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

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Lluís Quintana-Murci

We are living through a revolution in knowledge. Over the past twenty years, genetics has shed light on the history of humanity in unprecedented ways. It enables us to study an individual's genome, compare it with populations worldwide, and understand its place in human history. 
 
Here biologist Lluís Quintana-Murci, one of the scientists at the forefront of this research, reveals how population genetics is transforming our understanding of who we are. Thanks to numerous discoveries, we now know how Homo sapiens spread around the world: from their exit from Africa approximately 60,000 years ago to the recent settlement of the remote lands of Polynesia within the last millennia. Population genetics has also shown that humans mixed with now-extinct species, including Neanderthals, enabling them to adapt to new environments and survive diseases. These cutting-edge genetic findings will shape our future too, offering the key to medicine tailored to individuals. 
 
But the greatest revelation of population genetics is that we are all mixed and the product of our ancestors’ long odyssey of migrations and adaptations across the globe. As Quintana-Murci explains, without diversity, without difference, there is no evolution. 
 
Filled with fascinating insights from the front line of research, Human Peoples is a pioneering guide to the ground-breaking science of our shared past.

Human Peoples

On the Genetic Traces of Human Evolution, Migration and Adaptation

Paul McCartney

In 2020, an extraordinary trove of nearly a thousand photographs taken by Paul McCartney on a 35mm camera was re-discovered in his archive. They intimately record the months towards the end of 1963 and beginning of 1964 when Beatlemania erupted in the UK and, after the band's first visit to the USA, they became the most famous people on the planet. The photographs are McCartney's personal record of this explosive time, when he was, as he puts it, in the 'Eyes of the Storm'. 
 
1964: Eyes of the Storm presents 275 of McCartney's photographs from the six cities of these intense, legendary months - Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C. and Miami - and many never-before-seen portraits of John, George and Ringo. In his Foreword and Introductions to these city portfolios, McCartney remembers 'what else can you call it - pandemonium' and conveys his impressions of Britain and America in 1964 - the moment when the culture changed and the Sixties really began.

1964: Eyes of the Storm

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins has travelled the length and breadth of England to select his thousand best churches. Organised by county, each church is described - often with delightful asides - and given a star-rating from one to five. All of the county sections are prefaced by a map locating each church, and lavishly illustrated with colour photos from the Country Life archive. Jenkins contends that these churches house a gallery of vernacular art without equal in the world. Here, he brings that museum to public attention.

England's Thousand Best Churches

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch's modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbours in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us an intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, vengefulness and forgiveness. 
 
 A powerful literary reckoning, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know is the culmination of twenty-five years of reporting. The book takes its title from a Rwandan adage that speaks to the uneasy trade-offs that reconciliation demands. Since the genocide, Rwanda has engaged in the most ambitious and sweeping process of accountability ever undertaken. 'Truth Heals' was the slogan. But truth also wounds. And truth is always contested. 
 
 As Gourevitch returns to the same families in one small hillside village, their accounts of killing and surviving inform and enlarge one another, illuminating the ways that we seek, individually and collectively, to negotiate our irreparable pasts. This moving book continuously invites us - as only great writing can - to think, and to think again.

You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know

Thomas Hegghammer

Mujahidin

David Napier

Social Trust

David Zilber

Rotten

An Edible History of Human/Microbe Coevolution

Christienna Fryar

British history has long had a void at its centre. Content to pick up the story of the Caribbean only in the 1940s with the Windrush generation it has no good explanation for the periodic explosions of violent racism against Black and Asian people; it has only the most limited understanding of how Britain became so powerful; and it offers no real analysis of the deep and irreconcilable contradictions at the heart of some of Britain’s ‘core values’. If it is the job of a national history to fully reflect the people who live within the nation, British history has for too long told people of Caribbean heritage that they have no history here.In this compelling new history, Christienna Fryar shows how for the last five hundred years the Caribbean and Britain have shaped each other in profound ways. From the earliest encounters between indigenous societies and English colonists in the 1500s to the citizenship scandal of the last several years, she reveals how the Caribbean has been key to Britain economically, culturally and ideologically: the source of foods Britons eat, the goods in their homes, and what they have imagined in fiction. For centuries, people from the Caribbean have consistently pushed more expansive ideas of freedom into British society, while the way Britain has treated Caribbean people – from enslaved people, through the deeply comprised process of abolition in the nineteenth century, to the elders of the Windrush generation – has long exposed the profound limits of its liberal ideals.Britain’s Caribbean history is not hidden. It’s there for those who want to find it. And to see it, as Christienna Fryar shows, requires looking at Britain differently, asking different questions, and writing national history in different ways.

Entangled Lands

A Caribbean History of Britain

Steven Klein

Wherever there are workers, there are unions: and we need them now, more than ever. 
 
Whether in formal organisations or grass-roots collectives, people have always found ways to work together for a better world. Today, a historic wave of strikes and union organizing is sweeping the globe &ndash; from teachers to Amazon workers, barristers to actors, train-drivers and doctors alike. Dealing with an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, rising inequality, and rule by some of the richest leaders in history, ordinary people have had enough. And yet many of us have lost the central source of our political power: the union. 
 
Union is the first global philosophy and history of trade unions, which shows how the health of our democracies is the health of our unions. Tracing the idea of unions from the ancient world up through the present &ndash; from ancient Rome and the historic struggles for workers&rsquo; rights in Europe, to the fights for decolonization and against authoritarian regimes in the Global South &ndash; and drawing on political theory, social science and current affairs, it challenges our narrow idea of unions to show how they are crucial, not just to achieve better conditions for their members, but a healthier state of democracy for all of us. 
 
Union shows us that, if we are to save democracy today, we need a new vision: one that puts the organized power of ordinary citizens at the heart of its rebirth.

Union

The Global History of a Movement

Larry Siedentop

Americans in Exile

Hilton Als

Hilton Als grew up in a corner of Brooklyn scarred by riots, racial segregation and sexual prejudice. As a young teenager, he began to glimpse possibility in the different cultures and ways of being he encountered through high school; in the black men and white men who found ways to be together. As a burgeoning writer in a Manhattan pulsing with new culture - with hip hop, Basquiat, nightclubs and new wave - Hilton at last came together with the gay family he had longed for. The timing was not opportune: reports of a 'rare cancer' were beginning to trickle through the press. 
 
Part autobiography, part reportage, part cultural criticism, I Don't Remember weaves the impossible story of queer America in the age of the AIDs crisis. It is an elegy like no other for an unsung generation of gay men: of heroic lovers and friends, visionary makers, artists and creators. By turns lyrical, wry, and exquisite in its poetic, rapid-fire storytelling, it sings a song of the necessity of connection, and the grandness of human endeavor, especially when it comes to loving, and being loved, in the face of social limitations, stigma, and unspeakable tragedy.

I Don't Remember

Lucy Jones

Sugarheads

Wolfram Eilenberger

The Haunted Present

Adorno, Sontag, Foucault, Feyerabend and the Ends of Philosophy

Jamie Gianoutsos

In Rome's Long Shadow

How the Classical Tradition Shaped the Modern World

Laure Murat

Proust's In Search of Lost Time is many things. It is a staggering achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a literary reckoning with memory; it is also a massive reading challenge, a book more abandoned than read. For Laure Murat - who first read The Search when she was twenty years old - it was a map to the world of the French aristocracy, the very world into which she had been born. The chateaux and balls of The Search were, for her, the backdrop of her family story, understood anew through Proust's eyes. 
 
In this beautiful book, Murat explores the fixity of the aristocratic life, which codifies everything from speech to dress to movement; and Proust's astonishing seven-volume novel, which, with fluidity and linguistic virtuosity, shifts focus from the codes for behaving to the experience of living. In Proust: A Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature, and the honour of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.

Proust: A Family Affair

Lindsey Fitzharris

Edinburgh, 1878. A medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle squeezes into the Royal Infirmary’s packed operating theatre, hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrated professor whose uncanny powers of observation blur the line between diagnosis and detective work. 
 
That professor was Joseph Bell, who became one of the most celebrated surgeons and medical reformers of his age. With a flair for the theatrical and an eye for clues hidden in the tiniest details, he astonished his students with lightning-fast deductions about his patients’ backgrounds and ailments. Together with Edinburgh’s chief police surgeon, Henry Duncan Littlejohn, Bell also investigated some of the highest-profile murders of the century, including those of Jack the Ripper, and collaborated with forensic specialists such as a ballistics expert named Dr. Watson. And as Conan Doyle’s mentor, Bell inspired the creation of literature’s most iconic sleuth: Sherlock Holmes. 
 
International bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris guides us through the smog-choked alleys and crowded slums of Victorian Edinburgh to tell the compelling, untold story of the birth of modern forensic science through the life of its most charismatic figure.

Sleuth-Hound

The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes

Patricia Nilsson

If online pornography is a circus, its tent has been pitched all around us. And we’re not just spectators – we’re the prancing ponies. 
 
Pornography is everywhere. Every day, tens of thousands of hours of sexual content is uploaded to the internet. In a single year, visitors to the world’s most popular adult site will view more than four billion hours of porn—the equivalent of half a million years. This explosion in online pornography is affecting our world in profound and wholly unexpected ways. And yet we know strikingly little about where it comes from, whose pockets it’s lining, or what its lasting effects might be. 
 
In Guilty Pleasure, award-winning journalist Patricia Nilsson exposes how, over the past two decades, this vast, shadowy industry has quietly reshaped sexuality, culture, work, and the internet itself. She tracks how the digital age turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely, as Hollywood moguls gave way to anonymous moneymen determined to profit from our desires – at almost any cost. Today, whether we consume porn or not, we are living in the world they made: in an economy, and a society, saturated by the logic of pornography. We are stuck in its addictive, alienating cycles of stimulation, self-soothing, and craving. 
 
Drawing on years of investigative reporting, and emerging research about the impacts of porn, Guilty Pleasure uncovers the inner workings of the industry that has revolutionized everything. Nilsson brings to light the secretive owners of the companies that dominate it; the complicated realities of online sex work; and the bizarre role payment companies play in legislating what is, and isn’t, acceptable. Ultimately, she shows, the story of pornography in the online age leads us to the most urgent question of all: what does it mean to live in a world where almost everything about us – our attention, our desires, our anxieties – is monitored and manipulated by unaccountable figures who will stop at nothing to keep us watching?

Guilty Pleasure

The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else

Jared Diamond

We often read history as the biographies of ‘great men’ who shaped the world. But are leaders, whichever field they are in, really that influential? Should CEOs be given large bonuses when a company performs well? Why, when a political leader is assassinated, is their successor as likely to improve as damage a country? When do we know if firing a coach has changed the fortunes of the team? 
 
World-renowned historian and bestselling author Jared Diamond argues that leaders are neither heroic exceptions nor products of circumstance. Looking at four difference spheres: history, business, sport and religion, Diamond asks under which conditions is a leader most likely to make a difference and why. 
 
Drawing on the life and career of iconic leaders – from Botswana president Seretse Khama to legendary UCLA football coach John Wooden – Diamond shows us how leadership effectiveness is determined by a range of complex interrelated factors, from resources to geography, culture to technology. 
 
Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings is a thought-provoking assessment of when leaders can bring about effective change, when they don’t, and perhaps whether we need them at all.

Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings

(When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?

Naomi Klein

Astra Taylor

The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side. 
This is the world of End Times Fascism. 
 
In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’. 
 
But, Klein and Taylor reveal, the new supremacist survivalists are far from impregnable. They have no vision of a shared future. All they offer are remixes of a bygone past: the nihilistic, sadistic pleasures of domination. If we’re to meet this critical moment and defend what’s left of democracy before it’s smashed up beyond repair, we must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this earth, in the here and now. A story not of end times – but of better times. This book shows us how.

End Times Fascism

And the Fight for the Living World

Daniel Susskind

What should the next generation learn—and what should they stop worrying about—in a world transformed by artificial intelligence? AI is rewriting the rules in the classroom, the job market and the workplace, leaving parents, teachers, students and all types of workers unsure about how best to prepare for what lies ahead. In What Should My Children Do?, globally renowned economist Daniel Susskind cuts through the outdated advice to show us what young people actually need to succeed now. 
 
We should not ban tools or discourage new skills that are in demand, Susskind argues, or cling to inherited ways of working. Instead, he reveals how people can master new technologies without eroding other essential skills. From reorganizing the curriculum to re-imagining white-collar careers, Susskind maps a smarter, more productive path forward. 
 
This requires a fundamental mindset shift: we must embrace the extraordinary opportunities that AI brings—from personal tutors to scientific breakthroughs—rather than retreat from them. Drawing on fifteen years of research, this book is an evidence-based and practical guide to one of the most urgent questions of our time.

What Should My Children Do?

How to Flourish in the Age of AI

Neil Price

Almost everyone has heard of the Vikings: scouring the coasts of Europe in their longships, with plunder and pillage. Those raiders were real and deserved their reputation, but in fact they were only ever a small minority of the Scandinavians. ‘Viking’ comes from the Old Norse word for pirate, and while we may use that label for every Northerner of the eighth to eleventh centuries, in reality they followed many different callings. 
 
In his revelatory new book, archaeologist Neil Price takes us on a journey of individual encounters across the whole of the Norse world. From the beginning of the Viking Age to its end, the true diversity of their lives is brought out in vivid clarity from excavated evidence: we meet sea-kings and sorceresses; arctic hunters and shapeshifters; Sámi nomads and bears given burials; mercenaries and traders; the free and the enslaved; immigrants and diplomats; followers of many gods, and the worshippers of one; townsfolk and farmers; and yes, the real Vikings too. The time that bears their name will never seem so simple again.

The Sea-King and the Sorceress

Life and Death in the Viking Age

Jill Lepore

It presented itself as a form of futurism. But the future envisioned by the architects of the Artificial State looked, chillingly, like the very worst of the past…We live in the age of data. Over the past century, rapidly evolving technologies have transformed every aspect of our society, in troubling and seemingly unstoppable ways. Political campaigns have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, multinational corporations control public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to an end, replaced by the rule of artificial intelligence. Today, power is maintained through mystification: machines, we are told, know what humans cannot. Yet nothing about any of this was, or is, inevitable.In this astounding account of how technology has corroded democracy around the world, prizewinning historian Jill Lepore traces the rise and fall of what she calls the ‘Artificial State’. Examining everything from robot rights and Elon Musk’s origins to what data centres cost wildlife, Lepore offers a history – and a perspective – wholly missing from the debate.History, Lepore demonstrates, is driven not by machines but by individuals, societies, cultures and ideas. The architects of the Artificial State had no theory of governance, nor did they have any interest in the rule of law, or any capacity for restraint. They drew their ideas not from science, but from science fiction. Yet everything destructive that they have done can be undone. By illuminating the origins of the Artificial State, Lepore reveals how we can escape it – helping us to imagine, and fight for, a different future.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Daniel Lieberman

Why is it so hard to decide what to eat? We are bombarded with conflicting advice on weight and health, fad diets and food pyramids. No wonder so many of us feel confused and guilty. 
 
In Fed Up, Daniel Lieberman tackles this confusion head on with his trademark blend of lively storytelling and myth-busting science. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology and physiology, he explains how humans first evolved to eat; how fire, farming and industrialization transformed our diets; and what that history combined with rigorous medical science can – and cannot – tell us about what to eat today to stay healthy and manage our weight. In each chapter, Lieberman explores what different diets – from Paleo to veganism to intermittent fasting – tell us about nutrition and health, even putting these diets to the test himself. His conclusion is liberating: there is no optimal diet. What matters instead is variety, moderation and finding out what works for you. 
 
Clear-eyed, humane and always entertaining, Fed Up gives us the tools to make wiser, kinder choices about what we eat.

Fed Up

What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet and Eating Well

David Thomson

There are few greater film lovers than David Thomson who, over fifty years, has built a reputation as one of the wisest and most penetrating voices on the art form. But every flicker of light has its shadow. In this profound reckoning, Thomson confronts the dark side of the movies—responsible for creating an alternate reality and fantasyland that has only deepened the isolation and disconnection of our society over the course of a century. 
 
Thomson explores the high and low points of film history with his usual brilliant insight—sharp and arresting readings of movies from Metropolis to Rear Window to The Godfather can be found in these pages. But he also shows the ways in which our love of voyeurism and villainy, and the passivity which the movies further engender, have led to a coarsening not just of a medium, but of the larger culture, including our political life. A bracing and polemical book, this is a powerful capstone to a distinguished career.

A Sudden Flicker of Light

A Revisionist History of the Movies

Ian Bogost

In an era dominated by convenience and efficiency, you’d think life would be easier and, most importantly, happier. Shouldn’t all the time saved by technology leave us with more for ourselves? The Atlantic columnist, game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost thinks not. From digital tickets to automated taps, he argues that the simple, tactile pleasures of daily life have been replaced by sleek but soulless design. 
 
Through engaging anecdotes and sharp analysis of our dematerialized lives, Bogost uncovers how modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of moments that keep us grounded and human. The Small Stuff is not a nostalgic trip through the analogue world of a bygone era but instead reframes our view of the material world from merely utilitarian into a site of joy and gratification. Finding happiness, Bogost shows us, doesn’t require complete self-transformation, but simply noticing the sensory pleasures all around us. 
 
Humorous, thought-provoking and practical, The Small Stuff is a manifesto for re-enchanting us with the world, by observing and enjoying the small moments that make up our lives.

The Small Stuff

The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life

Joad Raymond Wren

Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy. It runs through history and literature from Plato to Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish to Ursula Le Guin. Utopia, this book shows, was for them a tool for exploring the horizons of thought, asking the unaskable and challenging entrenched assumptions about how society has to be. 
 
The Uses of Utopia travels not only to the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also the places where those inspired by visions of perfection tried to establish them, from the egalitarian communities built in colonial Mexico to the novelist Étienne Cabet’s disastrous attempt to realize socialism on the Mississippi. We see the groundbreaking ideas, about liberty and the law, sex and the sexes, work and wealth, that imagining an ideal society made possible. We hear the voices of radicals of many kinds talking freely to each other - and also to us. Here, in our imperfect world, how will you use utopia?

The Uses of Utopia

Travels to the Limits of Thought

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter