About John 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

Dave Gibbons

About Stella 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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Ruth Padel

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 
 
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. 
 
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

The Mara Crossing

Matthew Sweeney

In this, Matthew Sweeney's eighth full-length collection, the disarming fabulist and mythmaker steps out on his own into fresh territory. These are poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note. The sanctuary of the title is fragile and hard-won, and the complexities of the emotional life are written into the architecture of the physical, making for a poetry that is both vulnerable and disturbing. 
 
Celebrated for his ability to blend the simple terror of folklore with the more sophisticated anxieties of Kafka and the contemporary, Sweeney moves through this book like a revenant - past monkeys dressed as doormen, through ice-hotels and showers of human hair, towards a scaffold or a lover. Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home. 
 
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Sanctuary

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 
 
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. 
 
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Poems from The Mara Crossing

Elizabeth Sulis Kim

A modern bestiary with an ancient heart: meet twelve emblematic animals and restore your relationship with the natural world. 
 
The bear deities, Artio and Artaius, who’ll rise from sleep; the salmon of wisdom who gifts understanding of the universe’s past, present and future; the Lion Man carved 40,000 years ago. Join Elizabeth Sulis Kim as she travels across the globe and through time, from our deep past into the future, bringing together the animals which have captivated us for millennia. 
 
Steeped in folklore, mythology, magic and religion, The Book of Beasts tells the story of our shapeshifting relationships with animals, from reverence to persecution, friendship to fear, awe to indifference. It asks us what we actually know about the creatures we share this world with – and offers us a different way of living together.

The Book of Beasts

Reclaiming Animal Wisdom

'The valley was full of snakes and serpents as big as palm trees, so huge that they could have swallowed any elephant that met them.'

Sindbad the Sailor

Beautiful, disturbing and a pleasure to read, Ruth Padel's new poems are her most ambitious yet, adding animal legend and zoological science to her glitteringly imaginative canvas. With her gift for bringing together experiences and tones of voice that normally stay far apart, she sweeps us from Dulwich Pizza Hut to ancient Siberia, King's Cross to nineteenth-century Burma. We meet Socrates, urban foxes, Louisiana alligators and the endangered Amur leopard in poems resonating with sensuous delight in nature, but also with history and loss. 
 
Finally, a Chinese painter searches for tigers in a forest doomed to the sawmill while the minister who sold it scoffs an aphrodisiac bowl of tiger-penis soup. 
 
Hallucinatory and lyrical, passionately musical, seething with life, The Soho Leopard explores our human need for wildness- and also for stories, wherever we find them. A wonderfully ferocious new collection from one of our most exciting poets.

The Soho Leopard

Ben Jonson

One of the greatest English playwrights of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was also a deeply influential lyric poet, whose poetry combined classical ideals with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and colloquial language. The Complete Poems contains all the volumes of poetry Jonson published in his lifetime - including Epigrams, The Forest and Underwoods - alongside a wide variety of his other poems collected after his death. Ranging from deeply moving pieces such as 'On My First Son' and the elegant love lyric 'Song to Celia' to brutally satirical poems such as 'On Poet-Ape' and the reflective 'An Ode to Himself', it offers a powerful celebration of both one man's life, and of an age.

The Complete Poems

Gerard Woodward

In Island to Island, his third collection of poetry for Chatto, Gerard Woodward ventures into more hostile, less familiar territory. An Arabian desert, the moon, thinly-populated archipelagos are all visited in what emerges as an investigation into the nature of social space. A giraffe trapper finds that a successful trap must closely resemble a giraffe's own home; the 'suburban glass' of starter-home conservatories glazes and crysallises the lives of newly-weds. With his characteristic exuberance and ability to stand the world on its head, Woodward combines tichly imagined poems about half-invented lands with poetry that transforms the ordinary into the fantastical, where baths become oceans and ceilings lunar landscapes. Nor is the body exempt from this exploration of borders and limits. In one poem, two 'gurning' contestants find that they've overstepped some boundary of humanness and in 'The Madness of Heracles', a long retelling of the myth of the twelve labours, human strength is put to the test in a poem which evolves into a rhapsody of love, loss, toil and redemption.

Island To Island

Marina Warner

In early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of six lectures, she takes areas of contemporary concern and relates them to stories from mythology and fairy tale which continue to grip the modern imagination. 
 
She analyses the fury about single mothers and the anxiety about masculinity in the light of ideals about male heroism and control; the current despair about children and the loss of childhood innocence; the changing attitude of myths about wild men and beasts and the undertow of racism which is expressed in myths about savages and cannibals. The last lecture, on home, brings the themes together to examine ideas about who we are and where we belong, with reference to the British nation and its way of telling its own history. 
 
Using a range of examples from video games to Turner's paintings, from popular films to Keats, Marina Warner interweaves her critique of fantasy, dream and prejudice.

Managing Monsters

D J Taylor

Vanity Fair, published in serial parts in 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous 'all but at the top of the tree', he told his mother, 'and having a great fight up there with Dickens'. Behind him lay an extraordinary life - an intense, Anglo-Indian childhood, a fortune lost by his early twenties, a disastrous marriage to a wife who went mad and left him to bring up two small daughters in near penury. 
 
But his later life was no less troubled. As D.J. Taylor shows in this incisive biography, Thackeray was a complex, touchy man, acutely sensitive to criticism and fearful of the publicity that accompanied his passage through life.

Thackeray

The three plays collected in this volume depict the faults, errors and foibles of ordinary people with exuberant humour, savage satire and acute observations. Volpone portrays a rich Venetian who pretends to be dying so that his despised acquaintances will flock to his bedside with extravagant gifts in hope of an inheritance. The Alchemist also deals with greed and gullibility, as a rascally trio of confidence tricksters, claiming to have the legendary Philosopher's Stone, fool a series of victims who are hoping to make some easy money. And in a wonderfully energetic portrait of Jacobean life, Bartholomew Fair shows a diverse group of Londoners sampling the delights and temptations of the Fair - and the traders, prostitutes and cutpurses who set out to exploit them.

Volpone and Other Plays

John Crace

John Sutherland

Alas poor Yorick, he looks not at all well. 
I knew him, Horatio; 
a fellow of infinite jest, though sadly finite breath. 
Though thy gibes be still, yet still thou grins. 
I seldom saw thy teeth look quite so clean 
 
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this is the fourth of a new collection of the Bard's greatest plays, digested to a few thousand words with invaluable side notes from John Sutherland. Funny and incredibly clever, these parodies are a joy for those who know their Shakespeare, perfect for the theatre goer needing a quick recap, and a massive relief for those just desperate to pass their English exam.

Incomplete Shakespeare: Hamlet

George Orwell

In the winter of 1945-6, George Orwell was recently widowed, in poor health and living in bombed-out London under the deprivations of rationing – yet in this unpromising context, he wrote a series of essays celebrating the small joys of everyday life. This new anthology, edited by Rebecca Solnit, challenges the dominant image of Orwell as the austere author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. He instead emerges as an enthusiast of English cooking; a lover of gardening and the countryside; a leisurely pub drinker; an observer of the elm tree and blackbird’s song; a devotee of murder mystery novels and ‘good bad books’. 
 
These essays were not escapist for Orwell; rather, they deepened his political commitments. Attending to the world through the senses, trusting your own judgement and valuing ordinary joys are ways of preserving individuality and humanity in the face of propaganda, totalitarianism and despair. These small pleasures, far from trivial, became for Orwell fortifications of the self.

Orwell's Pleasures

In these extraordinary poems, using multiple viewpoints - from Darwin himself, to his beloved wife Emma, and even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo - Ruth Padel illuminates the development of Darwin's thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and the fluctuating emotions of Darwin the husband, the naturalist and the tender father, in a powerful tribute to her famous ancestor. 
 
Shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Poetry Award.

Darwin

A Life in Poems

Jean Sprackland

Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. 
 
These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic') or 'the fund of life' in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match' but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.

Tilt

Among the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid'. As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified 'mermaid' specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real. 
 
The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies. A third of the selections are published here in English for the first time, and all are accompanied by commentary that explores their undercurrents, showing us how public perceptions of this popular mythical hybrid - at once a human and a fish - illuminate issues of gender, spirituality, ecology and sexuality.

The Penguin Book of Mermaids

Sarah Maguire

This beautiful anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English, creating a rich bouquet of intriguing juxtapositions. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry. 
 
There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South African, Seitlhamo Motsapi; but there are also sections devoted to more unusual plants such as the mandrake, the starapple and the tamarind. 
 
An ex-gardener, the celebrated poet Sarah Maguire brings her extensive horticultural knowledge to bear on all the poems, arranging them into botanical families, identifying the plants being written about and writing a fascinating introduction. Whether you are a poetry lover, a gardener, a botanist, or simply the purchaser of the occasional bunch of flowers, this unique anthology allows you to luxuriate amidst the world's flora.

Flora Poetica

The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse

Colm Tóibín

In his essay on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Colm Tóibín reveals an artist 'alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish' and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or J.M. Synge and his mother, Toibin examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. 'Educating an unintellectual woman,' Cheever remarked, 'is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.' 
 
In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Writers and Their Families

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Many kinds of equine characters grace these pages, from magnificent war horses to cowboys' trusty steeds, from broken-down nags to playful colts, from wild horses to dream horses. We encounter the famous Trojan horse in Virgil's Aeneid, only to see it from a quite different perspective in Matthea Harvey's whimsical 'Inside the Good Idea'. Longfellow shows us Paul Revere defying an empire from the back of a horse, while Shakespeare's Richard III vainly offers his kingdom for one. Robert Burns's 'Auld Farmer' dotes affectionately on his ageing mare, while Paul Muldoon's 'Glaucus' is devoured by his fierce young fillies. Robert Frost's little horse stopping by the woods is gently puzzled by human behaviour, while Ted Hughes is dazzled by a stunning vision of horses at dawn, 'grey silent fragments/Of a grey silent world'. 
 
Mythical and metaphorical horses cavort alongside vividly real ones in these poems, whether they be humble servants, noble companions, beloved friends or emblems of the wild beauty of the world beyond our grasp.

Poems about Horses

Clare Pollard

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? 
 How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? 
 And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? 
 
Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of Clare Pollard's childhood reading and her re-discovery of the classic tales as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think.

Fierce Bad Rabbits

The Tales Behind Children's Picture Books

Anthony Bale

From the medieval bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses. 
 
Using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, north Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a living atlas that blurs the distinction between real and imagined places, offering the reader a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

The World Through Medieval Eyes

To write a poem is to become part of a great conversation with one's literary predecessors, but the poems in this anthology are a special breed, their authors deliberately addressing a particular poem or poet of the past or present. They may be replies, reproofs, updatings, acts of sabotage or adulation; they may argue with, elaborate upon, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their originals. From Raleigh's famous answer to Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd', to Anthony Hecht's 'The Dover Bitch', from Ogden Nash sending up Byron to Mona Van Duyn giving us Leda's perspective on the swan or Annie Finch's 'Coy Mistress' arguing her case with Marvell, these remarkable poems are not only engaging in themselves, but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems which inspired them. Thisconversation of the greats includes Philip Larkin replying to Sir Philip Sidney, Ezra Pound to Edmund Waller, Randell Jarrell to W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov to Wordsworth, Galway Kinnell to Rilke, David Lehmann to Pound, C.K. Williams to Coleridge - and many more.

Conversation Pieces

Juvenal

Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. A member of the traditional land-owning class that was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of outsiders, Juvenal also creates savage portraits of decadent aristocrats - male and female - seeking excitement among the lower orders of actors and gladiators, and of the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves. Constantly comparing the corruption of his own generation with its stern and upright forebears, Juvenal's powers of irony and invective make his work a stunningly satirical and bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman society

The Sixteen Satires

Miles Jupp

Miles Jupp probes mysteries both fictional and autobiographical in these ten radio investigations 
 
Actor and comedian Miles Jupp puts his inquiring mind and talent for comic analysis to work, as he turns his quizzical gaze on the world of fiction. 
 
In these ten entertaining documentaries, he explores why some books, games and binge-watched box sets are, as they say, 'literally unputdownable'; peers into Plotto, an ingenious manual of story devices, to discover whether it really can make writing easy; takes a sideways look at some familiar characters from literature, including James Bond, Dracula, Fu Manchu and Carruthers; delves into the intricacies of the locked-room murder; and revisits his old prep school to find out whether a book of stirring 19th-century verse can work its magic on today's young people. And there's a shock in store for Miles as, researching his Huguenot ancestors, he finds cracks appearing in his family tree... 
 
Included in this collection are: 
Miles Jupp is Literally Unputdownable 
Miles Jupp and the Plot Device 
The Soviet James Bond 
The Woman Who Invented James Bond? 
The Trainspotter's Guide to Dracula 
Miles Jupp in a Locked Room 
Fu Manchu in Edinburgh 
By Jove, Carruthers! 
Miles Jupp's Muscular Lines 
Miles Jupp is Insufficiently Belgian 
 
 
Production credits 
Presented by Miles Jupp 
Produced by David Stenhouse 
Actor: David Jackson Young, with additional contributions from Crawford Logan, David Rintoul and Samantha Bond 
 
Miles Jupp is Literally Unputdownable first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 28 June 2020 
Featuring DJ Taylor; Paula Hawkins; Jed Mercurio; Will Storr and Frederick Forsyth 
 
Miles Jupp and the Plot Device first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 31 December 2015 
Featuring Mike Ashley; Professor Paul Collins of the University of Portland Oregon; John Harvey; Jeffrey Marks; Val McDermid and Damon Rochefort 
 
The Soviet James Bond first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 18 December 2014 
Commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and produced by BBC Radio Scotland 
Featuring Professor Ian Christie of Birkbeck College; Mark Liederman, Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder; Olga Semyonova; Vitali Vitaliev and Simon Winder 
 
The Woman Who Invented James Bond? first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 10 December 2016 
Featuring Pam Hirsch; John Pearson; Nigel West and Simon Winder 
 
The Trainspotter's Guide to Dracula first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 31 October 2017 
Featuring Sir Christopher Frayling; Andras Hlavacska; Zita Hummer; Tudor Salajan; Alexandru Simon and Dacre Stoker 
 
Miles Jupp in a Locked Room first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 21 May 2012 
Featuring Robert Adey; Mike Ashley; Paul Doherty; Jasper Fforde; Christopher Fowler; Paul Halter; Daniel Mallory; Denise Mina; John Pugmire and Soji Shamada 
 
Fu Manchu in Edinburgh first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 6 April 2010 
Featuring Sascha Auerbach; Paul Bailey; Alan Bennell; Grant Buttars; Owen Dudley Edwards; Bill Maynard; Dr Jonathan Murray; Matthew Sweet and Shenxiao Tong 
Reader: Crawford Logan 
 
By Jove, Carruthers! first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 12 May 2009 
Featuring Louis Barfe; Owen Dudley Edwards; Bruce Durie; Roger Johnson; Sam Llewellyn and Celia Mitchell 
 
Miles Jupp's Muscular Lines first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 3 January 2010 
Featuring Leslie Barr; Colonel Tim Collins, OBE; Owen Dudley Edwards; Sir Ranulph Fiennes and vox pops with pupils from St George's School, Windsor Castle 
 
Miles Jupp is Insufficiently Belgian first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 25 March 2015 
Written by Miles Jupp and David Stenhouse with additional material by James Kettle 
Featuring Nick Barrett; Bella Jupp, Gillian Jupp, Rob Jupp, Rupert Jupp, Thomas Jupp, Christine Sas and Lieven Schiere

Miles Jupp is Literally Unputdownable

Ten lively literary investigations

Sebastian Faulks

The publication of Robinson Crusoe in London in 1719 marked the arrival of a revolutionary art form: the novel. British writers were prominent in shaping the new type of storytelling - one which reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in whom readers could find not only an escape, but a deeper understanding of their own lives. 
 
 But the novel was more than just a reflection of British life. As Sebastian Faulks explains in this engaging literary and social history, it also helped invent the British. By focusing not on writers but on the people they gave us, Faulks not only celebrates the recently neglected act of novelistic creation but shows how the most enduring fictional characters over the centuries have helped map the British psyche. In this ebook, Sebastian celebrates the greatest lovers in fiction - from Mr Darcy to Lady Chatterley. 
 
Also included are three classic novels: 
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Accomplished Elizabeth Bennett must navigate a web of familial obligations and social expectations in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity and love. 
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: The story of an all consuming love which knows no boundary between life and death, Emily Brontë's novel is a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion. 
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy: In a bid to alleviate her family's poverty, Tess visits the D'Urbervilles and unwittingly sets out on a path of suffering, love, social inequality and betrayal.

Faulks on Fiction (Includes 3 Vintage Classics): Great British Lovers and the Secret Life of the Novel

Adam Thorpe

From an abandoned rowing boat in Estonia full of wild flowers to a swimming pool in the Congo full of drowned insects, Adam Thorpe's new collection takes us on a wide-ranging journey through states of gain and loss, alienation and belonging. In the title poem, the poet disturbs a flock of geese by his mere presence, and one goose takes the wrong direction, away from the flock, as a 'voluntary exile'. A bid for freedom, or a mistake? 
 
These poems explore our chances, record our traces - in the marks on skin, home movies, stone walls, the pressure of our blood, or the clearing of a dying father's study: 'foraging backwards' until something is revealed, however tentative. As always in Thorpe's work, history's violence lurks in the margins: in the silent oppression of Roman roads, a polluting pipeline in Africa or the bombing of the Alcala train, he takes the gauge of our wider compulsions, of all that decides things for us. Against this he sets what, through the other meaning of 'voluntary', suggests chance's extempore music: the gleeful play of a sea-otter, the extraordinary gift of a passing gull to his small daughter, or poetry itself. 
 
Adam Thorpe is now celebrated as a novelist, but he began as a poet. Voluntary, his sixth collection, is a timely reminder of the elegance, skill and remarkable range of this most gifted British poet.

Voluntary

Aesop

Sardonic, wry and wise, Aesop&rsquo;s Fables are some of the most enduring and well-loved literary creations in history. In a series of pithy, amusing vignettes, Aesop created a vivid cast of characters to demonstrate different aspects of human nature. Here we see a wily fox outwitted by a quick-thinking cicada, a tortoise triumphing over a self-confident hare and a fable-teller named Aesop silencing those who mock him. Each jewel-like fable provides a warning about the consequences of wrong-doing, as well as offering a glimpse into the everyday lives of Ancient Greeks.

Aesop's Fables

Apollonius of Rhodes

'The Argonauts were terrified at the sight. But Jason planting his feet apart stood to receive them, as a reef in the sea confronts the tossing billows in a gale.' 
 
The tragic, epic love affair that allowed Jason to get the Golden Fleece. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BCE). Apollonius of Rhodes's The Voyage of Argo is also available in Penguin Classics.

Jason and Medea

Mark Twain

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

Twain's playful exuberance and remarkable storytelling gifts are on full display as he regales readers with his real-life adventures, some of them so outrageous they cannot be true - or can they? 
 
As Richard Russo says in his fascinating introduction, Twain was an 'inspired, indeed, unparalleled, bullshitter' who himself cheerfully relates how as a cub reporter out West he had elevated a routine Indian attack on a wagon full of immigrants to a battle that 'to this day has no parallel in history' - once he knew he could get away with it. 
 
There is drama as well as comedy in his account of life on the Mississippi, and great sadness too when his younger brother Henry is killed in a steamboat explosion - all the more poignant for the restraint with which he describes it. In The Innocents Abroad Twain the gleeful iconoclast is a passenger on a cruise ship to Europe and the Holy Land, poking fun at European snobbery and pretension and refusing to be overawed by all that History - but fully prepared to aim his satirical barbs at his fellow-tourists and indeed, squarely at himself. 
 
He also proves to be a deeply compassionate writer, as fierce in his condemnation of injustice as he is skilful in mining the humour of human folly. He brought to literature a new, distinctly American voice - and he harboured as rich and fertile a blend of contradictions as the dynamic nation he came to embody and define.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 2

Selections from the Memoirs and Travel Writings

Jesse Byock

In a land of ice, great warriors search for glory... 
 
When a dragon threatens the people of the north, only one man can destroy the fearsome beast. Elsewhere, a mighty leader gathers a court of champions, including a noble warrior under a terrible curse. The Earth's creation is described; tales of the gods and evil Frost Giants are related; and the dark days of Ragnarok foretold. 
 
Journey into a realm of legend, where heroes from an ancient age do battle with savage monsters, and every man must live or die by the sword ...

Sagas and Myths of the Northmen

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Classic reads for the Christmas season

7 extremely funny books written by women

VINTAGE designers pick their favourite books covers of 2019

Features

Lucy Mangan’s best Christmas scenes in literature

A text collage citing quotes about winter

The best literary quotes about winter

The best literary quotes about Christmas

Books to get you in the mood for Christmas

A festive green and red image featuring the quote "Christmas! 'Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart”, by Washington Irving.

Showing results for: ‘gibbons’

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