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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. 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

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Robert Macfarlane

At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Is a River Alive? takes the reader on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept. 
 
The book flows first to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened by goldmining. 
 
Then, to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is under way. 
 
And finally, to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign. 
 
At once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, spark debates and lead us to the revelation that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has

Is a River Alive?

James Cheshire

Oliver Uberti

Humans create data with nearly everything we do. This world of information is invisible, but it shapes society in profound ways. 
 
In Atlas of the Invisible, award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti redefine what an atlas can be. Transforming enormous data sets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualisations, they uncover truths about our past, reflect who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. With their joyfully inquisitive approach, Cheshire and Uberti explore happiness and anxiety levels around the globe; they trace the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us; they examine hidden scars of geopolitics; and illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj. 
 
Years in the making, Atlas of the Invisible invites readers to marvel at the promise and peril of data, and to revel in the secrets and contours of a newly visible world.

Atlas of the Invisible

Maps & Graphics That Will Change How You See the World

Jerry Brotton

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. 
 
In Four Points of the Compass, Jerry Brotton takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. He reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand.

Four Points of the Compass

The Unexpected History of Direction

John Lewis-Stempel

England’s landscape is iconic – a tapestry of distinctive habitats that together make up a country unique for its rich diversity of flora and fauna. Concentrating on twelve habitats, John Lewis-Stempel leads us from estuary to park, chalk downland to woodland , river to field, village to moor, lake to heath, fen to coastal cliffs, in a book that is unquestionably his magnum opus. 
 
Referencing beloved great writers in whose footsteps he treads – Gilbert White, John Clare, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas – and combining breathtakingly beautiful prose with detailed wildlife observation, botanical fact and ancient folklore, Lewis-Stempel immerses himself in each place, discovering their singular atmosphere, the play of the seasons; the feel of the wind in midwinter; the sounds of daybreak; how twilight settles. Each one – whether managed park or wild moor, plunging cliff or man-made Broads – has also shaped human life, forming our idea of ourselves and our sense of what ‘England’ means. 
 
England: A Natural History is the definitive volume on the English landscape, and the capstone of John Lewis-Stempel’s nature writing. 
........................................................................................................ 
 
‘No-one comes close to Lewis-Stempel’s ability to paint the English landscape in words. Maddeningly brilliant.’ - Sally Coulthard, author of A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects

England

A Natural History

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

Tim Coulson

How did everything start? 
 
And how did we come to exist? 
 
In one book Oxford Professor Tim Coulson seeks to simply explain what science tells us about the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the existence of humanity, and whether our existence was always inevitable or if we are just incredibly lucky. 
 
Coulson's engaging and accessible storytelling will enthral even the most reluctant of readers with its exploration of what thousands of years of study has told us about who we are, where we came from and what happens next.

A Little History of Everything

From the Big Bang to You

Jack Cornish

Hundreds of thousands of miles of paths reach into, and connect, communities across England and Wales. More than just a practical way for us to walk, ride and cycle around, they are an inheritance from the past, revealing how our ancestors interacted with and shaped their landscapes. But thousands of miles are still missing from our maps. 
 
Exploring the deep history of these pathways, Jack Cornish uncovers how this millennia-old network was created and has evolved - from prehistoric trackways to the modern creation of towns - reflecting the contours of the past and the changing fortunes of society.

The Lost Paths

A History of How We Walk From Here To There

Helen Molesworth

'A gem of a book' - Tracy Borman 
 
When Helen Molesworth joined the gem and jewellery industry she began her own love affair with one of humanity's oldest and richest fascinations. For as long as people have known about gemstones they have treasured them. Born of violent geological events and the chance meetings of minerals, their stories are an extraordinary journey through time, and are significant to the human narrative in as many ways as they boast sparkling facets. 
 
Selecting ten of nature's most dazzling jewels, Helen Molesworth makes journeys across the world to trace stones from their discovery to the moment a glimmering cut and polished masterpiece is traded, and then fought over, adorns emperors and kings, falls out of favour, and then raises eye-watering sums in another age. Touching on history and politics, archaeology and engineering, geography and geology, chemistry and physics, psychology and romance, fine art and high finance, her book is rich with great stories and has something for everyone.

Precious

The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time

Chris Thorogood

As a child, Chris Thorogood dreamed of seeing Rafflesia - the plant with the world's largest flowers. He crafted life-size replicas in an abandoned cemetery, carefully bringing them to life with paper and paint. Today he is a botanist at the University of Oxford's Botanic Garden and has dedicated his life to studying the biology of such extraordinary plants, working alongside botanists and foresters in Southeast Asia to document these huge, mysterious blooms. 
 
Pathless Forest is the story of his journey to study and protect this remarkable plant - a biological enigma, still little understood, which invades vines as a leafless parasite and steals its food from them. We join him on a mind-bending adventure, as he faces a seemingly impenetrable barrier of weird, wonderful and sometimes fearsome flora; finds himself smacking off leeches, hanging off vines, wading through rivers; and following indigenous tribes into remote, untrodden rainforests in search of Rafflesia's ghostly, foul-smelling blooms, more than a metre across. 
 
We depend on plants for our very existence, but two in five of the world's species are threatened with extinction - nobody knows how many species of Rafflesia might already have disappeared through deforestation. Pathless Forest is part thrilling adventure story and part an inspirational call to action to safeguard a fast-disappearing wilderness. To view plants in a different way, as vital for our own future as for that of the planet we share. And to see if Rafflesia itself can be saved.

Pathless Forest

The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers

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

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

Susan Casey

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
An awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets. 
______________________________________________'Fantastical and forbidding' Washington Post 
A fascinating history' Time 
'Entralling' Boston GlobeFor all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of fear and fascination, an unknowable realm that evokes a singular, compelling question: what’s down there? But now cutting-edge technologies are allowing scientists and explorers to discover this strange and exotic underworld: a place of soaring mountains, smouldering volcanoes and valleys 7,000 feet deeper than Everest is high. A realm long thought to be devoid of life is, in fact, a vibrant new world, home to pink gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long, creatures that breathe iron and communicate through their skin, ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live for half a millennium. 
 
In The Underworld, Susan Casey traverses the globe, joining scientists and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet. She interviews the marine geologists, marine biologists, and oceanographers as they uncover this vast unseen realm. And she discovers the mind-blowing complexity and ecological importance of the abyssal ocean and the quadrillions of creatures who live in its depths.

The Underworld

Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

Ranulph Fiennes

Co-opted by the British military, archaeologist and adventurer Thomas Edward Lawrence became involved in the 1916 Arab Revolt, fighting alongside guerilla forces, and made a legendary 300-mile journey through blistering heat. He wore Arab dress, and strongly identified with the people in his adopted lands. 
 
 By 1918, he had a £20,000 price on his head. 
 
 Despite people's fascination, Lawrence has long remained unknowable, one of history's most enigmatic explorers. But with in-depth knowledge of what it takes to venture into the unknown, this authoritative biography from explorer Ranulph Fiennes at last brings enthralling insight and clarity to this remarkable life.

Lawrence of Arabia

The definitive 21st-century biography of a 20th-century soldier, adventurer and leader

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

Christopher Somerville

Travelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville, author of The January Man and Ships of Heaven, sets out to discover how the land beneath our feet shapes our past, our present and our future. 
 
Taking a journey of a thousand miles, Christopher Somerville begins in the far north, at the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, formed when the world was still molten, and travels south-eastwards to the furthest corner of Essex, where new land is being formed. Crossing bogs, scaling peaks and skirting quarry pits, he unearths the stories bound up in the layers of rock beneath our feet, and examines how they have influenced everything from how we farm to how we build our houses, from the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. 
 
Told with characteristic humour and insight, this gripping exploration of the British landscape and its remarkable history cannot fail to change the way you see the world beyond your door. 
 
&lsquo;Somerville is a walker&rsquo;s writer&rsquo; Nicholas Crane

Walking the Bones of Britain

A 3 Billion Year Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn . . . 
 
Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains an irrepressible light. In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett highlights this often forgotten but vital foundation of the plant world with her unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir. Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to Country Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy of these overlooked spaces, renaming her favourite species of moss as she recovers from grieving her father’s death, spurred on by the resilience and tenacity of her plant - and human - friends.

Twelve Words for Moss

Helen Czerski

WINNER OF THE 2024 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION 
 
FINANCIAL TIMES 2023 HIGHLIGHT 
 
'Helen Czerski weaves together physics and biology, history and science, in a beautifully poetic way.' 
Professor Alice Roberts 
 
'In Helen Czerski's hands, the mechanical becomes magical. An instant classic.' 
Tristan Gooley, author of How to Read Water 
 
'Blue Machine is quite simply one of the best books I have ever read.' 
Dr George McGavin, zoologist, entomologist and broadcaster 
 
'A fascinating dive into the essential engine that drives our world. Czerski brings the oceans alive with compelling stories that masterfully navigate this most complex system.' 
Gaia Vince, science journalist, broadcaster and author of Nomad Century 
 
 
All of the Earth's ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight - a blue machine. 
 
Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told - that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture. 
 
In a book that will recalibrate our view of this defining feature of our planet, physicist Helen Czerski dives deep to illuminate the murky depths of the ocean engine, examining the messengers, passengers and voyagers that live in it, travel over it, and survive because of it. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she explains the vast currents, invisible ocean walls and underwater waterfalls that all have their place in the ocean's complex, interlinked system. 
 
Timely, elegant and passionately argued, Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet. The understanding it offers is crucial to our future. Drawing on years of experience at the forefront of marine science, Helen Czerski captures the magnitude and subtlety of Earth's defining feature, showing us the thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine.

Blue Machine

How the Ocean Shapes Our World

Chris Yates

Sitting on a riverbank, with rod and line, must count as one of the most relaxing and enjoyable – yet occasionally frustrating – experiences known to man. 
 
Chris Yates discovered the joys of fishing early in life and was quickly hooked by its pleasures. Many years later, he is still content to sit, day after day, observing the quirks of different fish and losing track of time. For him, fishing is much more than just a question of technique; sometimes it’s about listening to nothing but your instincts, and at other times it’s about enjoying the perfect cup of tea. And it’s always about not knowing how the day is going to unfold . . . 
 
There’s no better guide for the uninitiated – and no better companion for those already familiar with the satisfactions of fishing – than Chris Yates. And immersing yourself in How To Fish is almost as delightful an activity as fishing itself.

How to Fish

Philip Parker

Discover the 12 crucial moments in Britain's past that will answer the greatest questions for our future in this richly insightful and fascinating history 
 
'A richly entertaining canter through the country's past. Engrossing' INDEPENDENT 
___________ 
 
What is Britain? 
Where lie its boundaries? 
Why are they always changing? 
Are we a small island or a big idea? 
What will we look like next? 
 
In Small Island: 12 Maps that Explain the History of Britain, Philip Parker answers these and other crucial questions about this country and its peoples. 
 
By pondering our intertwined geography and history, he shows how the past has made Britain and how we might yet shape its future.

Small Island

12 Maps That Explain The History of Britain

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

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

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

Thomas Halliday

This is the past as we've never seen it before. 
 
Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. 
 
Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record. 
 
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

Otherlands

A World in the Making

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

Jemma Wadham

As one of the world's leading glaciologists, Professor Jemma Wadham has devoted her career to the glaciers that cover one-tenth of the Earth's land surface. Today, however, these 'ice rivers' are in peril. High up in the Alps, Andes and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating; in Antarctica, meanwhile, thinning ice sheets are releasing meltwater to sensitive marine foodwebs, and may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored deep beneath them. The potential consequences for humanity are almost unfathomable. 
 
Jemma's first encounter with a glacier, as a student, sparked her love of these icy landscapes. There is nowhere on Earth she feels more alive. Whether abseiling down crevasses, skidooing across frozen fjords, exploring ice caverns, or dodging polar bears - for a glaciologist, it's all in a day's work. 
 
Prompted by an illness that took her to the brink of death and back, in Ice Rivers Jemma recalls twenty-five years of expeditions around the globe, revealing why the glaciers mean so much to her - and what they should mean to us. As she guides us from the Alps to the Andes, the importance of the ice to crucial ecosystems and human livelihoods becomes clear - our lives are entwined with these coldest places on the planet. This is a memoir like no other: an eye-witness account by a top scientist at the frontline of the climate crisis, and an impassioned love letter to the glaciers that are her obsession.

Ice Rivers

A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness and Humanity

Patrick Roberts

Jungle is a new and ambitious history of the world, telling the remarkable story of the world's tropical forests from the arrival of the first plants millions of years ago to the role of tropical forests in the evolution of the world's atmosphere, the dinosaurs, the first mammals and even our own species and ancestors. Highlighting provocative new evidence garnered from cutting-edge research, Dr Roberts shows, for example, that our view of humans as 'savannah specialists' is wildly wrong, and that the 'Anthropocene' began not with the Industrial Revolution, but potentially as early as 6,000 years ago in the tropics. We see that the relationship between humankind and 'jungles' is deep-rooted, that we are all connected to their destruction, and that we must all act to save them. Urgent, clear-sighted and original, Jungle challenges the way we think about the world - and ourselves.

Jungle

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History – and Us

Tom Chivers

'A lyrical meditation on landscapes and cities, vivid reportage and a memoir. And also a beautifully realised and moving read.' Financial Times 
 
'A beguiling mix of history, geology, folklore and memoir that captivated me from the first page.' Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking 
 
'Tom Chivers brings a poet's sensibility to this book about the hidden parts of the capital, mixing the past with the present, the known with the unknown and his personal story with social history and geology.' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
What secrets lie beneath a city? 
 
Tom Chivers follows hidden pathways, explores lost islands and uncovers the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets. From Roman ruins to a submerged playhouse, from an abandoned Tube station to underground rivers, Chivers leads us on a journey into the depths of the city he loves. 
 
A lyrical interrogation of a capital city, a landscape and our connection to place, London Clay celebrates urban edgelands: in-between spaces where the natural world and the metropolis collide. Through a combination of historical research, vivid reportage and personal memoir, it will transform how you see London, and cities everywhere. 
 
'Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.' Iain Sinclair, author of The Last London

London Clay

Journeys in the Deep City

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.

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

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

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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