5ive Guys FC

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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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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

Sadiah Qureshi

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? 
 
Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. 
 
Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. 
 
Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

Vanished

An Unnatural History of Extinction

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

Jack Ashby

In Nature's Memory, zoologist Jack Ashby shares hidden stories behind the world’s iconic natural history museums, from enormous mounted whale skeletons to cabinets of impossibly tiny insects. 
 
Look closely and all is not as it seems: these museums are not as natural, Ashby shows us, as we might think. Mammals dominate the displays, for example, even though they make up less than 1 percent of species; there are many more male specimens than females; and often a museum’s most popular draw – the dinosaur skeletons – are not actually real. Over 99 percent of museum collections are held in immense, unseen storehouses. And it’s becoming clear that these institutions have not been as honest about their complex histories as they should be. Yet natural history museums are also the only museums that can save the world – it is just starting to be understood that their vast collections are indispensable resources in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate catastrophe. 
 
Weaving together fresh historical research with surprising insights, Nature's Memory is a love letter to the joys, eccentricities and planet-saving potential of the world's best-loved museums.

Nature's Memory

Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums

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

Tao Leigh Goffe

Our planet is on the precipice of ecological breakdown and climate despair is at an all-time high. But there are many communities who have survived beyond the environmental destruction wrought on them by colonialism – and they hold the solutions for climate repair. 
 
Using the Caribbean as a case study, Tao Leigh Goffe traces the history of the islands back to the arrival of Christopher Columbus, when the Caribbean became the subject of Western exploitation. Charting the ecological forces that have shaped the islands – from guano to coral reefs, sugarcane to mongooses – and learning from Black, Indigenous and Asian island histories, Goffe makes the argument that the extractivist capitalism that is the origin of the climate crisis is borne from colonial thinking – and that to fight one effectively is to fight both. 
 
Treating the Caribbean as both a warning and a guide, Dark Laboratory is a lyrical, vibrant and urgent investigation into the greatest threat facing humanity.

Dark Laboratory

On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

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?

Alice Mah

'Part of me knew what the hungry ghosts wanted all along, what they still want. It is not vengeance. No, they want something else, but we refuse to listen. They want us to face up to our broken obligations.' 
 
Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors, making offerings of food and incense to prevent them from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune. Yet for the past century, a time ruptured by war and revolution, many tombs have been left unattended. Following a record year of wildfires, Alice Mah returns to her family’s rice village in South China, and discovers that her ancestors are almost forgotten, and there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid. 
 
Here Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of South China to her home in post-industrial England, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she grew up, to the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves. Her research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety, culminating in a crisis of spiritual belief. 
 
A haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Red Pockets confronts the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, while searching for an acceptable offering. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

Red Pockets

An Offering

Gerald Durrell

A final posthumous work from the beloved conservationist and naturalist Gerald Durrell, to celebrate the centenary of his birth, with a new foreword by HRH Princess Anne. 
 
‘Gerald Durrell was magic’ SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH • ‘One of the finest and most lyrical nature writers in English’ OBSERVER 
 
Myself and Other Animals is a new book mosaicked from unpublished autobiographies, uncollected pieces and previously published extracts from Durrell’s work and archives. The result is an extraordinary journey through Durrell’s life in his own words, edited and introduced by his widow Lee Durrell. 
 
Drawing on a memoir that Durrell started writing before he became too ill to continue it, and an unfinished book from a trip to Australia in 1969 to the Great Barrier Reef, Northern Territory and Queensland, here is the unvarnished story of Durrell’s life, from touching family tributes to golden bats and pink pigeons. 
 
Moving from India to England and then to the always sun-lit Corfu, told with dry wit and insight into our fellow animals, here is the vivid finale of one of Britain’s most beloved conservationists and prose stylists.

Myself and Other Animals

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. 
 
The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. 
 
This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

More and More and More

An All-Consuming History

An All-Consuming History of Energy

Sunil Amrith

In this paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of the expansion of human freedom and its costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Spanish silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railways and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. He also reveals the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates, on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic – vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images – in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

The Burning Earth

An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

Vaclav Smil

In this ambitious, myth-busting book, leading scientist and internationally bestselling author Vaclav Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today: Why are some of the world’s biggest food producers also the countries with the most undernourished populations? Why is food waste a colossal 1,000kcal per person daily, and how can we solve that? Could we all go vegan and be healthy? Should we? How will we feed the ballooning population without killing the planet? 
 
How Food Really Works shows how we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. Ultimately, this data-based, rigorously researched guide explains how we will survive and thrive long into the future.

How to Feed the World

A Factful Guide

Rob Jackson

Can we really restore the earth’s atmosphere within our lifetime? 
 
Whether through sustainable technologies such as fossil-free steel production, hydrogen-powered ships and electric motorbikes, or natural solutions like rewilding peatlands, people all over the world are finding new ways to travel, feed themselves and drive industry while safeguarding a liveable planet for future generations. 
 
Drawing on decades of research and a vast network of experts, Rob Jackson, Chair of the Global Carbon Project, introduces some of the brilliant innovators behind the boldest solutions to climate change – including an Eritrean agricultural scientist, a Swedish CEO and a Brazilian hydrologist. 
 
Now we have more tools to combat climate change than ever before, Into the Clear Blue Sky traces a clear path to a better future for us all – one that will see us cutting emissions in inventive new ways that protect our health and livelihoods, while repairing the damage we have caused to the atmosphere. This visionary and transformative book is the call to action we need – right now.

Into the Clear Blue Sky

The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere

A classic Gerald Durrell title reissued by Penguin to celebrate the centenary of his birth 
 
'Gerald Durrell was magic' SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH 
 
Menagerie Manor chronicles the early, sunlit days of Gerald Durrell’s dream to create a sanctuary for animals, realized Les Augrès Manor in Trinity, Jersey. Here we encounter Leo the lion, who enjoys roaring solidly through the night; N’Pongo the gorilla who thinks nothing of boarding a small plane to be part of a BBC documentary; and Claudius the South American tapir, an escape art of Houdini-like cunning. 
 
Republished to celebrate the centenary of Durrell’s birth, this book is a testament to the enduring importance of conservation in a changing world, and the profound connection between the human and animal kingdoms. 
 
'This book is a certain joy' NEW STATESMAN 
 
'Animals come close to being Durrell's best friends. . . . He writes about them with style, verve, and humour' TIME

Menagerie Manor

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

Serhii Plokhy

On 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, armoured vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. It was the most direct way for them to reach the capital - and an extraordinarily reckless plan after the disaster that had taken place there three decades earlier. Russian occupation of the plant had begun. It would last thirty-five days. 
 
Closely reported and narrated from multiple perspectives, this is the story of the Ukrainians who were held hostage and worked shifts for weeks instead of days to spare the world a new nuclear accident. We meet Valentyn Heiko, the foreman who had also been there for the clean-up of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and turned sixty during the occupation; plant workers who found a way to celebrate International Women’s Day despite all odds; Russian officers who had no knowledge of nuclear reactors; and four stalkers who were caught in the middle and stood in for the overworked cook. 
 
Gripping and unforgettable, Chernobyl Roulette sounds the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in an unprecedented time, when plant workers are left to fight on their own while the world holds its breath. In a book that reads like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy tells a remarkable story about human nature, uncertainty and courage.

Chernobyl Roulette

A War Story

Clayton Aldern

It is now inarguable that climate change threatens the future of life on Earth. But in The Weight of Nature, award-winning journalist and neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern shows that the warming climate is not just affecting our planet - it is affecting our brains and bodies too. 
 
Drawing on six years of ground-breaking research, Aldern documents a burgeoning public health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Eco-anxiety, he shows us, is just the tip of the iceberg. The rapidly changing environment is directly intervening in our brain health, behaviour, decision-making and cognition in real time, affecting everything from spikes in aggravated assault to lower levels of productivity and concentration, to the global dementia epidemic. Travelling the world to meet the scientists and doctors unravelling the tangled connections between us and our environment, and reporting the stories of those who are already feeling these shifts most keenly, Aldern shows how a weary world is wearing on us. 
 
Written in urgent and deeply moving prose, The Weight of Nature is a revelation, bringing to light the myriad ways the changing environment is changing our very humanity from the inside out.

The Weight of Nature

How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains and Bodies

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

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

Sadiq Khan

Fatalism. Apathy. Cynicism. Deprioritisation. Hostility. Cost. Gridlock. When green campaigners and politicians lose the debate, this is why. 
 
Now, the Mayor of London draws on a decade in the corridors (and cycle lanes) of power to explain how, in practice, to win the climate argument. His book will help create a world where we can all breathe again. 
 
'A breath of fresh air' Observer | 'Practical and highly readable' Financial Times | 'Refreshing and galvanising' Vogue | 'Rousing and thoughtful' Independent | 'Passionate and authentic' GQ

Breathe

How to Win A Greener World

Seven Ways to Win a Greener World

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

Sally Huband

WINNER OF THE 2023 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 
 
A WATERSTONES NATURE AND TRAVEL BEST BOOK OF 2023 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT NATURE WRITING PRIZE 2023 
 
'Modern, revealing and restorative, a coastal treasure' Amy Liptrot 
 
'Like its talismanic title, Huband's voice is distinct and singular. A gorgeous reckoning with the sea, islands and mythology' Sinéad Gleeson 
 
'A wild melding of body and landscape. A deep, immersive, storm-tossed read' Helen Jukes 
 
'As vital and complex as the oceans themseleves' Joanna Pocock 
 
A powerful journey of sea and self, trial and hope on the islands of Shetland 
 
On the storm-tossed beaches of the Shetland Archipelago, Sally Huband is searching. A message in a bottle, a mermaid’s purse, a lobster trap tag, each find connects her more deeply with our oceans. But it is Sally’s quest for a fabled sea bean that unlocks the myths of these islands and carries her through chronic illness towards a new and more resilient self.

Sea Bean

Patrick Barkham

Roger Deakin, author of the immortal Waterlog and Wildwood, was a man of many parts: maverick ad-man, cider-maker, teacher, environmentalist, music promoter and filmmaker. But, above all, he was the restorer of ancient Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk, the heartland where he wrote about all natural life – with rare attention, intimacy, precision and poetry. 
 
Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues and lovers. Delving deep into Deakin’s library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters and recordings to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages.

The Swimmer

The Wild Life of Roger Deakin

Charles Foster

A fox, grown strong on pepperoni pizza from the dustbins of the East End, dances along a railway track towards Essex, the territory of wild foxes and wilder huntsmen. 
 
An orca, mourning the loss of her mother in a valley west of Skye, knows that she must now lead the pod as matriarch. She swims again through her childhood, thinking about the old ways, the old roads, laid down thousands of years ago. But the old roads aren't so easy now. 
 
At moonrise in a West Country river, an otter floats slowly downstream. The tide, though it pushes him landwards when it exhales, seems to pull him out when it inhales. He turns on his back. He can see the stars clearly for the first time and wonders if he can swim to them. 
 
The land has never stopped waiting. It has only ever been in exile, right under our noses, waiting to confound, outrage and re-enchant.

Cry of the Wild

Life through the eyes of eight animals

Tom Moorhouse

'A necessary nature book, with prose as sharp as prickles' John Lewis-Stempel 
 
In poll after poll hedgehogs come out top as Britain's favourite mammal. And yet their numbers have been in freefall, estimated to have halved in less than twenty years. Why? Who or what is responsible for the disappearance of so many thousands of hedgehogs in recent decades? 
 
Hopeful and informative, in a story full of twists, turns and uncomfortable truths, conservationist Tom Moorhouse explores the trade-offs that exist between humans and wildlife. And, drawing on insights from other hedgehog experts, he hands readers the toolkit necessary to help bring our prickly friends back.

Ghosts in the Hedgerow

A hedghog whodunnit

Greta Thunberg

We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, one of the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen. 
 
You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late. 
 
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? 
 
We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

The Climate Book

In 2011, a 43-foot-high tsunami crashed into a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. In the following days, explosions would rip buildings apart, three reactors would go into nuclear meltdown, and the surrounding area would be swamped in radioactive water. It is now considered one of the costliest nuclear disasters ever. But Fukushima was not the first, and it was not the worst. . . 
 
In Atoms and Ashes, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy tells the tale of the six nuclear disasters that shook the world: Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Based on wide-ranging research and witness testimony, Plokhy traces the arc of each crisis, exploring in depth the confused decision-making on the ground and the panicked responses of governments to contain the crises and often cover up the scale of the catastrophe. 
 
As the world increasingly looks to renewable and alternative sources of energy, Plokhy lucidly argues that the atomic risk must be understood in explicit terms, but also that these calamities reveal a fundamental truth about our relationship with nuclear technology: that the thirst for power and energy has always trumped safety and the cost for future generations.

Atoms and Ashes

From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima

Gaia Vince

We are facing a species emergency. With every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced from the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. From Bangladesh to Sudan to the western United States, and in cities from Cardiff to New Orleans to Shanghai, the quadruple threat of drought, heat, wildfires and flooding will utterly reshape Earth's human geography in the coming decades. 
 
In this rousing call to arms, Royal Society Science Book Prize-winning author Gaia Vince describes how we can plan for and manage this unavoidable climate migration while we restore the planet to a fully habitable state. Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening data and original reporting, Vince shows that migration is not the problem - it's the solution. We will need to move northwards as a species, into the habitable fringes on Europe, Asia and Canadas Canada and the greening Arctic circle. 
 
While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored. In Nomad Century, Vince provides, for the first time, an examination of the most pressing question facing humanity.

Nomad Century

How to Survive the Climate Upheaval

Christoph Keller

Most stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. 
 
Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Every Cripple a Superhero

George Monbiot

For the first time since the Neolithic, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world. 
 
Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry. 
 
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet. 
 
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

Regenesis

Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

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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