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

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Abbie Ross

In 1972 Abbie Ross’s cosmopolitan parents move the family from London to rural North Wales, exchanging a town house in Islington for a remote farmhouse on a hill. 
Abbie’s Liverpudlian grandparents – dedicated followers of Liberace, sleek in scented mohair and patent leather – are sure they’ve lost their minds. For Abbie, though, the only cloud on the horizon is the nearby hippy commune and its inhabitants. There are worrying signs that this is the sort of ‘better life’ that her parents have in mind. 
Brilliantly evoking a particular time and place, Abbie’s memoir re-creates a world of dens and pineapple chunks, of John Craven’s Newsround and fishing for sticklebacks – and the joy but also the burning powerlessness of being a child. Disgusted by her father’s ‘yogic flying’ and her mother’s taste for brown bread and billowing cheesecloth (with no bra), Abbie is desperate not to be different. Far better, she thinks, to fit in with shouting, pathologically nosy Sara across the fields,or stay close to Philip next door – paralysingly shy and with a preference for orange food and no trousers (‘nice to have a bit of air’) ... 
Rich with detail that reveals a whole world, Hippy Dinners is very funny and full of heart. It is also a delicate and astute portrait of the brutal realities of ‘a simple life’.

Hippy Dinners

A memoir of a rural childhood

John Lewis-Stempel

_________________ 
 
'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES 
 
WINNER OF THE THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2015 
 
What really goes on in the long grass? 
 
Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren,the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.

Meadowland

the private life of an English field

Declan Murphy

Ami Rao

**WINNER OF THE GENERAL OUTSTANDING SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD** 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017** 
 
Coping with your own death, when you are not yet dead, is a strange thing... 
 
A natural on a horse since he was able to walk, and imbued with a pure love of riding, Declan Murphy became one of the most brilliant jockeys of his generation before his world came crashing down at the final hurdle of a race at Haydock Park. His skull shattered in twelve places, he was believed to be dead, the last rites were read and the Racing Post prepared his obituary. Miraculously, and the word is not used lightly, he survived and defied medical thinking in recovering to the extent that eighteen months after his fall, he was able to saddle up for one more race. As usual, he won. 
 
For 23 years, Declan has been unable to tell his story, to bring to words existence on the frontier between life and death, to describe the incredible bond between man and horse. But now, in an extraordinary collaboration with Ami Rao, she has helped him find those words, a way to piece together what happened before, during and after, what it all meant and what it means to us all. It is a story of triumph, fear, love and loss, by turns primal, heartbreaking and inspirational, and ultimately, it is the story of hope, and of life.

Centaur

Shortlisted For The William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2017

Richard Dawkins

Born to parents who were enthusiastic naturalists, and linked through his wider family to a clutch of accomplished scientists, Richard Dawkins was bound to have biology in his genes. But what were the influences that shaped his life? And who inspired him to become the pioneering scientist and public thinker now famous (and infamous to some) around the world? 
 
In An Appetite for Wonder we join him on a personal journey from an enchanting childhood in colonial Africa, through the eccentricities of boarding school in England, to his studies at the University of Oxford’s dynamic Zoology Department, which sparked his radical new vision of Darwinism, The Selfish Gene. Through Dawkins’s honest self-reflection, touching reminiscences and witty anecdotes, we are finally able to understand the private influences that shaped the public man who, more than anyone else in his generation, explained our own origins.

An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

Jessica Pan

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat 
 
What would happen if a shy introvert lived as an out-and-out extrovert for one year? Jessica Pan is about to find out… 
 
* 
 
When she found herself jobless and friendless, sitting in the familiar Jess-shaped crease on her sofa, she couldn't help but wonder what life might have looked like if she had been a little more open to new experiences and new people, a little less attached to going home instead of going to the pub. 
 
So, she made a vow: to push herself to live the life of an extrovert for a year. She wrote a list: improv, a solo holiday and... talking to strangers on the tube. She regretted it instantly. 
 
Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come follows Jess's hilarious and painful year of misadventures in extroverting, reporting back from the frontlines for all the introverts out there. 
 
But is life actually better or easier for the extroverts? Or is it the nightmare Jess always thought it would be? 
 
* 
 
‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon 
 
‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan 
 
‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously

Barry Norman

Barry Norman was one of the nation's most popular and enduring broadcasters. Journalist, writer and presenter, he was best known for having fronted the BBC's flagship Film programme for more than 25 years. 
 
While working as a gossip columnist for The Daily Sketch, Barry met a pretty, talented young journalist called Diana Narracott, when they were sent to cover the same news story. Within a year they were married, their union lasting until Diana's untimely death in 2011. 
 
In this heartfelt memoir, Barry introduces us to the remarkable woman he knew so well and loved so deeply. He traces their careers and lives together, describing how Diana moved from being an accomplished journalist, to mother-of-two, to best-selling author. Through his writing, we grow to love Diana's irrepressible nature, fierce intelligence, her sense of fun and even her stubbornness. 
 
Writing in his entertaining, inimitable style, Barry shows how, like any couple, he and Diana had their disagreements but that the deep-rooted love and respect they had for each other ultimately ensured a long and happy marriage. With heart-breaking honesty, he shares the difficulty he and their family faced while Diana was fighting ill-health, as well as the pain he still feels at the loss of his wife who he describes as 'the best friend a man could ever hope for'.

See You In The Morning

Sam Kean

For centuries, scientists had only one way to study the brain: wait for misfortune to strike - strokes, seizures, infections, lobotomies, horrendous accidents, phantom limbs, Siamese twins - and see how the victims changed afterwards. In many cases their survival was miraculous, and observers marvelled at the transformations that took place when different parts of the brain were destroyed. Parents suddenly couldn't recognise their children. Pillars of the community became pathological liars and paedophiles. Some people couldn't speak but could still sing. Others couldn't read but could write. 
The stories of these people laid the foundations of modern neuroscience and, century by century, key cases taught scientists what every last region of the brain did. With lucid explanations and incisive wit, Sam Kean explores the brain's secret passageways and recounts the forgotten tales of the ordinary individuals whose struggles, resilience and deep humanity made neuroscience possible.

The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons

The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

Ruth McKernan

Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research it is Ruth McKernan's way. When her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse his medical condition. 
 
In this moving account of her father's last year, love, grief and hope are intertwined with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work. The result is an inspired blend where the contrasting view of scientist and daughter ultimately unite.

Billy's Halo

Edward Stourton

‘If you are accompanied by a dog you can talk to anyone, and anyone can talk to you – about anything …’ And they do. Edward Stourton’s walks with, Kudu, his dog, become an opportunity for wonderfully unlikely encounters, and reflecting on the world from the dog-walker’s perspective proves remarkably illuminating. Ed and Kudu’s small trips to the park offer up big insights into romantic attachment, honour and heroism, guilt and depression, our sense of duty, beauty and the hard facts of life’s pecking order. Diary of a Dog-Walker is witty, wise and will be utterly irresistible to any man or woman with a dog.

Diary of a Dog-walker

Time spent following a lead

The Times and Irish Independent: BEST NATURE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
Great nature writing needs to be informative, detailed, accurate, lyrical, and, above all, to instil a sense of gratitude and wonder. John Lewis-Stempel succeeds in all these things triumphantly. From amorous toads to the eye-popping mating habits of water boatmen, a magical celebration of pond life by one of our finest, most evocative nature writers.' Daily Mail 
 
Ponds: small bodies of water, both naturally formed and artificial, home to wondrous, multitudinous life-forms. Ponds define our childhood: frogspawn, goldfish, feeding the ducks, but also our village life, our farms, our landscape. And they are multi-layered - from carp circling the bottom to water boatmen, coot, and birds dragonflies overhead. In Still Water, John immerses himself in the murky depths, both literarily and figuratively, to explore the still waters of the British countryside through each month of the year.

Still Water

The Deep Life of the Pond

Candida Lycett Green

From her early childhood, when her inspirational mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of green lanes and tracks, of moving along at horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door. Her insatiable appetite for exploring unknown territory has led her to travel all over the country by horse for weeks at a time, and often these journeys have come at important turning points in her life. 
 
Lyrical yet down-to-earth, framed by a recent 150-mile journey through Yorkshire and Northumberland with a friend, Over the Hills and Far Away dips back into past journeys by horse that also reflect her idyllic childhood in the bohemian Betjeman household, a charmed youth in the Swinging Sixties, a year-long honeymoon journey overland to India, early days at Private Eye, and the ups and downs of thirty-nine years of marriage and motherhood. Her story is made all the more poignant by her recent fight with breast cancer.

Over The Hills And Far Away

** GUARDIAN SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 ** 
 
‘Popular science at its best’ 
Mail on Sunday 
 
‘Eminently accessible and enjoyable’ 
Observer 
 
With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds in the Roman Senate, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding. In fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might also bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation. 
 
In Caesar’s Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe and across time to tell the epic story of the air we breathe.

Caesar's Last Breath

The Epic Story of The Air Around Us

'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES 
 
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER and BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' from 'indisputably, one of the best nature-writers of his generation' (Country Life) 
 
Written in diary format, The Wood is the story of English woodlands as they change with the seasons. Lyrical and informative, steeped in poetry and folklore, The Wood inhabits the mind and touches the soul. 
 
For four years John Lewis-Stempel managed Cockshutt wood, a particular wood - three and half acres of mixed woodland in south west Herefordshire - that stands as exemplar for all the small woods of England. John coppiced the trees and raised cows and pigs who roamed free there. 
 
This is the diary of the last year, by which time he had come to know it from the bottom of its beech roots to the tip of its oaks, and to know all the animals that lived there - the fox, the pheasants, the wood mice, the tawny owl - and where the best bluebells grew. For many fauna and flora, woods like Cockshutt are the last refuge. It proves a sanctuary for John too. 
 
To read The Wood is to be amongst its trees as the seasons change, following an easy path until, suddenly the view is broken by a screen of leaves, or your foot catches on a root, or a bird startles overhead. This is a wood you will never want to leave.

The Wood

The Life & Times of Cockshutt Wood

Jenni Murray

The only child of an electrical engineer and a mother who resented the fact that she'd never been to university, the broadcaster Jenni Murray grew up in a traditional household in the 1950s. But instead of becoming the conventional housewife her mother expected her to be, Jenni opted to forge her own path in both her career and her personal life. 
 
The resulting tensions have lasted as long as she can remember. How, she has often wondered, could two women be so close, so full of love for each other, and at the same time so full of hate that they broke each other's hearts? 
 
And so Jenni began her remarkable memoir - and continued to write throughout 2006 as her mother lay dying, and Jenni struggled to care for her and her beloved father while herself being treated for breast cancer. 
 
Filled with love and laughter, frustration and heartbreak, and with the courage 'to keep on keeping on' even in the darkest days, it will speak to every mother and daughter, dutiful or not.

Memoirs Of A Not So Dutiful Daughter

Niall Edworthy

'A revelation for anyone with the slightest interest in the feathered friends visiting their gardens' - Garden News 
 
You don't have to be a dedicated birdwatcher to be a bird lover. Millions of us love the sight and sound of them. And yet most of us know very little about their remarkable behaviour, incredible diversity and the story of their evolution. This handbook sets about answering every interesting question there is to ask about birds. 
 
How do migrating birds know where to go? 
Are birds really descended from dinosaurs? 
How do birds have sex? 
 
There are over 10,000 species in the world, including over 500 in Britain, some rare and endangered, some bizarre and beautiful, others common and familiar. As this captivating and often humorous handbook reveals, all of them are fascinating. 
 
Filled with beautiful illustrations, The Curious Bird Lover's Handbook is perfect for experienced twitchers and those who are simply captivated by the beauty of birds and would like to learn more about them. 
 
- 
 
The hardback edition titled "Bald Coot and Screaming Loon" was published in 2009. This paperback edition has been updated and includes a new foreword from the author.

The Curious Bird Lover’s Handbook

Richard Davies

*Winner of the Enlightened Economist Prize 2019* 
*Winner of Debut Writer of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020* 
*Longlisted for the Financial Times &amp; McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2019* 
 
'Extreme Economies is a revelation - and a must-read.' Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England 
 
To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. From death-row prisoners trading in institutions where money is banned to flourishing entrepreneurs in the world's largest refugee camp, from the unrealised potential of cities like Kinshasa to the hyper-modern economy of Estonia, every life in this book has been hit by a seismic shock, violently broken or changed in some way. 
 
In his quest for a purer view of how economies succeed and fail, Richard Davies takes the reader off the beaten path to places where part of the economy has been repressed, removed, destroyed or turbocharged. He tells the personal stories of humans living in these extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create. Far from the familiar stock reports, housing crises, or banking scandals of the financial pages, Extreme Economies reveals the importance of human and social capital, and in so doing tells small stories that shed light on today's biggest economic questions. 
 
'A highly original approach to understanding what really makes economies tick.' Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England

Extreme Economies

Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons from the World’s Limits

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

The Fall of the West

Hunt the Villain

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

The Mortons

Watch a trailer for The Spook's Blood

A photograph of Ben Barnes in character for Shadow and Bone Netflix series.

Interviews

Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes on tear-jerking books and what he’s reading

An image showing a selection of adventure stories for 9-12 year olds on a bright yellow background with orange doodles that include a hashtag, flag, danger sign and speech bubble

Children's reading lists

16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

An image of a selection of books for 9-12s on a blue background with a large splodge and striped print

24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

A picture of several different children's books on a pink to blue ombre background; each book has a bright yellow shadow

Reading lists

The 100 best children's books of all time, as chosen by our readers

stemming

Showing results for: ‘joseph delaney’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter