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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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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

Orlando Reade

**A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
‘Lively and humane… Reade’s enthusiasm and curiosity are winning’ GUARDIAN 
 
Summoned in Haiti’s struggle against colonial rule, read in prison by the young Malcolm X, and reimagined by Virginia Woolf - this is the revolutionary history of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost 
 
Orlando Reade shows the many different, surprising, and often contradictory ways in which Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost has been read across centuries and continents. 
 
Boldly original, lively, and far-reaching, What in Me Is Dark is the story of how a work of literature born in the ashes of a failed revolution became an indelible part of the modern imagination. 
 
Reade guides us through the epic, exploring how Milton came to write its dark and dazzling poetry, and offers us a new account of its radical, ever-evolving legacy. 
 
‘Clever, wide-ranging…witty and sardonic' NEW STATESMAN

What in Me Is Dark

The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

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

Maggie Nelson

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide – from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Kara Walker to Bjork – but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. 
 
The collection is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Like Love is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Like Love

Essays and Conversations

Dani Shapiro

‘Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro’s long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between’ Jennifer Egan 
 
From Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers - and anyone with an artistic temperament - will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro shares her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.

Still Writing

The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

Ismail Kadare

**LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024** 
 
'Comrade Stalin wishes to speak with you.' 
 
A fascinating exploration of the relationship between writers and tyranny, from the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize. 
 
In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. 
 
Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare's experience writing under dictatorship, when he received an unexpected phone call of his own. 
 
Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson 
 
‘One of Europe's most decorated authors... Seasoned fans [of Kadare] will be enthralled’ Sunday Times

A Dictator Calls

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me. 
 
Irreverent, witty and wise, But the Girl is a coming-of-age story about not wanting to leave your family behind 
 
Girl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence. 
 
When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity, but learning to understand the people who made you who you are?

But the Girl

Robert Crawford

The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources. 
 
In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. 
 
This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life. 
 
From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces. 
 
He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets. 
 
Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

Eliot After The Waste Land

Lauren Elkin

'Destined to become a new classic' Chris Kraus 
 
A dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them. 
 
For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? 
 
Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body. Weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers – from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography to Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits to Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures – Lauren Elkin shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political. 
 
‘The Susan Sontag of her generation’ Deborah Levy

Art Monsters

Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

A darkly comic and moving memoir on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor. 
 
‘A book that will stay with you for life’ 
NATALIE HAYNES 
 
‘The best book about multiple sclerosis’ 
THE TIMES 
 
We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time... But sometimes we are unlucky. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting room of an Oxford neurologist. 
 
When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, as he explores in Metamorphosis, his fall also did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined. 
 
‘A pitch-perfect memoir… touchingly honest and darkly funny’ 
JACQUELINE WILSON 
 
‘An outstanding feat… Riveting’ 
SUNDAY TIMES

Metamorphosis

A Life in Pieces

Amanda Gorman

The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman 
 
&lsquo;Poetry so alive you want to hold it and protect it&rsquo; Malala Yousafzai 
 
The luminous poetry collection captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future. 
 
&lsquo;A new collection full of hope and healing from the young American poet who electrified the world&rsquo; Guardian 
 
&lsquo;Reading these poems, I feel at once haunted, heartened and formidably ministered to&rsquo; Tracy K. Smith 
 
&lsquo;The liberating force of the stories these poems tell about our resilience and survival showcases a powerful griot for our times&rsquo; Oprah Daily

Call Us What We Carry

From the presidential inaugural poet

Claire Harman

** The Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023** 
** A Waterstones Best Book of 2023** 
 
'All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work' A.L. KENNEDY 
 
Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield’s career was short but dazzling. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, 'Where is she – our missing contemporary?' 
 
In this inventive and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s life and achievements, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield’s desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small.’ 
 
‘What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity… Brilliant’ Sunday Times 
 
‘A searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand’ Sunjeev Sahota

All Sorts of Lives

Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything

Haruki Murakami

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles. 
 
'You end this collection…vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again' Guardian 
 
Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his beautifully surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing. 
 
In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. 
 
'Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers' New York Times Book Review 
 
'A fascinating glimpse of the peculiar writerly life' Sunday Times 
 
** A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES and NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR**

Novelist as a Vocation

Margaret Atwood

The Sunday Times bestselling collection of funny, endlessly curious and uncannily prescient essays from cultural icon Margaret Atwood. 
 
In it she seeks answers to Burning Questions such as: 
 
Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? 
How can we live on our planet? 
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? 
 
In Burning Questions Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe. 
 
 
INCLUDES NEW ESSAYS FOR PAPERBACK 
 
'Brilliant and funny' Joan Didion 
 
'She's taken our times and made us wise to them' Ali Smith 
 
'Lights a fire from the fears of our age . . . Miraculously balances humor, outrage, and beauty' New York Times Book Review 
 
'All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood's name is written at the top of it' Anne Enright, Guardian 
 
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times

Burning Questions

The Sunday Times bestseller from Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood

Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004–2021

Seán Hewitt

A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma. 
 
When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. 
 
All Down Darkness Wide is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a fearless exploration of a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

All Down Darkness Wide

A Memoir

Daisy Hay

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize* 
 
In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. 
 
The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 
Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today. 
 
'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian 
 
'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

Lucasta Miller

'Outstanding... The best short introduction I have come across' Sunday Times 
 
When he died at the age of just twenty-five, few imagined John Keats would one day be considered among the greatest poets of all time. 
 
Taking nine of Keats's best-known poems, Lucasta Miller excavates their backstories and, in doing so, resurrects the real Keats: an outsider from a damaged family whose visceral love of language allowed him to change the face of English literature for ever. 
 
Combining close-up readings with the story of his brief existence, Miller shows us how Keats crafted his groundbreaking poetry and explains why it continues to speak to us across the centuries. 
 
'One never wants Keats's life to end so soon; I didn't want this book to end, either' TLS Books of the Year 
 
'Irresistible... [Miller]digs into the backstories of her subject's most famous poems to uncover aspects of his life and work that challenge well-worn romantic myths' Wall Street Journal

Keats

A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

Salman Rushdie

From 'Best of the Booker' winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture. 
 
'One of the greatest writers of our age' Neil Gaiman 
 
Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, he shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Rushdie considers, too, the nature of truth and looks afresh at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. 
 
'Essential reading... Powerful' Financial Times 
 
'Rushdie is vital, expansive, the critic as storyteller, championing his subjects with gusto' TLS

Languages of Truth

Essays 2003-2020

Filled with empathy and wisdom, personal experiences and creative inspiration, this is a vital collection of essays on the power of literature and the craft of writing from an international array of writers of colour. 
 
'Electric essays that speak to the experience of writing from the periphery . . . a guide, a comfort, and a call all at once' Laila Lalami, author of Conditional Citizens 
 
'A whip-smart collection' Kamila Shamsie, author of Best of Friends 
 
What if we reconsidered our assumptions about how fiction should be written? And can we then apply our discoveries to both what we read and how we read? This book explores these questions and encourages us into a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, featuring: 
 
• Taymour Soomro on resisting rigid stories about who you are 
• Madeleine Thien on how writing builds the room in which it can exist 
• Amitava Kumar on why authenticity isn't a license we carry in our wallets 
• Tahmima Anam on giving herself permission to be funny 
• Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the bodily challenge of writing about trauma 
• Zeyn Joukhadar on queering English and the power of refusing to translate ourselves 
• Kiese Laymon on hearing that no one wants to read the story that you want to write 
• Deepa Anappara on writing even through conditions that impede the creation of art 
 
Plus essays from Tiphanie Yanique, Xiaolu Guo, Jamil Jan Kochai, Vida Cruz-Borja, Femi Kayode, Nadifa Mohamed in conversation with Leila Aboulela, Myriam Gurba, Mohammed Hanif and Sharlene Teo. 
 
'This book is essential' Nikesh Shukla 
 
'Bracing and moving . . . No one interested in how we read and should read fiction can afford to miss this' Pankaj Mishra, author of Run And Hide

Letters to a Writer of Colour

Ann Morgan

'A brilliant, unlikely book' Spectator 
 
How can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world? 
 
In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics...and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe's 196 independent countries (plus one extra), sampling one book from every nation. It wasn't easy. Many languages have next to nothing translated into English; there are tiny, tucked-away places where very little is written down; some governments don't like to let works of art escape their borders. 
 
Using Morgan's own quest as a starting point, Reading the World explores the vital questions of our time and how reading across borders might just help us answer them. 
 
'Revelatory... While Morgan's research has a daunting range...there is a simple message: reading is a social activity, and we ought to share books across boundaries' Financial Times

Reading the World

How I Read a Book from Every Country

Confessions of a Literary Explorer

What can freedom really mean? 
 
'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING 
 
In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about freedom. Drawing on pop culture, theory and real life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live. 
 
'Tremendously energising' Guardian 
 
'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York Times 
 
'Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company... Exhilarating' Literary Review 
 
* A New York Times Notable Book *

On Freedom

The electrifying new book from the author of The Argonauts

Four Songs of Care and Constraint

David Lodge

In a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has been one of Britain's best-loved and most versatile writers. 
 
 With Varying Degrees of Success he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. He describes the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres, his extensive travels around the world, and the hope and desire of writers to make a significant and positive impression on their readers and audiences. 
 
Varying Degrees of Success provides the reader with a privileged insight into the working practices and the creative life of a major British novelist. 
 
'Continuously engaging... Glimpses of the ambition and energy required to fuel the final stretch of his near 60-year career as the most dependable of novelist-critics' New Statesman 
 
'Lodge is the best British novelist never to have won the Man Booker prize' The Times

Varying Degrees of Success

The new memoir from one of Britain’s best loved writers

A Memoir 1992-2020

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
 The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It's also a turbulent time in the life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this year will become the turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives. 
 
The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens's London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him, and forever alter Britain's relationship with the world. 
 
'Sparklingly informative' Guardian 
 
'Wonderfully entertaining' Observer 
 
'It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens' New Statesman

The Turning Point

A Year that Changed Dickens and the World

Rachel Kushner

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000–2020

Longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 
 
'A remarkable achievement' Spectator 
 
In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of a London printer's workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and the promise of protection. 
 
Soon after, an anonymous pamphlet was quietly distributed in the backstreets of the city. Entitled The Memorial of the Church of England, the argument it proposed threatened to topple the government. Fearing insurrection, parliament was in turmoil and government minister Robert Harley launched a hunt for all of those involved. The printer was eventually named, but could not be found... 
 
In this breakneck political adventure, Joseph Hone shows us a nation in crisis through the story of a single incendiary document. 
 
'An elegant blend of scholarship and detection' Peter Moore, author of Endeavour 
'Enthralling' London Review of Books 
'An exciting story told with vigour' Adrian Tinniswood, Literary Review

The Paper Chase

The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers

Oliver Burkeman

A life-changing gift of a book: What if you tried to stop doing everything, so you could finally get round to what counts? 
 
**The instant Sunday Times bestseller** 
 
Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. 
 
Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny. 
 
Embrace your limits. Change your life. Discover how to make your four thousand weeks count in 2025. 
 
'Life is finite. You don't have to fit everything in... Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living' Emma Gannon 
 
'Every sentence is riven with gold' Chris Evans 
 
'Comforting, fascinating, engaging, inspiring and useful' Marian Keyes

Four Thousand Weeks

Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

Heather Clark

The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath. 
 
'Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath' Ali Smith 
 
 *WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021* 
 *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES* 
 *FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 2021* 
 
Drawing on a wealth of new material, Heather Clark brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath. Refusing to read Plath's work as if her every act was a harbinger of her fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century as she thoroughly explores Sylvia's world. We see Plath's early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; we witness her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and, through clear-eyed portraits of the demonised players in the arena of her suicide, we gain a deeper understanding of her final days. 
 
Featuring illuminating readings of Plath's poems, Red Comet brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women the world over. 
 
'A first-class biography . . . Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel . . . I couldn't put it down' The Times

Red Comet

A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

*THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* 
 
'A simply wonderful book' PHILIPPE SANDS 
 
'Begin Again is that rare thing: an instant classic' PANKAJ MISHRA 
 
'Incredibly moving and stirring' DIANA EVANS 
 
America is at a crossroads. 
 
Drawing insight and inspiration from Baldwin's writings, Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through an era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Seamlessly combining biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a more just future. 
 
'An essayistic marvel . . . deeply personal and yet immensely readable' SARA COLLINS, GUARDIAN 
 
'An urgent, deeply interesting book' RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER 
 
Winner of the Stowe Prize 2021 
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2021

Begin Again

James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today

Selina Todd

'A sympathetic and perceptive account of a fine writer at a critical moment in our cultural life' KEN LOACH 
 
On 27 May 1958, A Taste of Honey opened in a small fringe theatre in London. Written by a nineteen-year-old bus driver's daughter from Salford, the play exposed a deeply polarised society in Britain, sparked press and political outrage and transformed its young author into an unexpected star. Shelagh Delaney's assertive female characters struck an immediate chord with working-class women who dreamed of more than just suburban housewifery, and her work and legacy would go on to inspire future generations of writers, musicians and artists. 
 
 This is the remarkable story of how a working-class teenager stormed theatreland, exploded old certainties about class, race, sex and taste, and blazed an incendiary new path in British culture. 
 
'A riveting book' DAVID HARE

Tastes of Honey

The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution

Jenny Landreth

'With spot-on injections of humour and a frequently raised sardonic eyebrow, joy and warmth shine from this fascinating and funny book' Jo Brand 
 
A joyful celebration of amateur theatre 
 
From the Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages, via the Georgian aristocrats who built opulent private theatres in their own homes, to the radical lefties taking political theatre to the streets, this is the story of amateur dramatics in Britain. We meet a cast of characters who tell us about the joy amateur theatre brings them and we follow the full arc of a production, from first auditions to last night party, with all the mishaps and forgotten lines that come in between. In a triumphant mix of memoir, social history and manifesto, Jenny Landreth opens our eyes to am-dram and shows us a vibrant world that is a crucial part of our culture.

Break a Leg

A memoir, manifesto and celebration of amateur theatre

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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