Alex Edelman

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a widely recognised global expert on behavioural finance, responsible business and misinformation. He has spoken at Davos, testified in the UK House of Commons and has reached millions through his hugely popular TED talks and his contributions to outlets such as the BBC, CNBC, the Guardian and the Independent. 
 
 
He is the author of May Contain Lies, which was an Amazon #1 bestseller and received huge acclaim from the Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times. His first book Grow the Pie was a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2020.

Alex Edmans

Alex Evans is Campaigns Director at Avaaz.org, a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC), and has nearly twenty years’ experience in climate and development policy. Alex has worked as Special Adviser to two UK Secretaries of State for International Development (Hilary Benn and Valerie Amos), as an expert on climate change in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and with think tanks including Chatham House and the Brookings Institution. He has also worked as a consultant on futures and foreign policy for organizations from Oxfam to the US National Intelligence Council. 
Alex lives in North Yorkshire and is married with two children.

Alex Evans

Alex Ferguson was born and brought up in Govan, Glasgow. He has always been a controversial figure, never far from the limelight, from the time he led an apprentices’ strike before entering full-time football. As a player with a reputation as uncompromising centre-forward his clubs included Glasgow Rangers, Dunfermline and Falkirk, and he became a spokesman for the player’s union. His first appointment as manager was with East Stirling, from where he moved to Love Street, where St Mirren’s crowds under his dynamic leadership rose from 3,000 to 12,000. He joined the Pittodrie set-up as manager in 1978.

Alex Ferguson

Alex Fryer

Alex Games

Alex Garland was born in London in 1970. He is the author of two novels, The Beach, The Tesseract and an illustrated novella, The Coma, in collaboration with his father. He has also written screenplays for films including 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd. In 2015, Garland made his directorial debut with Ex Machina.

Alex Garland

Alex George

Dr Alex George was the UK’s Mental Health Ambassador for children and young people from 2021 until early 2025, and he currently hosts the Stompcast podcast. Dr Alex’s first children’s book A BETTER DAY was a Sunday Times No.1 bestseller, won a British Book Award and sold 42,000 copies through TCM. Dr Alex previously worked for the NHS as an A&amp;E doctor and is now passionate about helping to equip everyone – especially children and young people – with the tools needed to live a full, productive and meaningful life.

Alex Gordon

Alex Grecian worked for an ad agency before returning to writing fiction full-time and raising his son. Alex is the author of the long-running and critically acclaimed comic-book series Proof, and the bestselling Scotland Yard Murder Squad series. He lives in Topeka, Kansas, with his wife and son.

Alex Grecian

Alex Gutteridge

Alex Halberstadt is the author of the award-winning Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ and The Paris Review. He is a two-time James Beard Award nominee and a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He works and lives in New York.

Alex Halberstadt

Alex Haley

Dr Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a former senior research scientist on Google's Ethical AI team. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry and a proponent of community-based uses of technology.

Alex Hanna

Alex Hannaford

Alex Hely-Hutchinson

Professor Alex Hill is the co-founder and Director of The Centre for High Performance – a collaboration between the University of Kingston, Duke Corporate Education, London Business School and Green Templeton College, Oxford – which is dedicated to helping high-performing organizations develop a stronger and more robust economy, society and environment. The Centre has worked with organizations in sectors ranging from the arts and education to sport, technology and the military. 
 
He is also a Professor at Kingston University (UK), Educator at Duke Corporate Education (US), and Visiting Professor at Cass Business School (UK), Gordon Institute of Business Science (South Africa), The Academy of National Economy (Russia) and KEDGE Management School (France). 
 
He has written a number of books, published articles in leading academic journals such as the Harvard Business Review, advised the UK Government on educational policy, appeared on BBC Newsnight, presented at the Global Economics and Skills Forum and has written for The Times and Schools Week.

Alex Hill

Alex Hoffler and Stacey O’Gorman’s motto is ‘Follow your dream’. Just a couple of year ago Alex and Stacey quit their 9 to 5 jobs and began their Meringue Girls journey. Now they have a bakery HQ in Broadway Market with a staff of eight, which sells to Selfridges, Fortnum &amp; Mason, Recipease and Harvey Nicholls, as well as fashion events, weddings and their weekly market stall. They run masterclasses rated by the Evening Standard as one of the best in London. They have had a huge media and social media response including numerous TV appearance and over 80,000 Instagram followers. They are in talks to open a franchise in Dubai. 
 
They also do weekly food styling for various publications including the Guardian. They live in east London. Alex has a new baby, and Stacey recently got married.

Alex Hoffler

Alex Holt is the Global Head of the multi-billion-dollar Technology, Media and Telecoms practice at KPMG. He leads a large team who work with all the major organisations across the sector on everything from multi-billion M&amp;A deals through to tax, audit and management consulting. As well as leading the TMT sector globally, Alex is also the Global Lead Partner for some of the largest tech companies in the world. 
 
 Alex also serves on the Board of the anti-poverty charity JobTrain.

Alex Holt

Alex Horne 
noun 
1. comedian, writer, gambler, taskmaster, podcaster, birdwatcher, potential neologist and father.

Alex Horne

Alex Hughes is an online recipe creator who is committed to making reaching your weight goals not only delicious but fun. All her recipes are comforting, low-calorie and will help you feel full. She can be found doing a little dance in her kitchen (the recipes taste that good) at @alexskitchenbangers on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

Alex Hughes

Alex James is a writer, farmer, and the bass player with Blur. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and five children.

Alex James

Alex Kadis is half-British, half-Greek, and grew up in Leyton and Walthamstow, East London. She studied English Literature at Goldsmiths University before embarking on a music journalism career. She was Features Editor at Smash Hits in its heyday (RIP) and has also written for various newspapers and magazines, including Sunday Times Style and Q Magazine. She then went into artist management and now works as a consultant in the music industry. Alex suffers from delusions of grandeur and still believes she will, one day, headline Wembley Stadium.

Alex Kadis

Alex Kantrowitz is a senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed News and one of the ten most cited technology reporters in the world. His work has been referenced by dozens of major publications, from the New Yorker to the Wall Street Journal to Sports Illustrated. He is the founder of the tech publication and podcast Big Technology, which focuses on analysing tech giants. Kantrowitz is a graduate of Cornell University's College of Industrial and Labor Relations. This is his first book.

Alex Kantrowitz

Alex Kapranos

Alex Kerr is an American writer and Japanologist whose previous books include Lost Japan and Another Kyoto (with Kathy Arlyn Sokol). He was the first foreigner to be awarded the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan.

Alex Kerr

Alex Kershaw

Alex Kingston

Alex Kingston is TV royalty, celebrating 45 years in the business, from her debut in Grange Hill in 1980 to the title role (and BAFTA nomination) in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, starring in over 150 ER episodes and becoming part of Doctor Who folklore as River Song. Her appearance in Doctor Who was meant to be a one-off but she became a regular and remains a fan favourite.

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Steven Runciman

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

'The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion' 
 
In 1187 the catastrophic Battle of Hattin resulted in Saladin's destruction of the crusaders' main army. In an atmosphere of total crisis, the three principal leaders of Europe, Philip Augustus, Richard the Lionheart and Frederick Barbarossa decided that they should personally lead armies to relieve the beleaguered survivors. 
 
A triumph of prose-writing, argument and research, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is an unimprovable account of events which changed the world and which still resonate today. In this final volume he starts with the glamorous Third Crusade and then tells the later story as the crusader states collapsed - a less well-known but fascinating period where crusaders found themselves fighting everywhere from Egyptian swamps to the Great Hungarian Plain and the apparent clarity of the original urge to liberate Jerusalem seemed a distant dream.

A History of the Crusades III

The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades

Vladimir Nabokov

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays an astonishing range of inventiveness, with dazzling sleight of hand, fantastical fairy tales, intellectual games and enchanting glimpses into lives of ambiguity and loss. 
 
The collection displays Nabokov's astonishing range of technical and formal inventiveness: the dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives full of disturbing ambiguities.

Collected Stories

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys wrote this autobiography in her old age, now the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea but still haunted by memories of her troubled past: her precarious jobs on chorus lines and relationships with unsuitable men, her enduring sense of isolation and her decision at last to become a writer. From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist.

Smile Please

Georges Simenon

'If he had searched his conscience, in all seriousness, for anything predisposing him to an eventful future, he would probably not have thought of a certain furtive, almost shameful emotion that disturbed him whenever he saw a train go by, a night train especially, its blinds drawn down on the mystery of its passengers.' 
 
Something snaps in the mind of Kees Popinga when the Dutch shipping firm he works for collapses under dubious circumstances just before Christmas, taking all his money with it. From the shell of this model citizen emerges a calculating paranoiac, capable of random acts of violence - even murder. The fugitive Popinga makes his way to Paris, playing a bizarre game of cat and mouse with the police - determined to force an uncaring world to take notice of him.

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

James Thurber

Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a weary, put upon middle-aged man - is the hero of his own story. 
 
 A man can dream, can't he? 
 
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is just one of the brilliant humorous and witty stories written by James Thurber and collected here.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

'Feels incredibly modern... it is brutal, frank about sex and violence, and will make your flesh creep' Ian Rankin 
 
A brilliant new translation of Simenon's critically acclaimed masterpiece. 
 
'And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage ... unable to cover the filth.' 
 
Nineteen-year-old Frank - thug, thief, son of a brothel owner - gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal. During a bleak, unending winter, he embarks on a string of violent and sordid crimes that set him on a path from which he can never return. Georges Simenon's matchless novel is a brutal, compelling portrayal of a world without pity; a devastating journey through a psychological no-man's land. 
 
'Among the best novels of the twentieth century' New Yorker 
 
'An astonishing work' John Banville 
 
'So noir it makes Raymond Chandler look beige' Independent

The Snow Was Dirty

Laurie Lee

'Magical' Daily Mail 
'I finished it with an ache in my heart and a tear in my eye' Spectator 
 
From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. 
 
Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers. 
 
Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world. 
 
'Brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee's home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers' Guardian 
 
'Simply written, observant and shot through with Lee's characteristic humility ... Against his whitewashed prose are touches of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement

Village Christmas

And Other Notes on the English Year

Stanislaw Lem

'On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms' 
 
Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stories from his protagonists Ijon Tichy (from The Star Diaries) and Pirx the Pilot, this is a highly entertaining but also deeply alarming view of the glories and absurdities of Outer Space.

Mortal Engines

A new translation of George Simenon's taut, devastating psychological novel set in American suburbia. The inspiration for the new play by award-winning playwright David Hare. 
 
'I had begun, God knows why, tearing a corner off of everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces' 
 
Confident and successful, New York advertising executive Ray Sanders takes what he wants from life. When he goes missing in a snow storm in Connecticut one evening, his closest friend begins to reassess his loyalties, gambling Ray's fate and his own future. 
 
'The romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place . . . utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining' John Banville 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independen

The Hand

Arnold Bennett

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story. 
 
Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

Riceyman Steps

H G Wells

In the space of less than four years, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published four of the most influential, original and hair-raising of all works of science-fiction. In a life of tireless experiment, travelling and intellectual engagement, Wells was both a leading public figure and one of the great imaginers of the modern world, but his reputation was always dominated by these amazing novels: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. Each is great in its own right, but they also became the 'books of Genesis' for entire genres of speculative fiction. 
 
This omnibus allows them to be read together, perhaps for the first time allowing the full range of Wells's achievement to be understood.

The Great Science Fiction

The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Short Stories

A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time. Blending unforgettable snapshots of the realities of everyday life with surrealism, fantasy and subversion, this collection shows Dutch writing to be an integral part of world literary history.

The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories

Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fantastic prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison not quite knowing when the end will come. Nabokov described the book as 'a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures ... The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita ... But I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair'.

Invitation to a Beheading

'Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life' Margaret Drabble 
 
Growing up in the world of the 'five towns' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold's novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of great spirit, complexity and integrity.

Anna of the Five Towns

Shirley Jackson

From the peerless author of The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a treasure trove of deliciously dark and funny stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings. 
 
Let Me Tell You brings together the brilliantly eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side, revealing her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist and a powerful feminist. 
 
'The stories range from sketches and anecdotes to complete and genuinely unsettling tales, somewhat alarming and very creepy ... The whole of the book offers insights into the vagaries of her mind, which was ruminant and generous ... For those of us whose imaginations, and creative ambitions, were ignited by 'The Lottery', Jackson remains one of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses' - Paul Theroux, New York Times 
 
'Shirley Jackson made a reputation with a short story in 1948. Like a lot of people I read 'The Lottery' when I was young, in an anthology of short stories from the New Yorker, and never forgot it. Let Me Tell You is a rich, enjoyable compendium of her unpublished short fiction and occasional writings, kicking off with a story of a dozen pages, 'Paranoia', which I won't forget, either' - Tom Stoppard, TLS Books of the Year

Let Me Tell You

George Orwell

'This selection is a ceaseless delight ... there is a treat on almost every page' Daily Telegraph 
 
George Orwell wrote, in his words, from 'a desire to see things as they are'. This new collection of his journalism and other writings, including articles, essays, broadcasts, poems, book and film reviews from across his career, shows his unmatched genius for observing the world. Whether discussing Polish immigration or Scottish independence, railing against racism, defending the English language or holding an imaginary conversation with Jonathan Swift, these pieces reveal a clear-eyed, entertaining and eternally relevant chronicler of his age. 
 
Edited with an introduction by Peter Davison 
 
'Orwell's luminous gift was for seeing things, for noticing what others missed, took for granted or simply found uninteresting, for discovering meaning and wonder in the familiarity of the everyday... Nothing escaped or seemed beneath his notice, which was what made him such a good reporter... Seeing Things As They Are is intended to be a collection first and foremost of his journalism, with preference given to lesser-known pieces and reviews as well as some of the poems he wrote. It is full of interest and curiosities' Jason Cowley, Financial Times 
 
'Peter Davison gives us a feast of [Orwell's] shorter writings, showing how from such hesitant beginnings he evolved into the writer of enduring importance we know, committed to decency, equality and political honesty, who could nevertheless wax lyrical over the first signs of spring or an imaginary English pub' Gordon Bowker, Independent

Seeing Things as They Are: Selected Journalism and Other Writings

E. L. Doctorow

'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom' 
 
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.

Billy Bathgate

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. 
 
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Pale Fire

Italo Calvino

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void' 
 
With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant précis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Translated by Geoffrey Brock 
 
'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith 
 
'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

One of fiction's greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great man 
 
Set in the raw, Victorian world of the 'Five Towns', The Card tells the extremely funny and tangled story of Denry Machin's rise from mediocrity to fame through a series of ludicrous and yet perversely successful schemes. He dances, pleads, cheats and inspires his way through life in a series of set-pieces which wonderfully evoke a now long-gone world of civic balls, seaside excursions, newspaper boys and patent chocolate remedies. As everybody said after one of his most stylish coups, Denry 'was not simply a card; he was the card.'

The Card

A Story of Adventure in the Five Towns

Arne Næss

'The smaller we come to feel ourselves compared with the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness.' 
 
 
Philosopher, mountaineer, activist and visionary, Arne Naess's belief that all living things have value made him one of the most inspirational figures in the environmental movement. Drawing on his years spent in an isolated hut high in the Norwegian mountains, and on influences as diverse as Gandhi's nonviolent action and Spinoza's all-encompassing worldview, this selection of the best of his writings is filled with wit, charisma and intense connection with nature. Emphasizing joy, cooperation and 'beautiful actions', they create a philosophy of life from a man who never lost his sense of wonder at the world. 
 
'Arne Naess's ideas ... inspired environmentalists and Green political activists around the world' The New York Times

Ecology of Wisdom

John Callahan

Ralph Ellison

Raw, lyrical and blazing with intensity, these short stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. 
 
'He saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold' 
 
Ranging from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlour, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War, they all display the musically layered voices, soaring language and sheer ebullience that made Ellison a giant of twentieth-century American writing. Written early in Ellison's career, several of these fourteen stories were unpublished in his lifetime, including 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' which features in this collection for the first time. 
 
'Approach the simple elegance of Chekhov' Washington Post

Flying Home And Other Stories

'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times 
 
'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves' 
 
Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans. 
 
This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation. 
 
With an Introduction by John F. Callahan 
 
'Brilliant' Saul Bellow

Invisible Man

Published after Ellison's death, this follow-up to Invisible Man is a thunderous epic of memory, faith, loss and identity. 
 
'Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything' 
 
'Tell me what happened while there's still time,' demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate black baptist minister he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young orphan, Sunraider was taken in and raised by Hickman, before reinventing himself as a racist politician. Now, as the two men confront the truth about their shared past in a final reckoning, Ellison's masterly novel takes in memories of a southern childhood, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and the richness of the African-American experience. 
 
'Majestic' Toni Morrison

Juneteenth

John le Carré

A box set of John le Carré's exceptional and thrilling first five novels, collected together for the first time: 
 
Call for the Dead 
A Murder of Quality 
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 
The Looking Glass War 
A Small Town in Germany

John le Carré, Novels (Box Set)

Volume 1

John Ball

A 50th anniversary edition of the classic crime novel that inspired the Oscar-winning film starring Sidney Poitier. 
 
'They call me Mr Tibbs!' 
 
A small southern town in the 1960s. A musician found dead on the highway. It's no surprise when white detectives arrest a black man for the murder. What is a surprise is that the black man - Virgil Tibbs - is himself a skilled homicide detective from California, whom inexperienced Chief Gillespie reluctantly recruits to help with the case. Faced with mounting local hostility and a police force that seems determined to see him fail, it isn't long before Tibbs - trained in karate and aikido - will have to fight not just for justice, but also for his own safety. 
 
The inspiration for the Academy Award-winning film starring Sidney Poitier, this iconic crime novel is a psychologically astute examination of racial prejudice, an atmospheric depiction of the American South in the sixties, and a brilliant, suspense-filled read set in the sultry heat of the night.

In the Heat of the Night

Väinö Linna

Published for the first time in a faithful English translation, Unknown Soldiers is the story of a platoon of ordinary Finnish soldiers fighting their Soviet Union counterparts during the Second World War. Drawing on Linna's own wartime experiences, this gritty and realistic account shatters the myth of the noble, obedient Finnish soldier.

Unknown Soldiers

Svetlana Alexievich

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
'Desperately important and impossible to put down. It is timeless. . . what shines clear from the testimonies is love - love which can make you do the most spectacular things ' Sheena Patel, Observer 
 
'- A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised version - 
 
In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. 
 
A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. 
 
'Beautifully written. . . heart-breaking' - Arundhati Roy, Elle 
 
'One of the most humane and terrifying books I've ever read' - Helen Simpson, Observer

Chernobyl Prayer

Voices from Chernobyl

Penguin Modern Classics

J L Carr

'But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want it to believe it.' J.L. Carr 
 
Very strange and extremely funny, this uncategorizable novel is a surreal fantasy set, vaguely, in the early 1970s, during one highly memorable football season. Steeple Sinderby Wanderers, in their new all-buttercup-yellow stripe, start it by ravaging the Fenland League and end it with a phenomenal nail-biter against Glasgow Rangers. 
 
Told through unreliable recollection, florid local newspaper coverage and bizarre committee minutes, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is somehow both entertaining and very moving. There will never be players again like Alex Slingsby, Sid 'the Shooting Star' Swift and the immortal milkman-turned-goalkeeper Monkey Tonks.

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art.

Speak, Memory

An Autobiography Revisited

Hope Harbor

Hot Wheels

House of Devils

House of Niccolo

House of Robots

How To

How To Be An Antiracist

How To Invent a Country

How to Garden

How to Grow

How to Grow Magic

How to be a Writer

Hurrah for Gin

I Am Number Four: The Lost Files

I Funny

I Like Birds

I Wanna Be Your Girl

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

ICONIC

ITCH

Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides

Following a horrific car accident in which she was the only survivor, seventeen year old Mia is faced with a choice. Does she stay, living with her grandparents and her loving boyfriend, or does she leave? She makes a difficult decision, leaving  it all behind her, breaking Adam's heart. Three years later, and the pair find themselves thrown together in New York, reminding Mia of her past and everything that she left behind her. If I stay and Where She Went are simultaneously tragic and hopeful, exploring grief, romance and memory.

If I Stay

In Our Time

In The Night Garden

In Their Own Words

Ink and Iron

Inspector Iwata

Inspector Maigret

DI Tony McLean of the Lothian and Borders Police knows Edinburgh like the back of his hand - an invaluable advantage when simultaneously pursuing depraved and dangerous criminals, and dodging overbearing superiors. Alongside a few trusted colleagues like DS 'Grumpy Bob' Laird and DS Kirsty Ritchie, McLean is an unorthodox force to be reckoned with . . .

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