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

Joseph Delaney

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Dr Gillian O'Brien

The Irish Times Top 10 Bestseller! 
 
From war to revolution, famine to emigration, The Darkness Echoing travels around Ireland bringing its dark past to life 
 
It's no secret that the Irish are obsessed with misery, suffering and death. And no wonder, for there is darkness everywhere you look: in cemeteries and castles, monuments and museums, stories and songs. 
 
 In The Darkness Echoing, Gillian O'Brien tours Ireland's most deliciously dark heritage sites, delving into the stories behind them and asking what they reveal about the Irish. 
 
Energetic, illuminating and surprisingly funny, The Darkness Echoing challenges old, accepted narratives about Ireland, and asks intriguing questions about Ireland's past, present and future. 
 
'My history book of the year' Ryan Tubridy 
 
'As thought-provoking as it is informative and entertaining' Irish Times 
 
'Hugely enjoyable, thought-provoking and informative ... An essential read' History Ireland

The Darkness Echoing

Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion

Neil Oliver

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. 
 
Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.. 
 
Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

James Rebanks

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. 
 
Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. 
 
This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold. 
 
Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge, forgiveness and how to make lasting change.

The Place of Tides

Alice Albinia

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. 
 
The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles - from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias - transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.

The Britannias

And the Islands of Women

An Island Quest

Patrick Joyce

** Longlisted for the 2024 Cundill History Prize** 
 
‘A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book’ Annie Proulx 
 
A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. 
 
In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the nineteenth century to the present day. Into this passionate history, written with exquisite care, Joyce weaves remarkable individual stories, including those of his own Irish family, and looks at how peasant life has been remembered - and misremembered - in contemporary culture. 
 
This is a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history. Yet for Joyce, we are all the children of peasants, who must respect the experience of our ancestors. This is particularly pressing when our knowledge of the land is being lost to climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely and vital, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on our history and our future remains profoundly relevant.

Remembering Peasants

A Personal History of a Vanished World

Ranulph Fiennes

Discover the exhilarating true story of Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctic expedition 
 
Told through the words of the world's greatest living explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes - one of the only men to understand his experience first-hand . . . 
 
'For anyone with a passion for polar exploration, this is a must read' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'THE definitive book on Shackleton and no one could have done it better . . . an authentic account by one of the few men who truly knows what it's like to challenge Antarctica' LORRAINE KELLY 
_________ 
 
In 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton's attempt to be the first to traverse the Antarctic was cut short when his ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice. 
 
He and his crew should have died. 
 
Instead, through a long, dark winter, Shackleton fought back: enduring sub-zero temperatures, a perilous lifeboat journey across icy seas, and a murderous march over glaciers to seek help. 
 
Shackleton's epic trek is one of history's most enthralling adventures. But who was he? How did previous Antarctic expeditions and his rivalry with Captain Scott forge him? And what happened afterwards to the man many believed was invincible? 
 
In this astonishing account, Fiennes brings the story vividly to life in a book that is part celebration, part vindication and all adventure. 
_________ 
 
'Fiennes makes a fine guide on voyage into Shackleton's world . . . What makes this book so engaging is the author's own storytelling skills' Irish Independent 
 
'Fiennes relates these tales of exploration and survival, adding insight to Shackleton's journeys unlike any other biographer' Radio Times 
 
Praise for Sir Ranulph Fiennes: 
 
'The World's Greatest Living Explorer' Guinness Book of Records 
 
'Full of awe-inspiring details of hardship, resolve and weather that defies belief, told by someone of unique authority. No one is more tailor-made to tell [this] story than Sir Ranulph Fiennes' Newsday 
 
'Fiennes' own experiences certainly allow him to write vividly and with empathy of the hell that the men went through' Sunday Times 
 
 'Fiennes brings the promised perspective of one who has been there, illuminating Shackleton's actions by comparing them with his own. Beginners to the Heroic Age will enjoy this volume, as will serious polar adventurers seeking advice. For all readers, it's a tremendous story' Sara Wheeler, The Wall Street Journal

Shackleton

Explorer. Leader. Legend.

Rick Stanton

Thailand, July 2018. Twelve boys and their football coach vanish into Tham Luang caves. 
 
 Rick Stanton, a retired Midlands firefighter, races to save them. The boys have been missing for days. Each hour, their chance of escape shrinks. Rick must swim, crawl and squeeze through treacherously tight submerged tunnels hunting for them. 
 
 But that is not the impossible part. Because if by some miracle they're alive then somehow Rick must bring the boys back out again . . . 
 
 He doesn't know it yet but all his life he's been training for this very moment . . .

Aquanaut

A Life Beneath The Surface – The Inside Story of the Thai Cave Rescue

Eugene Linden

The definitive history of the modern climate change era, from an award-winning writer who has been at the centre of the fight for more than thirty years 
 
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter was presented with the findings of scientists who had been investigating whether human activities might change the climate in harmful ways. "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late," their report said. They were right -- but no one was listening. Four decades later, we are haunted by the consequences of this inattention, and the years of complacency, obfuscation and denialism that followed. Today, the staggering scale and scope of what we have done to the planet is impossible to ignore: the seasons of fire and flood have crossed into plain view. 
 
Fire and Flood is a comprehensive, compulsively readable history of climate change from veteran environmental journalist Eugene Linden. Linden retells the story of the modern climate change era decade by decade, tracking the progress of four ticking clocks: first, the reality of climate change itself; second, advances in scientific understanding; third, the spread of public awareness; and fourth, the business and finance response. Like no previous writer, Linden has drawn together the elements of the biggest story in the world, in a book that it is gripping as history, as economic investigation, and as scientific thriller.

Fire and Flood

A People's History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present

Hugh Thomas

Inspired by hopes of both riches and of converting native people to Christianity, the Spanish adventurers of the fifteenth century convinced themselves that an earthly paradise existed in the Caribbean. This is the story of the hundreds of conquistadors who set sail on the precarious journey across the Atlantic - taking with them wheat, the horse, the guitar and the wheel as well as guns, malaria and slaves - to create an empire that made Spain the envy of the world. In this epic history Hugh Thomas brings Spain's rise to empire vividly to life, capturing the spirit of an ebullient age.

Rivers of Gold

The Rise of the Spanish Empire

Jan Morris

For six centuries the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire, its sovereign power extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean &ndash; an empire of coasts, islands and isolated fortresses by which, as Wordsworth wrote, the mercantile Venetians 'held the gorgeous east in fee'. 
 
Jan Morris reconstructs the whole of this glittering dominion in the form of a sea-voyage, travelling along the historic Venetian trade routes from Venice itself to Greece, Crete and Cyprus. It is a traveller's book, geographically arranged but wandering at will from the past to the present, evoking not only contemporary landscapes and sensations but also the characters, the emotions and the tumultuous events of the past. The first such work ever written about the Venetian &lsquo;Stato da Mar&rsquo;, it is an invaluable historical companion for visitors to Venice itself and for travellers through the lands the Doges once ruled.

The Venetian Empire

A Sea Voyage

Henry Kamen

How did a barren, thinly populated country, somewhat isolated from the rest of Europe become the world's first superpower?  Henry Kamen's tremendous new book takes full advantage of its great theme to recreate the dazzling world of militant Castile from the fall of Moorish Granada and Columbus' first voyage to the imperial collapse over three centuries later.  There is no better account in English of this immense, brutal adventure - a ceaseless quest for land, gold and slaves that made Spain, both for its conquered peoples and much of the rest of Europe, into a rapacious nightmare.

Spain's Road to Empire

The Making of a World Power, 1492-1763

Francis Pryor

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily. 
 
Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm. Scattered through fields, woods, moors, roads, tracks and towns, he reveals the stories of our physical surroundings and what they meant to the people who formed them, used them and lived in them. These landscapes, he stresses, are our common physical inheritance. If we can understand how to make them yield up their secrets, it will help us, their guardians, to maintain and shape them for future generations.

Paths to the Past

Encounters with Britain's Hidden Landscapes

Lee Schofield

It was a tragic day for the nation's wildlife when England's last and loneliest golden eagle died in an unmarked spot among the remote eastern fells of the Lake District., but the fight to restore the landscape had already begun. 
 
Lee Schofield, ecologist and site manager for RSPB Haweswater, is leading efforts to breathe life back into two hill farms and their thirty square kilometres of sprawling upland habitat. 
 
Informed by the land, its turbulent history and the people who have shaped it, Lee and his team are repairing damaged wetlands, meadows and woods. Each year, the landscape is becoming richer, wilder and better able to withstand the shocks of a changing climate. 
 
But in the contested landscape of the Lake District, change is not always welcomed, and success relies on finding a balance between rewilding and respecting cherished farming traditions. This is not only a story of an ecosystem in recovery, it is also the story of Lee's personal connection to place, and the highs and lows of working for nature amid fierce opposition.

Wild Fell

Fighting for nature on a Lake District hill farm

Owen Hatherley

Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. 
 
In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it.

Trans-Europe Express

Tours of a Lost Continent

Simon Winchester

A burgeoning new city is built on the dreams of the American gold rush. It is also built upon a landscape that has been stretching, sliding and breaking apart for millennia. In 1906 the dreams of this city came crashing down beneath the rippling wave of a horrifying earthquake that turned roads into great rippling rivers, that set buildings ablaze for days on end, that made homes collapse upon themselves.  Simon Winchester's breathtaking story delves deep beneath the surface of the earth and explains to us why the world moves as it does; and breaks apart with such devastating results. At the same time he never lets us forget the human story: what happened in this new, seemingly blessed city on the 18th April 1906. As he vividly portrays the lives of the people who suffered and survived the devastation he also tells a universal story: the hubris of man as he ignores the warnings of nature and how we respond and try to understand the world around us. Compelling, moving and enlightening, Simon Winchester brings to light the world beneath our feet and through the story of this one terrifying event one hundred years ago, begins to make sense of our world now.

A Crack in the Edge of the World

The Great American Earthquake of 1906

Ben Saunders

Part of the new Ladybird Expert series, Shackleton is a clear, simple and enlightening introduction to perhaps the most extraordinary survival stories of all time. 
 
Polar explorer Ben Saunders draws on his own experience of the Antarctic to bring to life the history, dangers and challenges of Shackleton's Endurance expedition. 
 
Inside, you'll discover how Shackleton, by successfully bringing all his men home in the face of near insurmountable odds, earned his reputation as one of the greatest leaders in history. 
 
Written by the leading lights and most outstanding communicators in their fields, the Ladybird Expert books provide clear, accessible and authoritative introductions to subjects drawn from science, history and culture. 
 
Other books currently available in the Ladybird Expert series include: 
· Climate Change 
· Quantum Mechanics 
· Evolution 
· Battle of Britain 
 
For an adult readership, the Ladybird Expert series is produced in the same iconic small hardback format pioneered by the original Ladybirds. Each beautifully illustrated book features the first new illustrations produced in the original Ladybird style for nearly forty years.

Shackleton (A Ladybird Expert Book)

Chris D. Thomas

THE TIMES, ECONOMIST AND GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 
 
It is accepted wisdom today that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. Yet what if this narrative obscures a more hopeful truth? 
 
In Inheritors of the Earth, renowned ecologist and environmentalist Chris D. Thomas overturns the accepted story, revealing how nature is fighting back. 
 
Many animals and plants actually benefit from our presence, raising biological diversity in most parts of the world and increasing the rate at which new species are formed, perhaps to the highest level in Earth's history. From Costa Rican tropical forests to the thoroughly transformed British landscape, nature is coping surprisingly well in the human epoch. 
 
Chris Thomas takes us on a gripping round-the-world journey to meet the enterprising creatures that are thriving in the Anthropocene, from York's ochre-coloured comma butterfly to hybrid bison in North America, scarlet-beaked pukekos in New Zealand, and Asian palms forming thickets in the European Alps. In so doing, he questions our irrational persecution of so-called 'invasive species', and shows us that we should not treat the Earth as a faded masterpiece that we need to restore. After all, if life can recover from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, might it not be able to survive the onslaughts of a technological ape? 
 
Combining a naturalist's eye for wildlife with an ecologist's wide lens, Chris Thomas forces us to re-examine humanity's relationship with nature, and reminds us that the story of life is the story of change.

Inheritors of the Earth

How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

Callum Roberts

'Thrilling' Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall 
 
'Authoritative and furious, urgent and persuasive' Sunday Times 
 
'Compelling ... Roberts is that precious pearl: a practising scientist who not only knows his field inside out, but also understands how to write' Guardian 
 
Oceans are the most mysterious places on earth. Their depths remain largely unexplored, yet ninety-five percent of the planet's habitable space lies within them. And now the life they support is in the balance. 
 
Callum Roberts uses his lifetime's experience working with the oceans to take us on a panoramic tour beneath the seas, exploring the richness of life in the deep and how it has altered over the centuries. He shows the catastrophic impact of humanity on the oceans, but also how we can restore them to life. 
 
'For anyone who loves the sea, Ocean of Life is a wake-up call, an urgent alert' Daily Mail 
 
'At the heart of this book is a deep love of the ocean and a profound concern for its viability as a resource for us all' Nature 
 
'An impressive history ... one of this book's strengths is the many solutions Roberts outlines' Financial Times

Ocean of Life

Robert Macfarlane

In Silt, bestselling travel writer Robert Macfarlane walks the Broomway, the deadliest path in Britain. In one of the most striking chapters of his brilliant recent book The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane walks the Essex offshore path which has claimed the lives of more than sixty people over the centuries. His companion on this atmospheric and potentially perilous journey is his old friend and photographer, David Quentin. 
 
Now, in this special e-book edition, the Broomway section of The Old Ways appears alongside a run of twenty-two photographs taken that day by David, which form a haunting counterpoint to the text itself. In a newly written afterword, David reflects on the walk, on Robert Macfarlane's writing and on the fascinating legal terrain which paths like this one traverse even as they cross the land itself.

Silt

Tom Higham

50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters.

The World Before Us

How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

Ed Glinert

In the same format as the successful London Compendium, the Manchester Compendium relates the remarkable and diverse history of England's second city. Manchester's town hall and its Royal Exchange epitomise the city's architectural grandeur and its industrial heritage., Peterloo and Engel's treatise on the conditions of the working classes its political history and the Manchester Guardian and Factory Records its cultural and social history. From Thomas de Quincey to Alan Touring, Neville Cardus to Morrissey - all are part of the city's rich and fascinating past. Covering every area of human activity and incorporating all the great events and key moments in the city's history this will be a fresh and unique perspective on a great city.

The Manchester Compendium

A Street-by-Street History of England's Greatest Industrial City

Nicholas Crane

By knowing the shape of our earth we can create maps, survive the oceans, follow rivers, navigate the skies, and travel across the globe. This is the story of our world, of how we discovered what no one thought possible - the shape of the earth. 
 
A thrilling and page-turning account of the first major expedition by data gatherers and qualified observers to interior Peru, to discover the shape and magnitude of the earth. Until humanity discovered this it would be impossible to produce accurate maps and sea charts, without which thousands of lives would be lost, and exact locations of cities, roads and rivers would never be known. This fascinating and dramatic story weaves scientific rigour, egos, funding crises and betrayal with sea voyages, jungles and volcanoes.

Latitude

The astonishing adventure that shaped the world

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