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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

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Jeremy Atherton Lin

A Book of the Year for The New Yorker 
 
It’s 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion shows, and East Village hotel rooms; eventually, finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco. 
 
What emerges is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. Deep House moves through the couple’s various domiciles while unlocking doors to a lineage of outsiders who came before them: hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subvert the system and activists who go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for their freedoms. Combining cultural history with radically intimate memoir, Deep House is at once a romp through the queer archives and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

Deep House

The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

Luke Kemp

A radical retelling of human history through collapse – from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twenty-first century and beyond. 
 
** FEATURED IN THE NEW BBC SERIES CIVILISATIONS: RISE AND FALL ** 
** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ** 
 
‘A brilliant, utterly convincing account of the evolution of human society and why we are probably reaching humanity's end days’ HENRY MARSH 
 
'Absolutely essential reading for understanding why past civilisations collapsed, and how to protect our own from the same fate' LEWIS DARTNELL 
 
For the first 300,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. 
 
As we reluctantly congregated in the first farms and cities, people began to rely on novel lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. And when more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organization. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires – with vast bureaucracies and militaries – carved up and dominated the globe. 
 
What brought them down? Whether in the early cities of Cahokia in North America or Tiwanaku in South America, or the sprawling empires of Egypt, Rome and China, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power that hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population. 
 
Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last. 
 
'An excellent survey of human history through the collapses of Goliath-like kings, states and empires' OBSERVER 
 
'A comprehensive overview of societal collapse, based on the analysis of dozens of cases spanning thousands of years from the Paleolithic to today. Highly recommended' PETER TURCHIN 
 
'A deeply sobering and strangely inspiring history of how societies collapse - and how we can still save ours. Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins' JOHANN HARI 
 
'Like reading Thomas Piketty filtered through Mad Max' NEW YORK TIMES

Goliath’s Curse

The History and Future of Societal Collapse

Armistead Maupin

‘Logical Family is a sweet, filthy peach of a memoir from a cultural explosion of a man’ Caitlin Moran 
‘A beautiful memoir — so tender and funny and dignified and kind that it left me a little weepy’ Alan Cumming 
‘I read Logical Family as slowly as I could. It was like having the great man visit and sit smoking and gossiping from an armchair at the foot of the bed’ Patrick Gale 
__________ 
 
In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer. 
 
Raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man ‘on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired’. Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Logical Family

A Memoir

Anthony Delaney

'In this moving and revelatory book, Anthony Delaney gives a voice to women and men whose lives have been written out of history. At heart, Queer Georgians is about the triumph of love in adversity' Hallie Rubenhold 
 
‘A fascinating story, beautifully told . . . I was utterly enthralled from the first page to the last’ Tracy Borman 
 
‘Anthony Delaney is a superb public historian’ Dan Snow 
 
 
In this dazzling work of restorative history, Dr Anthony Delaney has traced the stories of people daring to challenge society's expectations, unearthing archives and court records to reveal the tragedies and the joys of queer life three centuries ago. From Mother Clap’s Holborn coffee house to the Ladies of Llangollen’s utopian homestead, Delaney breathes new life into the forgotten and offers radical new interpretations of celebrated figures such as Anne Lister and the Chevalier d'Éon. Queer Georgians is an invitation to view our shared history in a whole new light.

Queer Georgians

A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers

Shon Faye

Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice. 
 
In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond. 
 
The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.

The Transgender Issue

An Argument for Justice

Siddharth Kara

'A horrific tale of the slave trade, destined to become a classic' New York Times 
 
* PEN Literary Award Finalist 2026 
* New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 
* Time’s 100 Must Read Books of 2025 
* The New Yorker 12 Essential Non-Fiction Reads 2025 
 
From the author of New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Cobalt Red, discover the shocking true story and riveting account of the 18th century slave ship whose journey from the high seas to the High Court sparked the human rights campaign to end the slave trade. Perfect for fans of David Grann's The Wager and The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. 
 
In 1781, the Zorg set off from the Netherlands to buy slaves in West Africa to sell in the Caribbean. By the time its journey ended, the Zorg became the first undeniable argument against slavery. 
 
When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the crew's solution was to throw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save themselves and the most valuable slaves. The ship's owners then claimed their loss on insurance. 
 
The insurers refused to pay the claim due to the unusually high mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in favour of the ship's owners, with the slaves equated to horses with a compensation value of £30 per slave. Due to the outrage of one man present in court that day who wrote an anonymous letter to the press objecting to the result, a retrial was held. 
 
For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: Were the Africans on board people or cargo? 
 
In this riveting book, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Siddharth Kara brings the true horror of the Atlantic slave trade to life. 
 
The case catapulted the emerging anti-slavery movement to one of the most consequential moral campaigns that changed the course of history.

The Zorg

A True Story of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery

A Tale of Greed, Murder and the Abolition of Slavery

Johnny Drain

Dr Johnny Drain has spent his career exploring how fermentation has shaped the bodies we inhabit, the foods we eat and the world we live in. From making live yoghurt in his grandma’s kitchen, to fermenting butter at the world’s best restaurant, Noma, Dr Drain’s fascination with the magic of fermentation has led him around the globe. 
 
Adventures in Fermentation charts his culinary escapades and scientific discoveries to give us unprecedented insights into the microbial world. With irresistible wit and verve, chef and scientist Dr Drain illuminates the vast and unsung possibilities that fermentation brings to the table – from sweet enzyme syrups made from red mangos in Brazil to the fine art of fuzzy koji and umami-rich miso in Japan. He even shares his favourite recipes for you to follow in his footsteps. 
 
Whether you are an aspiring fermenter, interested in improving your gut health, or simply curious about the wonders of microbial life, this book will transform the way you see – and taste – the world.

Adventures in Fermentation

From Ancient Origins to Culinary Frontiers, an Exploration of the Microbes That Shape the World We Live In

Ashley Walters

Chris Isaie

FROM THE STAR OF THE PHENOMENAL NETFLIX SHOW, ADOLESCENCE, COMES A POWERFUL MEMOIR, PACKED WITH INSPIRING STORIES AND HARD-EARNED WISDOM FOR LIFE'S MOST CHALLENGING MOMENTS. 
 
“I wanted to write this book for that person who feels like the world doesn’t understand what life is like for them. I want to be honest about where I have been and how I have got to where I am. Because we can’t be what we can’t see.” – Ashley Walters 
 
'An icon of British and wider Black British culture.' GQ 
 
'A raw and inspiring testament to resilience.' STEVEN BARTLETT 
 
'A deeper truth that speaks to our whole time and culture, and offers us all a way forward.' AFUA HIRSCH 
 
'An important and powerful read.' IAN WRIGHT 
 
From Adolescence and Top Boy to So Solid Crew, Ashley Walters’ explosive on-screen performances and trailblazing music has always explored the same conflicting forces that have governed his life. Born and raised in Peckham, his father in and out of prison, Ashley found the gang culture in inner city London inescapable. At 15, he was stabbed in the neck and left for dead. At 18, he had a gun held to his head as he cradled his newborn son. At 20, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. 
 
In this brave and inspiring book, Ashley opens up about his turbulent past. He writes candidly about his battles with identity, addiction, family and fame, and the realisation that, after years of struggle, only he could change his future. 
 
‘Always Winning’ is the framework Ashley developed to turn his life around. Revealed for the first time in this book, explored through powerful stories from his life and career, he shares the principles of this philosophy and shows how anyone can use them to overcome their own challenges, helping them to align a true sense of purpose with inner happiness and personal success and fulfilment.

Always Winning

David Hepworth

When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July 1985 we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. 
 
As the forty years since have shown he - and many others of his generation - were just getting started. 
 
This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the 60s and 70s exploited the age of spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honour in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else had retired. 
 
Hence this is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas for ever.

Hope I Get Old Before I Die

Why rock stars never retire

Karen Hao

Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times &amp; Schroders Business Book of the Year 
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 2025 
Shortlisted for Foyles Non Fiction Book of the Year 2025 
A New York Times Bestseller 
 
An eye-opening account of the tech arms race shaping out planet, from an award-winning journalist and AI insider to the world of Sam Altman and OpenAI 
 
When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces. 
But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We have entered a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace, as a small group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down. 
In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

Empire of AI

Inside the reckless race for total domination

Jonathan Mahler

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt and reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets – and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions were boiling over. 
 
Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events – involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters – would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Larry Kramer. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. The Tompkins Square Riots. Jimmy Breslin. Ivan Boesky. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, Black Monday and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire – the tabloids. 
 
In The Gods of New York, bestselling author Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these outsized characters and of these convulsive, defining years. It’s an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city, drawing in and lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture — a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker — when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems that were intended to protect them? New York was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

The Gods of New York

The Tumultuous Eighties, from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots

Oswyn Murray

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century. 
 
Through the work of different historians, including Burckhardt and Braudel, and others newly discovered, the book creates a rich picture of a European approach to history. It also draws on the wide variety of philosophical approaches from Hobbes to Foucault that have influenced interpretation of the Greeks, showing the limits of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the ambiguities of democracy, and the difficulty of understanding the past without the present.

The Muse of History

The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present

Robin Wall Kimmerer

John Burgoyne

'This book will nourish your soul, heart, and mind' Anthony Doerr 
 
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? 
 
Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” 
 
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE AUTUMN BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, GUARDIAN, TIME, OPRAH DAILY, LIT HUB, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BOOKPAGE

The Serviceberry

An Economy of Gifts and Abundance

Ciarán Murphy

Hurling is Ireland’s national game – a source of fascination and pride, even to people who have never played it. Ciarán Murphy, a lifelong club footballer, used to be one of those people. Then he spent a summer trying to play hurling with a tiny club in the West Waterford Gaeltacht. Along the way he embarked on a quest to understand the history, geography and mystique of this extraordinary sport. 
 
Old Parish is the club of Ciarán’s father, a club where relatives of his are still deeply involved, and possibly the only place brave (or stupid) enough to take on a forty-one-year-old newcomer to the game. Predictably (and at times hilariously), Ciarán finds out just how difficult a sport hurling is to pick up when you’re in your sporting dotage, up against men who’ve played it since childhood. 
 
Ciarán also explores why hurling is played in only half the country; he investigates the origins of hurling clubs’ antipathy to football and the difficulties of establishing hurling in new areas; he looks into the mysteries of hurley-making; and he seeks to understand why, when a hurling legend refers to the sport as ‘the greatest game ever played by any man’, he has to be taken seriously. 
 
Anyone who has ever watched hurling knows that it is something unique and extraordinary. Old Parish explains why.

Old Parish

Notes on Hurling

Dan Hicks

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator. 
 
Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. 
 
Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Every Monument Will Fall

A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

Manvir Singh

What are the origins of shamanism and what is its future? Do shamans believe in their powers? What exactly is trance? What can we learn from indigenous healing practices? 
 
In this enlightening book, anthropologist Manvir Singh offers a new explanation for one of the most misunderstood religious traditions. Travelling from Indonesia to the Amazon, living with shamans and observing music, drug use and indigenous curing ceremonies, he journeys into the origins of shamanism. Fundamentally, shamans are specialists who use altered states to engage with unseen realities and provide services like healing and divination. As Singh shows, shamanism’s ubiquity stems from its psychological resonance. Its core appeal is transformation: a specialist uses initiations, deprivation and non-ordinary states to seemingly become a different kind of human, one possessed with the superpowers necessary to tame life’s uncertainty. 
 
Following a fascinating cast of characters, Singh tells a larger story about the ancient and modern expressions of this timeless tradition. He argues that biomedicine can learn from shamanic practices, yet that psychedelic enthusiasts completely misrepresent history. He also shows that shamanic traditions will forever re-emerge – and that by journeying into humanity’s oldest spiritual practice, we come to better understand ourselves, our history and our future.

Shamanism

The Timeless Religion

Imani Perry

Many of us think we know the American South. We can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole. 
 
This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterise so much of Southern life. 
 
Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America shows that in order to envision a more humane future for the United States, we must shift our focus below the Mason-Dixon Line.

South to America

A Journey to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Music is what makes us alive, mindful and connected to each other. Music is what makes us human. This is the power of music. 
 
Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason knows and feels the transformative power of music as much as any musician alive. From winning the prestigious BBC Young Musician Award to performing at Harry and Meghan’s wedding; from Bach’s solo suites to Bob Marley’s reggae; his ferocious passion shines through in every single performance, whether in a packed-out concert hall or on record. 
 
But how was it that someone like him – a person of colour, from a state school in Nottingham – rose to the upper echelons of the classical music world? What were the obstacles that he had to overcome, what did he learn along the way, and how could a young person follow in his footsteps today? 
 
In The Power of Music, Sheku explores the experiences and values that led him here, from a childhood of football practice and family music sessions, to his work today in the world’s finest concert halls and in the less privileged communities that surround them. As his star continues to rise, he shows us the darker side of an industry ruled by exclusivity and stubborn adherence to tradition. 
 
With its power to transform our mental and physical health, to effect social change, and to make a house a home, Sheku shows us that classical music is for everyone, not just an elite few. The Power of Music is a celebration of music of all sorts and those who make it, and a rallying call to change.

The Power of Music

How Music Connects Us All

Esther Ghey

On 11 February 2023, 16-year-old Brianna Ghey was lured to a local park where she was tragically murdered. Amidst the international outpouring of outrage, anguish and displays of support, her usually shy and private mother, Esther, came to reflect on how she could redirect her personal grief into campaigning to help others and to create a lasting legacy for her child. A clarion call for change, this is an essential and urgent read about finding threads of hope in the darkest of times and uniting to protect our young people from the threats they face in an increasingly unchecked digital world.

Under a Pink Sky

Kate Lister

The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow - hopefully for the better - but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from.Based on the popular research project Whores of Yore, and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex draws upon Dr Kate Lister's extensive knowledge of sex history. From medieval impotence tests to twentieth-century testicle thefts, from the erotic frescoes of Pompeii, to modern-day sex doll brothels, Kate unashamedly roots around in the pants of history, debunking myths, challenging stereotypes and generally getting her hands dirty.This fascinating book is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang, and illustrated with eye-opening, toe-curling and meticulously sourced images from the past.You will laugh, you will wince and you will wonder just how much has actually changed.

A Curious History of Sex

Quinn Slobodian

After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.

Hayek's Bastards

The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right

Devi Sridhar

Have you ever questioned why, despite the avalanche of self-help books and optimization hacks, we remain embroiled in multiple global health crises? Populations worldwide are gaining life-shortening excess weight (even in poorer countries), and water contamination is rampant (even in richer countries). In such dire circumstances, a gratitude journal won’t help. 
 
The stark reality is that we’ve been sold a monumental lie. The obsession with individual health optimization has distracted us from the real game-changer: holding governments accountable for policies that can significantly extend our lifespans. How Not to Die (Too Soon) is a vital, transformative guide that shifts the focus from individual responsibility to societal accountability. It’s time to demand the changes that will save lives.

How Not to Die (Too Soon)

The Lies We’ve Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us

Rob Cowen

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025 
 
‘A dazzlingly inventive work of literature’ Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways'A wonderful, epic braiding of history, geography and personal memoir' James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral____________________________________________________________________At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. 
 
In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves. 
 
Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway. 
_________________________________________________________________________ 
 
'Stunning and utterly unique. The North Road sits in a genre of one' Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole 
 
'A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history, The North Road truly is a trip' Melissa Harrison, author of All Among The Barley 
 
'Thought-provoking and beautiful' Matt Gaw, author of Under The Stars 
 
'A beautifully woven and mesmerising book' Tom Bullough, author of Sarn Helen 
 
'Sweeping, sensitive and enduring' Tristan Gooley, author of How To Read A Tree 
‘Rob has given the A1 an entirely new sense of life’ Luke Turner, author of Out Of The Woods

The North Road

Frances Ryan

'No one really talks about it. No one really talks about what it is to be a disabled woman, especially a young one … To navigate all the standard parts of life - exams, careers, dating - but with a body that is different from everyone else’s.' 
 
Almost one in four women in the UK have some sort of disability, yet this subject is too often shrouded in silence and stereotypes. Who Wants Normal? by the award-winning journalist and author Frances Ryan is a game-changing take on disability and feminism. 
 
Part memoir, part manifesto, it explores six facets of life: education, careers, health, body image, relationships and representation, as well as how to survive life’s bumps in the road. It draws on Frances’s own experience as well as her interviews with over fifty of Britain’s best-known women and non-binary people with mental and physical health conditions, including Jameela Jamil, Sophie Morgan, Ruth Madeley, Nikki Fox, Rosie Jones, Fearne Cotton, Emma Barnett, Ellie Goldstein and Katie Piper. 
 
Who Wants Normal? lifts the lid on and redefines what it means to be a disabled woman in Britain today. It offers support, inspiration and a sense of solidarity to the many women with disabilities and long-term health conditions – as well as opening the eyes of anyone wanting to better understand life with a disability.

Who Wants Normal?

Life Lessons from Disabled Women

The Disabled Girls’ Guide to Life

Noam Chomsky

With exceptional clarity and power of argument, Noam Chomsky lays bare as no one else can the realities of contemporary geopolitics. Divided into four sections and originally published in the US as individual short books which have collectively sold over half a million copies, How the World Works is a collection of speeches and interviews with Chomsky by David Barsamian, edited by Arthur Naiman. It includes What Uncle Sam Really Wants, about US foreign policy; The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, about the new global economy, food, Third World 'economic miracles' and the roots of racism; Secrets, Lies and Democracy, about the US, the CIA, religious fundamentalism, global inequality and the coming eco-catastrophe; and The Common Good, about equality, freedom, the media, the myth of Third World debt and manufacturing dissent.

How the World Works

Katie Cotugno

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. 
 
Liar's Beach, a Level 3 Reader, is A2 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to three clauses, introducing first conditional, past continuous and present perfect simple for general experience. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear on most pages. 
 
Lindon visits his friend Jasper at his parent’s huge beach house in Martha’s Vineyard. Jasper’s family are rich but Linden’s family is working class and he wants to keep this a secret. Liar’s Beach is a story about friends, money, secrets, love, and lies.

Penguin Readers Level 3: Liar's Beach (ELT Graded Reader)

Abridged Edition

Joe Dunthorne

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. 
 
The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew… 
 
Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it? 
 
Children of Radium is a remarkable, searching meditation on individual and collective inheritance. Witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising, it considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

Yehudis Fletcher

As the daughter of a rabbi raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, Yehudis struggled to conform to the strict expectations placed upon her and her siblings. Outspoken, curious and desperate to know more about G-d, she felt fenced in by arbitrary rules and questions left unanswered. 
 
As she grew older, these restrictions intensified and her questions for G-d hung heavier than ever. Repeatedly let down by those who were supposed to protect her and pushed on to a path that seemed to take her further away from who she really was, she began to yearn for a life where she could embrace all facets of herself. 
 
When Yehudis’s sexuality came to blows with the expectations of her family and her community, the pressure to inhabit a binary position reached fever pitch. Confronted with either losing the faith she loved or losing herself, Yehudis made the most daring decision of all: she decided to stay. 
 
Wry and exhilarating, Chutzpah is a fearless exploration of what is possible when one person simply refuses to choose between abandoning their roots and abandoning themselves.

Chutzpah

A memoir of faith, sexuality and daring to stay

Deepa Paul

What if you dared to want more – from love, from life, from yourself? 
 
Deepa Paul rises from her boyfriend’s bed in the early hours of dawn. She gets dressed, slips away with a kiss and cycles home where she is welcomed lovingly by her husband. There isn’t a glimmer of shame, deception or guilt, only the honesty and compassion needed to make this kind of life possible – even if it wasn’t always this easy. 
 
Whose idea was it? What are the rules? Are you ever jealous? Deepa answers these questions openly and tenderly, as she seeks the truths that so many of us want to discover. Can I ask for what I want? Do I deserve it? Is it worth it? 
 
Beautiful and bold, this is one woman’s story of becoming, of desire and of identity, and of asking the questions she deserved to find the answers to.

Ask Me

A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently

Owen Hatherley

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

The Alienation Effect

How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

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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