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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Astrid Goldsmith

'Rich, moving and wryly funny... a delight' Observer *Graphic Novel of the Month* 
 
'Brilliant, witty and endlessly inventive' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine 
 
A road-trip across Europe and back in time: the debut graphic memoir from the prize-winning author of A Funeral In Freiburg. 
 
When her imperious, chain-smoking German Jewish grandmother dies, it falls to Astrid and her father to drive a hire van to the Black Forest and collect the family heirlooms from Gisela's nicotine-stained apartment. 
 
In Freiburg, they are faced with several lifetimes’ worth of belongings to sort through - infested Persian rugs, mysterious photographs, a toy monkey that started a marriage - and a grasping landlord, impatient to renovate. 
 
As the list of demands from uncles, sisters and cousins grows longer, the rabbit-holes of history and memory grow deeper. Long-buried secrets and tales of survival are revealed - from Nazi Germany to colonial Africa - and old feuds are reignited, as father and daughter struggle with the responsibility of preserving the family legacy. More importantly, will they be able to fit everything into a medium wheel-base transit van? 
 
Funny, bittersweet and beautifully drawn, The Crystal Vase is an odyssey of family arguments, identity crises, and late discoveries.

The Crystal Vase

Jeremy Hardy

When Jeremy Hardy decided to explore his ancestry it was, in part, to get to the bottom of his grandmother Rebecca's dubious claims that the family descended from a certain 17th-century architect and that, more recently, Jeremy's great-grandfather was a Royal bodyguard. Other legends ranged from the great aunt who ran illegal hooch during Prohibition to the wronged Victorian servant girl who bore an illegitimate Hardy, not forgetting the family's rightful claim to a large country estate. 
 
Wild stories aside, Jeremy sets out to such diverse locations as the Croydon one-way system and the hostile waters around Malta in order to find traces of recognisable family traits and a sense of how he came to be. With wry humour and a keen eye for the absurd and the frustrating, Jeremy takes us on a by turns funny and moving journey into the world of family ancestry. 
 
My Family and Other Strangers will be enjoyed by anyone who has tried to decipher the 1901 census records, or simply wishes they too had asked their grandparents more about their lives.

My Family and Other Strangers

Adventures in Family History

Will Millard

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish. That is, until the fateful day he let a record-breaking sand eel slip through his fingers and he knew that he had lost the magic of those days down by the river, and that something had to change. Armed with his late grandfather's well-thumbed fishing encyclopaedia Will set out on a quest to get back to his roots and catch some of our great forgotten fish species, hidden deep in our lost waterways. 
 
The Old Man and the Sand Eel is at its heart the story of three generations of men trying to figure out what it is to be a man, a father and a fisherman. It plots Will's scaly stepping stones back to his childhood innocence and late granddad, and a return to the importance of understanding the truly feral through a child's eyes, when anything was possible and the wild was everywhere.

The Old Man and the Sand Eel

Howard Marks

Howard Marks was released from Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana in April 1995 after serving seven years of a twenty-five year sentence for marijuana smuggling. It was time for a change of career. 
 
So he wrote two best-selling books, became a sports writer and travel writer, stood as a parliamentary candidate in Norwich North, Norwich South, Southampton Test and Neath, applied to become the country's Drug Czar, and embarked on a long-running sell-out series of one man shows. 
 
While performing in his home town of Kenfig Hill, he fell among old friends who made extraordinary claims for Welsh culture (Was Elvis really Welsh? Was there really a tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans?) At the same time his elderly aunt told him of his outlaw ancestry: William Owen, the legendary Welsh smuggler (who had operated for some time in South America) and his great-great-grandfather Patrick McCarty, the half brother of Billy the Kid, who had joined Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Patagonia. He decided to explore South America. 
 
His travels took him to Jamaica and Panama in the footsteps of the Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan; he went to Brazil looking for groups of Welsh settlers so obscure he never found them (although he did succeed in finding his musical idol Jimmy Page); and he searched among the thriving Welsh community in Patagonia for signs of Billy the Kid's half brother. Richly comic and charged with the sense of adventure that would induce an Oxford graduate to become the world's most notorious marijuana smuggler, Señor Nice is the hugely entertaining sequel to Mr Nice.

Senor Nice

Straight Life from Wales to South America

Nick Barratt

The market for family history has never been stronger. The phenomenally successful television series Who Do You Think You Are? made many people consider the subject for the first time. Nick Barratt, the man behind the interactive strand of the series, now brings his expertise to this practical, lively and well-researched book, which will open the door to the fascinating world of genealogy. Accessible and clearly presented, and underpinned by a wealth of knowledge and experience, this book gives you everything you need to know to get cracking. From how to get started (talking to relatives, gathering clues, assembling a family tree), through to accessing and understanding and understanding the main sources (certificates, censes, probate and family registers), to how to flesh out your family tree, including tracing immigrant and emigrant relatives, tracking down military ancestors and how to cope if you uncover family secrets. Throughout the book there are case histories and real-life examples to help and inspire every reader.

The Family Detective

Discover your family history and bring the past to life

Bryan Sykes

Bryan Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, takes us on a journey around the family tree of Britain and Ireland, to reveal how our tribal history still colours the country today. 
 
In 54BC Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. His was the first detailed account of the Celtic tribes that inhabited the Isles. But where had they come from and how long had they been there? When the Romans eventually left five hundred years later, they were succeeded by invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Did these successive invasions obliterate the genetic legacy of the Celts, or have very little effect? 
 
After two decades tracing the genetic origins of peoples from all over the world, Bryan Sykes has now turned the spotlight on his own back yard. In a major research programme, the first of its kind, he set out to test the DNA of over 10,000 volunteers from across Britain and Ireland with the specific aim of answering this very question: what is our modern genetic make-up and what does it tell us of our tribal past? Are the modern people of the Isles a delicious genetic cocktail? Or did the invaders keep mostly to themselves forming separate genetic layers within the Isles? 
 
As his findings came in, Bryan Sykes discovered that the genetic evidence revealed often very different stories to the conventional accounts coming from history and archaeology. Blood of the Isles reveals the nature of our genetic make-up as never before and what this says about our attitudes to ourselves, each other, and to our past. It is a gripping story that will fascinate and surprise with its conclusions.

Blood of the Isles

The Countess of Carnarvon

Join Lady Carnarvon as she opens the gates to Highclere Castle, the 'real Downton Abbey', and discover how the iconic British landmark celebrates and changes each season. 
 
This book reveals the treasures within Highclere Castle's land and estates: Georgian architecture, follies, secret gardens, the monks' garden, wildflower meadows and the woods of enchantment. Alongside history and anecdotes, this book also details sumptuous recipes for dishes inspired by local, seasonal produce, such as Heritage Tomato Tart, Highclere Baked Figs with Goats Cheese, and Honeyed Winter Vegetable Salad. 
 
Beautifully illustrated with full-colour photography, Seasons at Highclere is full of gastronomical delights, the stories of the treasures within Highclere Castle's grounds, untold secrets from the castle's archives and much more. This is the perfect gift or keepsake, and a book to be cherished for years to come.

Seasons at Highclere

Gardening, Growing, and Cooking through the Year at the Real Downton Abbey

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 Romani 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

Jack Sheffield

As the 1982 school year begins, Jack Sheffield returns to Ragley village school for his sixth year as headteacher. Nora Pratt celebrates twenty-five years in her coffee shop, Ronnie Smith finally tries to get a job, and little Krystal Entwhistle causes concern in the school Nativity play. It's the time of ET and Greenham Common,. Price William's birth, Fame legwarmers and the puzzling introduction of the 20p piece. Meanwhile, for Jack, the biggest surprise of his life is in store...

Educating Jack

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

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

Colin MacFarlane

In his last book, The Real Gorbals Story, Colin MacFarlane detailed how he witnessed a once great area, home to wonderful characters and grand old buildings, disappear before his eyes. By the time MacFarlane's tenement was knocked down in the early 1970s, he had left school and been rehoused in another part of the city. In an attempt to extricate himself from his Gorbals gang days, he took a job as an apprentice chef at one of Glasgow's top restaurants, where he soon discovered that his colleagues were just as insane as those he had mixed with on the city streets. Meanwhile, MacFarlane struggled to integrate into the more affluent area that his family had been moved to and soon found himself returning to his old haunts and back in trouble again. 
 
In No Mean Glasgow, MacFarlane charts his eventful, fun-packed passage from Gorbals street boy to grown man on the brink of a new beginning. He describes his adventures with a mixture of humour, sadness and delight. It is a book for those people living all over the world who remember the old Glasgow - a city teeming with warmth, passion, patter and characters who could brighten up even the darkest of days.

No Mean Glasgow

Revelations of a Gorbals Guy

Marilyn Hardy

The former mining town of Stanley lies only twenty minutes drive from the beautiful cathedral city of Durham. Yet the two are worlds apart. 
 
Marilyn Hardy recounts in touching detail the trials of growing up in this impoverished mining town and her life-long struggle to find happiness, from her troubled relationship with her undemonstrative mother, an early suicide attempt and the death of her much-loved father to her violent relationship with her second husband and her long-term struggles with serious health problems. Her journey from troubled childhood and early adulthood to her current happy marriage and eleven grandchildren is shared with candour and grace in this heartfelt memoir, and gives a fascinating insight into a time gone by.

Worthless

The inspirational story of one woman's triumph over tragedy

Peter Firstbrook

Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family. Peter is the only person to have traced Obama's roots from the present back through more than twenty generations, thanks to the Luo tribe's remarkable oral tradition. 
 
Seen though the eyes of the Obama family this will be the story of an African dynasty going back over 400 years. It is a truly astonishing drama culminating in the inauguration of Barack Obama on 20 January 2009, watched by Obama's African family on a flickering television clustered under a group of trees in the twilight of Kobama village in Kenya. A very special hundred or so men, women and children amongst billions all around the world who viewed the momentous event of the swearing in of the first black President of the United States. 
 
This book establishes the early ancestry of the Obama family in the Alego region, telling the story of farmers and fishermen, of love and tribal warfare, of families lost and found. It traces the Obama roots from famous tribal warriors in the seventeenth century to the first encounters with the white man in the early 1900s; generation by generation we follow the family through colonial rule and the fight for Kenyan independence, including the Mau Mau and the relationship of Barack Obama's father with President Kenyatta. 
 
This is a book about a family whose destiny is unknown to them. It is a true testament to the belief that any person can make their mark in the world no matter how humble their origins.

The Obamas

The Untold Story of an African Family

Alison Weir

Fascinating and authoritative of Britain's royal families from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria, by leading popular historian Alison Weir 
 
'George III is alleged to have married secretly, on 17th April, 1759, a Quakeress called Hannah Lightfoot. If George III did make such a marriage…then his subsequent marriage to Queen Charlotte was bigamous, and every monarch of Britain since has been a usurper, the rightful heirs of George III being his children by Hannah Lightfoot...' 
 
 Britain's Royal Families provides in one volume, complete genealogical details of all members of the royal houses of England, Scotland and Great Britain - from 800AD to the present. Drawing on countless authorities, both ancient and modern, Alison Weir explores the crown and royal family tree in unprecedented depth and provides a comprehensive guide to the heritage of today's royal family – with fascinating insight and often scandalous secrets. 
 
'Staggeringly useful... combines solid information with tantalising appetisers.’ Mail on Sunday

Britain's Royal Families

The Complete Genealogy

Tim Benson

Few contemporaries captured Britain’s indomitable wartime spirit as well or as wittily as the cartoonist Carl Giles. Now, for the first time, the very best of the cartoons he produced between 1939 and 1945 are brought together, including many that have not seen the light of day in over 75 years. 
 
As a young cartoonist at Reynold’s News and then the Daily Express, Giles's work provided a crucial morale boost – and much-needed laughs – to a population suffering daily privations and danger, and Giles's War shows why. Here are his often hilarious takes on the great events of the war – from the Fall of France, via D-Day, to the final Allied victory – but also his wryly amusing depictions of ordinary people in extraordinary times, living in bombed-out streets, dealing with food shortages, coping with blackouts, railing against bureaucracy and everyday annoyances. It's a brilliantly funny chronicle of our nation’s finest hour, as well as a fitting tribute to one of our greatest cartoonists.

Giles's War

Art Spiegelman

The first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, MAUS is a brutally moving work of art about a Holocaust survivor -- and the son who survives him 
 
'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker 
 
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. 
 
Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits, studying the bloody pawprints of history and tracking its meaning for those who come next. 
 
HAILED AS THE GREATEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF ALL TIME, THIS COMBINED, DEFINITIVE EDITION INCLUDES MAUS I: A SURVIVOR'S TALE AND MAUS II. 
___________________ 
 
'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal 
 
'A brutally moving work of art' Boston Globe 
 
'No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill' Adam Gopnik 
 
'Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect' Philip Pullman 
 
'A capital-G Genius' Michael Chabon

The Complete MAUS

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

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

London's suburbs may stretch for well over 600 square miles, but in historical accounts of the capital they tend to take something of a back seat. In Greater London, historian Nick Barratt places them firmly centre stage, tracing their journey from hamlets and villages far out in the open countryside to fully fledged urban enclaves, simultaneously demonstrating the crucial role they have played in the creation of today's metropolis. 
 
Starting in the first century AD, he shows how the tiny settlements that grew up in the Thames Valley gradually developed, and how they were shaped by their proximity to the city. He describes the spread of the first suburbs beyond the city walls, and traces the ebb and flow of population as people moved in to find jobs or away to escape London's noise and bustle. He charts the transformation wrought by the coming of the railways, the fight to preserve Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest and other green spaces and the struggle to create a London-wide form of government. He gives an account of wartime destruction and peacetime reconstruction, and then brings the story to the present with a description of the very varied nature of today's suburbs and their inhabitants. In the process, he evokes Tudor Hackney and Georgian Hampton, explains why Victorian Battersea and Finchley were so different from one another, and follows Islington's fall from grace and subsequent recovery. 
 
Magnificently illustrated throughout with contemporary engravings and photographs, this is the essential history for anyone who has ever lived in London.

Greater London

The Story of the Suburbs

Darran Anderson

‘Astonishing… A marvellous poetic reminder that every place is a universe of magical possibility to the perceptive mind’ Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places 
 
 A smuggler and a deserter, Darran Anderson’s grandfathers skirted the Second World War on the fringes of legality. His father survived the height of the political violence in Northern Ireland and Darran himself came of age during the final years of the Troubles before leaving his hometown to find a way to exist in the world. 
 
 But when another young man in his family disappears, Darran is brought back to Derry. Walking the banks of the River Foyle, he starts on a search for what has been lost. A portrait of a city, a biography of a family, a record of the objects that make up a life, Inventory offers a vital new perspective on a troubled history.

Inventory

A Family Portrait of Derry’s Troubled Past

A River, A City, A Family

Stuart Heritage

Stuart Heritage got where he is today by being decent, thoughtful, hardworking and kind. He is, in short, a model citizen. The favourite son. 
 
His younger brother Pete is quick-tempered, peevish and aggressively pig-headed and, for a while, known to his friends as 'Shagger'. 
 
But now, Stu has returned to his hometown to discover that Pete has taken his place. 
 
Don’t Be A Dick, Pete is a hilarious examination of home and family; sons, fathers, fatherhood, sibling relationships and how hard it is to move on in a system that’s loaded with several decades of preconceived ideas about you.

Don't Be a Dick Pete

David McKie

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Surnames are much more than convenient identity tags; they are windows into our families’ pasts. Some suggest ancestral trades (Butcher, Smith, Roper) or physical appearance (Long, Brown, Thynne). Some provide clues to where we come from (McDonald, Evans, Patel). And some – Rymer, Brocklebank, Stolbof – offer a hint of something just a little more exotic or esoteric. 
 
All are grist to the mill for David McKie who, in What’s in a Surname?, sets off on a journey around Britain to find out how such appellations have evolved and what they tell us about ourselves. En route he looks at the surname’s tentative beginnings in medieval times, and the myriad routes by which particular names became established. He considers some curious byways: the rise and fall of the multi-barrel surname and the Victorian reinvention of ‘embarrassing’ surnames among them. He considers whether fortune favours those whose surnames come at the beginning of the alphabet. And he celebrates the remarkable and the quirky, from the fearsome Ridley (the cry of which once struck terror in the hearts of their neighbours) to the legend-encrusted Tichborne, whose most famous holders were destined to suffer misfortune and controversy. Elegiac and amusing by turns, he offers a wonderfully entertaining wander along the footpaths of the nation’s history and culture, celebrating not just the Smiths and Joneses of these islands but the Chaceporcs and Swetinbeddes, too.

What's in a Surname?

A Journey from Abercrombie to Zwicker

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

Raymond Briggs

In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death… and doesn’t like them much. 
 
Illustrated with Briggs’s inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog… He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. But most, like this one, are about his home in Sussex: 
 
Looking round this house, 
What will they say, 
The future ghosts? 
 
There must have been 
Some barmy old bloke here, 
Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type, 
Did pictures for kiddy books 
Or some such tripe. 
 
You should have seen the stuff 
He stuck up in that attic! 
Snowman this and snowman that, 
Tons and tons of tat.

Time For Lights Out

Colm O'Regan

A BOOK if you don’t mind! And him with a degree and a job and all. 
 
Everyone should have an Irish Mammy. She’s never short of advice, a kind word and a cup of tea (making sure to scald the teapot first, of course). 
 
Bring the coat anyway. If it’s too hot you can take it off. 
 
Comedian Colm O’Regan explores the phenomenon of the Irish Mammy and what she might say about everything from the ‘new mass’ to the cardinal sin of not owning a cough bottle and the importance of airing clothes properly. The global influence of the Irish Mammy, through history, science, politics and literature, is undeniable. Did you know, for instance, that Hamlet had an Irish Mammy? 
 
So if you’re an Irish Mammy, have one, know one or suspect you might be turning into one, this book will act as your guide. But be aware that though this book might think it knows it all, it doesn’t, only Mammy knows it all.

Isn't It Well For Ye?: The Book of Irish Mammies

Suzanne Lambert

Christmas, 1953: When little Billy discovers a lost puppy in the grounds of his orphanage home, he knows that the nuns will never allow him to keep a pet. But as Billy stares into the adorable Labrador's big brown eyes, he knows in his heart that he can't bear to be parted from his new friend. So he comes up with a plan. 
 
With the help of his fellow orphans, Billy hides the puppy in the caretaker's cottage. Together the children swear not to reveal the secret to the grown-ups. Yet as Billy and the puppy's special bond develops, his dread of discovery and being separated from his beloved dog grows . . . 
 
The Puppy and the Orphan tells the story of many lost souls who have found refuge at the orphanage, and how love helps each of them to fight for a second chance of somewhere to call home.

The Puppy and the Orphan

John Fuller

A walk is like a knot that gets undone, 
And yet it keeps us closer. 
 
In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet’s wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by long companionship, under the growing shadow of mortality. 
 
Taking in a dizzying sweep of human time, Fuller reflects on what keeps us together and what breaks us apart. With spectacular formal dexterity and a tender awe, the poems track the hidden lives of wildflowers, birds, and other emissaries from an increasingly fragile natural world. Lyrical, irreverent, freighted with a lifetime’s understanding, the poems reach out, with the humility of an apprentice, to the precious others who share our path: ‘Can you tell / Me / Something of love?’

Marston Meadows

Colm O’Regan’s massive bestseller Isn’t It Well For Ye? The Book of Irish Mammies brought the wonderful world of the Irish Mammy to homes across Ireland, where it took pride of place alongside the good scissors and the bit of string that might come in handy someday. And now, before you can say “Is it that time already?”, Irish Mammy is back with more words of wisdom. 
That’s More Of It Now: The Second Book of Irish Mammies takes us even deeper into this parallel universe, with advice on everything from how to tell Mammy she is about to become a Granny to how to discipline a child (aged 0–45), touching on Irish Mammies’ role in the worlds of sport, the workplace, technology, religion and culture. Enjoy popular fairy-tales retold with an Irish Mammy at the centre of them; marvel at exclusive, not-yet-released scenes from the epic Game of Scones; and find some essential apps for the Modern Mammy’s tablet. 
Probably the most important sequel since The Godfather Part II, or at least Fifty Shades Darker, That’s More Of It Now will find a place in everybody’s heart (and stocking). Just don’t leave it on a damp step.

That's More Of It Now

The Second Book Of Irish Mammies

Jim Eldridge

The complete first and second series of the charming railway station comedy starring Arthur Lowe, Ian Lavender and Kenneth Connor 
 
 Parsley Sidings ran for two highly successful series from 1971-1973, and was the only radio sitcom (other than Dad’s Army) to star the much-loved Arthur Lowe. As Horace Hepplewhite, station master of a sleepy railway station, he spends his time dealing with small crises and supervising his errant staff – including his son, ticket clerk Bert; blonde bombshell Gloria the station announcer; crafty Cockney porter Percy and ancient signalman Bradshaw – not to mention his nemesis, Phineas Perkins, who manages the station one stop down the line. 
 
 This collection includes all 21 episodes of the classic comedy, many of which were thought lost but were recently rediscovered and restored for fans to enjoy once more. Included are: The Market Special; The Postal Express; The Beauty Queen Contest; The Inspector Calls; The 1890 Rocket; The Excursion; Cricket, Lovely Cricket; Who’ll Be Mother?; The Concert; Goodbye Parsley Sidings; Pass the Parcel; The Flower Show; The Entente Cordiale; A Night Out; The Goods Train; A Bird in the Hand; The Purity League; The New Level Crossing; The Film Makers and The Secret Agent and the pilot episode, The Royal Train. 
 
 Starring Arthur Lowe as Horace, Ian Lavender as Bert, Kenneth Connor as Percy and Liz Fraser as Gloria, with guest stars including Elizabeth Morgan, Pat Coombs, Bill Pertwee and Roger Delgado. 
 
Please note: Due to the archive nature of this recording sound quality may vary and that some of the humour in this programme reflects the era in which it was first broadcast.

Parsley Sidings: The Complete Series 1 and 2

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