we cope with jarring sounds in our world today, and could we live without the daily cacophony?' 
 
Quirky and engaging, these delightfully entertaining essays will give you a whole new perspective on the modern world - and the world beyond. 
 
Production credits 
Produced by Duncan Minshull (Yorkshire, Hanging On, England Ejects, The Further Realm, The Sound and the Fury) and Karen Holden (The Lost Hours) 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the following dates: 23-27 January 2012 (The Sound and the Fury), 27-31 January 2014 (England Ejects), 26-30 October 2015 (The Further Realm), 17-21 April 2017 (Hanging On), 21-25 January 2019 (Yorkshire), 25-29 October 2021 (The Lost Hours) 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

On the World Around Us

25 Explorations of Britain, Past and Present

Howard Jacobson

'One of the all-time great memoirs' Daily Telegraph 
'Wonderful...candid, shrewd and moving' William Boyd 
'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious' Simon Schama 
 
Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. 
 
Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. 
 
Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 
 
'Hilariously brilliant' David Baddiel 
 
'Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Mother's Boy

A Writer's Beginnings

Justin Webb

'Searingly honest... gripping... fascinating and hugely entertaining.'- Sunday Times 
 
'Moving and frank ... A story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s.'- Misha Glenny 
 
'A crisp, unself-pitying memoir of a 'trainwreck' youth ... I've always likes Webb on the radio. But I like him much more after reading this book. He offers precisely the kind of brisk honesty and considered analysis he expects from his interviewees. Our politicians should all read it, and step up their game.' -Telegraph 
......................................................................................................................................................... 
 
Justin Webb's childhood in the 1970s was far from ordinary. 
 
Between his mother's un-diagnosed psychological problems, and his step-father's untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn't much better. 
 
Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is as much a portrait of a troubled era as it is the story of a dysfunctional childhood, shaping the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now. 
........................................................................................................................................ 
 
'I thoroughly enjoyed Justin Webb's bonkers childhood. He captures the middle class of the age with a tenacity only possible in one of its victims.' -Jeremy Paxman

The Gift of a Radio

My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

Neil MacGregor

World-renowned art historian Neil MacGregor takes us across Britain to discover local museums and their hidden gems 
 
 
Neil MacGregor, former director of the National Gallery and the British Museum, knows the importance of public museums. In The Museums That Make Us, he takes us around the country to visit twenty local museums and to talk to their curators, staff and local figures about the most prized objects in their collections. Often a child's first experience of valuable objects and historical belongings, these regional spaces can be a wonderful way to recognise local pride and shine a light on buried history. 
 
At Penrhyn Castle in North Wales, the museum strives to tell the story of their rich collection of art while also being truthful about the slave trade that made it possible; on the Isle of Lewis, the Museum Tasglann nan Eilean wants to share the story of land ownership and clearances through their objects; at the Leeds Museum, a Roman child's sandal has been chosen to demonstrate their ambitious and thriving scheme of having exhibits leave the museum to go out to schools; and in Bristol's M Shed Museum, one of the city's old Lodekka Buses is used to tell the story of the successful Bristol Bus boycott of 1963. 
 
Travelling from Stowe, one of the first examples of a vision of Britain outside London, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where he looks at an ancient Syrian model clay wagon, possibly a child's toy, to examine how museums can provide for a huge breadth of local people from all over the world, Neil MacGregor uses these invaluable community sites to consider how they are run, who they draw in, and how they can inspire us all. 
 
Episode guide 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the following dates: 
Stowe and the Temple of British Worthies 7 March 2022 
The Tower Museum, Derry Londonderry 8 March 2022 
Penrhyn Castle, North Wales 9 March 2022 
PK Porthcurno - Museum of Global Communications 10 March 2022 
Museum &amp; Tasglann nan Eilean, Stornoway 11 March 2022 
Derby - The Museum of Making 14 March 2022 
The Food Museum, Suffolk 15 March 2022 
The Auckland Project, Bishop Auckland 16 March 2022 
The Hepworth, Wakefield 17 March 2022 
Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton 18 March 2022 
Leicester Museum and Art Gallery 11 April 2022 
Bristol's M Shed Museum 12 April 2022 
Birmingham 13 April 2022 
Liverpool 14 April 2022 
Leeds 15 April 2022 
The National Museum of Scotland 18 April 2022 
The National Museum of NI, Belfast 19 April 2022 
The National Museums of Wales, Cardiff 20 April 2022 
The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 21 April 2022 
What are museums for? 22 April 2022 
 
Production credits 
Presented by Neil MacGregor 
Produced by Tom Alban 
Original music by Phil Channell 
 
©2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

The Museums That Make Us

Curating Our Shared History

Teresa Lim

A cherished family photograph, taken in Hong Kong, 1935, sets Teresa Lim on a journey to uncover her family history. Through detective work, serendipity, and the kindness of strangers she was guided to the fascinating, ordinary, extraordinary life of her great-aunt Fanny, and her world of sworn spinsters, ghost husbands and the working-class feminists of 19th century south China. 
 
But to recover her great-aunt's past, we must first get to know Fanny's family, the times and circumstances in which they lived, and the momentous yet forgotten conflicts that would lead to war in Singapore and, ultimately, a long-buried family tragedy.

The Interpreter's Daughter

A remarkable true story of feminist defiance in 19th Century Singapore

Hannah Azieb Pool

In 1974 Hannah Azieb-Pool was adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up unable to imagine what it must be like to look into the eyes of a blood relative until one day a letter arrived from a brother she never knew she had. Not knowing what to do with the letter, Hannah hid it away. But she was unable to forget it, and ten years later she finally decided to track down her surviving Eritrean family and embarked upon a journey that would take her far from the comfort zone of her metropolitan lifestye to confront the poverty and oppression of a life that could so easily have been her own.

My Fathers' Daughter

Shelley Klein

'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday Times 
 
Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. 
 
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 
 
'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon 
 
'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian 
 
'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' Telegraph

The See-Through House

My Father in Full Colour

Sally Magnusson

Tracing Your Roots explores one of the UK's most popular pastimes: researching family history. Bestselling author Sally Magnusson follows the genealogy trail back in time, uncovering facets of social history through personal stories and giving you the information you need to add branches to your own family tree. With the right tools, you can not only find lost ancestors, but discover what they did for a living, what their lives were like, and maybe even what kind of people they were... 
 
Accompanied by resident genealogist Nick Barratt, who offers insider tips and ideas, she talks to professional and amateur researchers, revealing the wealth of resources available and how to make the most of them. In these six series, the duo determine what clues can be gleaned from photographs, diaries and DNA analysis, learn about unravelling wartime secrets, investigate how stories handed down through generations can offer a new slant on history and hear how the manner of an ancestor's death can offer clues to the life they led. They also explain why shady characters are good news for family history hunters, tackle the issues of illegitimacy and immigration, track down relatives who vanished without trace and probe mysteries surrounding name changes and adoption. 
 
Fascinating family stories are unearthed, as they talk to families including one woman who believes her grandmother may have been the illegitimate daughter of Louis XVI, another whose ancestor was locked away indefinitely on the Queen's orders, and two correspondents with Caribbean roots who suspect there is slavery on their family tree. Two follow-up episodes see Sally and Nick revisiting their favourite Tracing Your Roots tales, finding out what families did next and unveiling new information and lasting repercussions... 
 
In addition, a themed show, tied in with the British Library's 'History of the World in 100 Objects' project, investigates family heirlooms, and four special episodes mark events including the 90th anniversary of World War One, Scotland's Homecoming Year and the 2011 Census. 
 
Production credits 
Presented by Sally Magnusson, with resident genealogist Nick Barratt 
Produced by Anne McNaught (Series 1-2), Moira Hickey (Series 3, 5), Claire White (Series 4) and Lucy Lloyd (Series 6) 
 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 12 March-16 April 2007 (Series 1), 24 October-28 November 2007 (Series 2), 11 May 2008 (Family History Special), 20 August-24 September 2008 (Series 3), 7 November 2008 (90th Anniversary of World War 1 Special), 2 August 2009 (Homecoming Scotland Special), 31 August-28 September 2009 (Series 4), 14 September-12 October 2010 (Series 5), 20 March 2011 (Census Special), 13 September-11 October 2011 (Series 6) 
 
©2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Tracing Your Roots

A BBC family history show

Simon Jenkins

LONDON: a settlement founded by the Romans, occupied by the Saxons, conquered by the Danes and ruled by the Normans. This unremarkable place - not even included in the Domesday Book - became a medieval maze of alleys and courtyards, later to be chequered with grand estates of Georgian splendour. It swelled with industry and became the centre of the largest empire in history. And rising from the rubble of the Blitz, it is now one of the greatest cities in the world. 
 
From the prehistoric occupants of the Thames Valley to the preoccupied commuters of today, Simon Jenkins brings together the key events, individuals and trends in London's history to create a matchless portrait of the capital. Based in part on his own witness of the events that shaped the post-war city, and with his trademark colour and authority, he shows above all how London has taken shape over more than two thousand years. This is narrative history at its finest, from the most ardent protector of our heritage.

A Short History of London

The Creation of a World Capital

"Everyone should have two copies - one for the car and one for the house to plan journeys. . . a reminder to think more about the places you pass and less about your route, because every British journey is through rich history." (Edward Stourton) 
 
From much-loved historian Neil Oliver, comes this beautifully written, kaleidoscopic history of a place with a story like no other. 
 
The British Isles, this archipelago of islands, is to Neil Oliver the best place in the world. From north to south, east to west it cradles astonishing beauty. The human story here is a million years old, and counting. But the tolerant, easygoing peace we enjoy has been hard won. We have made and known the best and worst of times. We have been hero and villain and all else in between, and we have learned some lessons. 
 
The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places is Neil’s very personal account of what makes these islands so special, told through the places that have witnessed the unfolding of our history. Beginning with footprints made in the sand by humankind’s earliest ancestors, he takes us via Romans and Vikings, the flowering of religion, through civil war, industrial revolution and two world wars. From windswept headlands to battlefields, ancient trees to magnificent cathedrals, each of his destinations is a place where, somehow, the spirit of the past seems to linger.

The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places

Laura Cumming

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Guardian 
 
Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. 
 
Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 
 
'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times 
 
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

On Chapel Sands

My mother and other missing persons

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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