Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Marjane Satrapi

In November 1955, Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most celebrated tar players, is in search of a new instrument. His beloved tar has been broken. But no matter what tar he tries, none of them sound right. Brokenhearted, Nasser Ali Khan decides that life is no longer worth living. He takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all of its pleasures. This is the story of the eight days he spends preparing to surrender his soul. 
 
As the days pass and Nasser Ali Khan grows weaker, those who love him - his wife, his children, his siblings - gather round, incredulous, to try to comfort him. Every visitor stirs up a memory, and in the course of this week Nasser Ali Khan revisits his entire life, a life defined by three relationships in particular. He remembers his late mother, who sacrificed everything for his revolutionary brother, but who also, in the last week of her life, found solace only in smoking and listening to him play his tar; his angry wife, who can't forgive him his melancholy and irresponsibility; and Irane, his first love, whose father forbade her to marry a poor musician and inflicted the wound that fuelled his music. The pieces of Nasser Ali Khan's story slowly fall into place, and as they do, we begin to understand him. By the time the eighth day dawns, having witnessed Nasser Ali Khan communing with Sufi mystics, Sophia Loren, the spirit of his late mother, his own demons and, bravely, with Azrael, the angel of death - we feel privileged to have known him. 
 
Brilliantly weaving together the past, present and future to explore the successes and joys, failures and disappointments of Nasser Ali Khan's life and through his story, the meaning of any of our lives - Marjane Satrapi has also once again presented us with a complex and deeply human portrait of the men and women of her country, and of pre-revolution Iran itself. She delivers this tremendous story about life and death, and the fear and courage both require, with her trademark humour and insight. Chicken With Plums is Marjane Satrapi's finest achievement to date.

Chicken With Plums

Emma-Lee Moss

A story of music, fandom and identity, from the acclaimed singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss (a.k.a. Emmy the Great) 
 
For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises are everywhere - their images are on every billboard and their music spills from shop speakers onto the streets. When she and her family move to England later that year, Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop will be pushed underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity. 
 
My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma-Lee found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It’s about suffering an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her heritage: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie. 
 
It’s a story of falling in love with a city, a country, its people and its music, while trying to find your own place to belong.

My Cantopop Nights

A Memoir in Songs

Jon Hotten

Los Angeles, 1988. In a summer of hedonism, everyone wants their share. 
 
On Sunset Strip, undiscovered bands dream of emulating their heroes: Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Poison and all the other chancers who got lucky... Above them in the canyons, the city’s privileged youth already live like rock stars. Drifting between these separate worlds is a journalist on the trail of stories that grow darker by the day: a rock star wannabe who may or may not be who he says he is, a guitar player who will do anything to succeed, crossing the line between reality and fantasy. 
 
Then comes beautiful Iris, distant Brenna, ambivalent Blair, Lana the singer - taking their chances, losing their way, doing whatever it takes… 
 
Set in the glory days when the music business was a vast and amoral empire where stardom seemed arbitrary and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were the lifestyle of choice, My Life and the Beautiful Music blurs memoir, myth and reality to recreate the last, lost era of a now-vanished world.

My Life And The Beautiful Music

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