Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour. 
 
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. 
 
These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through. 
 
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? How do we achieve fulfilment with our lives if we don't know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time. 
 
‘More than 40 years after Midnight's Children, there is still nobody who spins a yarn quite like Salman Rushdie’ Spectator 
 
‘Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities’ The Times 
 
‘Salman Rushdie is a genius’ A.M. Homes

The Eleventh Hour

Jacqueline Crooks

A spellbinding portrait of 90s London and three lives brought together by chance, from the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Fire Rush 
 
*Guardian book to read 2026* 
 
London in the 90s. After years in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a room of her own high up in Sky City, a housing estate in north London carved out of the glow-in-the-dark sky. But the past is not so easily forgotten and her childhood continues to haunt her. When an old classmate, Sol, reappears, he seems to offer her a lifeline. Sol was her first love, and the only person who looked out for Jaycee when they were kids. Can she trust him now? 
 
Her best friend from the hostel is Ella-G, who has left London for the glamorous world of the New York music scene. Both Jaycee and Ella-G are daughters in search of fathers. When Jaycee finds a rare record that seems to lead to Ella-G’s father, the two women go searching for answers in Atlantic City. What Jaycee encounters there brings her to the edges of her identity. Back in London, she finally begins to confront the traumas of her own past. But can she find justice and healing, even as her, Sol, Ella-G's worlds threaten to crash together and splinter apart?

Sky City

Joe Sacco

From the ground-breaking graphics journalist and author of Palestine, a revelatory investigation of the deadly sectarian riots in 2013 Uttar Pradesh, India, and their urgent global significance today 
 
Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath. 
 
Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs, and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds, rather than leaders, to influence the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the accounts that perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed. 
 
Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, the award winning cartoonist turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for us all. 
 
* 
 
PRAISE FOR JOE SACCO: 
 
'One of the masters of his craft' New Statesman 
 
'A pioneer of the genre' TLS 
 
'Formidably talented.' Independent 
 
'The hands-down boss of his particular corner of contemporary literature' Dazed & Confused 
 
'Sacco's brilliant, excruciating books of war reportage are potent territory... He shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold' New York Times Book Review

The Once and Future Riot

Joff Winterhart

'One of the most talented graphic novelists in the UK' ZADIE SMITH 
 
Improbable friends Margaret and Lucy navigate their age gap, the cult of personality, graveyards and bad knees: from cult-favourite graphic novelist Joff Winterhart 
 
At this point in her life, septuagenarian Margaret is particular about the things she likes. These include looking out of train windows, graveyards in the rain, an afternoon sherry. But most of all, it is her lifelong subject, the obscure 17th century polymath J.W Preece, who she has devoted her life to studying. 
 
Margaret doesn’t like: drawing attention to herself, extravagant behaviour and television. 
 
When she meets a young history TV producer, Lucy, they form a tentative bond, despite Margaret’s reluctance to be drawn into the media world. Several decades Margaret’s junior, heartbroken and unsure of herself, Lucy finds curious new inspiration as she falls under the spell of Margaret’s passions. 
 
With inimitable sensitivity and humour, cult-favourite graphic novelist Joff Winterhart returns with an irresistible portrait of two women navigating their age gap, loss, self-made-celebrity-historians, and bad knees… 
 
'Just when I thought I couldn’t love Joff Winterhart more, along came Dear Historian. It has all the wry humanity and keen eye for detail that won Driving Short Distances and Days of the Bagnold Summer such passionate fans' PATRICK GALE 
 
'Even in the prose aisles, you'd be hard-pressed to find a piece of literary fiction as nuanced and beautiful as this.' VULTURE, on Other People

Dear Historian

Akshi Singh

The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner invented new ways of thinking about leisure. A hundred years on, Akshi Singh follows her methods, with life-changing consequences. 
 
'Illuminating and thought-provoking' Darian Leader'Astounding, generous, and quietly exhilarating' Daisy LaFarge 
 
Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life. 
 
Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own. 
 
In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach - from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea - she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. 
 
'An exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived' Marianne Brooker, author of Intervals 
 
'Singh's verve and intelligence radiate from every page' Hannah Zeavin

In Defence of Leisure

Experiments in Living with Marion Milner

Alison Bechdel

'The funniest, most satirical cartoon she has ever written – as well as, perhaps, the most prescient' OBSERVER 
 
"Very funny and self-hating in a good way" ZADIE SMITH 
 
From her pygmy goat farm in Vermont, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathing memoir about her own greed and privilege? 
 
But how is she supposed to sit here writing a book when the world hangs on a thread? 
 
In this hilariously skewering comic novel, Alison is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a country on the brink of civil war. 
 
Her first graphic memoir about growing up with her taxidermist father has been adapted into a highly successful TV series, Death and Taxidermy. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group. 
 
As the TV show racks up Emmy after Emmy, Alison’s own envy spirals. Why couldn’t she be the writer for a wildly popular reality TV series which shows people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?! 
 
In Spent, the celebrated, bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud and passionately political work of autofiction, and once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times) than the real Alison Bechdel.

Spent

A Comic Novel

Marjane Satrapi

In November 1955, Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most celebrated tar players, is in search of a new instrument. His beloved tar has been broken. But no matter what tar he tries, none of them sound right. Brokenhearted, Nasser Ali Khan decides that life is no longer worth living. He takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all of its pleasures. This is the story of the eight days he spends preparing to surrender his soul. 
 
As the days pass and Nasser Ali Khan grows weaker, those who love him - his wife, his children, his siblings - gather round, incredulous, to try to comfort him. Every visitor stirs up a memory, and in the course of this week Nasser Ali Khan revisits his entire life, a life defined by three relationships in particular. He remembers his late mother, who sacrificed everything for his revolutionary brother, but who also, in the last week of her life, found solace only in smoking and listening to him play his tar; his angry wife, who can't forgive him his melancholy and irresponsibility; and Irane, his first love, whose father forbade her to marry a poor musician and inflicted the wound that fuelled his music. The pieces of Nasser Ali Khan's story slowly fall into place, and as they do, we begin to understand him. By the time the eighth day dawns, having witnessed Nasser Ali Khan communing with Sufi mystics, Sophia Loren, the spirit of his late mother, his own demons and, bravely, with Azrael, the angel of death - we feel privileged to have known him. 
 
Brilliantly weaving together the past, present and future to explore the successes and joys, failures and disappointments of Nasser Ali Khan's life and through his story, the meaning of any of our lives - Marjane Satrapi has also once again presented us with a complex and deeply human portrait of the men and women of her country, and of pre-revolution Iran itself. She delivers this tremendous story about life and death, and the fear and courage both require, with her trademark humour and insight. Chicken With Plums is Marjane Satrapi's finest achievement to date.

Chicken With Plums

Tom Segev

Simon Wiesenthal was the legendary 'Nazi hunter', a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the punishment of Nazi criminals. A hero in the eyes of many, he was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. 
 
For this definitive biography, Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's hundreds of thousands of private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. 
 
Tom Segev has written a brilliant character study of a 'hunter' who was driven by his own memories to ensure that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten.

Simon Wiesenthal

Deepti Kapoor

Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Médicis 
 
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night. 
 
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character. 
 
This is the story of Idha, a young woman who finds escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic, dangerous young man. She is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city, Delhi, and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past the point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own. 
 
A novel about female desire, A Bad Character shows us a Delhi we have not seen in fiction before: a city awash with violence, rage and corruption.

A Bad Character

Charles Burns

‘An instant classic from a master of the form’ 
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 
 
'Unsettling and beautifully executed' 
GUARDIAN 
 
An arresting story of an artist's obsessions, from the beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole. 
 
As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie – his reluctant muse – set off to a remote cabin in the woods. 
 
Armed with an old camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, in homage to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams – both his damsel in distress and his saviour. 
 
Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art. 
 
**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, THE NEW YORKER AND THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
Charles Burns, Eisner Award-Winner, 2006

Final Cut

Howard Jacobson

A provocatively entertaining, savagely funny satire on Donald Trump by Britain’s greatest comic novelist. 
 
Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers. He is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic; has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no ideas and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again? 
 
'Deliciously laugh-aloud nasty about not just the making of this rough beast but what in the American character enabled it to go slouching into the White House' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Undigested rage, whip-smart wit devastating fluency and an aim as straight as an arrow… This is the story, savagely well told by our greatest comic novelist, of how we got in the state we’re in' Oldie

Pussy

Kate Beaton

*WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDS FOR BEST MEMOIR AND BEST WRITER/ARTIST* 
 
'A vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people... it shimmers with grace' 
ALISON BECHDEL, author of FUN HOME 
 
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. 
 
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. 
 
Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Ducks

Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2022

Ottessa Moshfegh

Read the novel that catapulted Ottessa Moshfegh to literary stardom: a gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas 
 
'One of America's most exciting - and most provocative - young novelists' Financial Times 
 
'You’re in safe, if sticky hands... A wild ride' The Times 
 
Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, 1851: McGlue is down in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name, situation or orientation – but he has blood on his hands. He may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. As the ship makes its voyage home to Salem, Massachusetts, intolerable memory accompanies reluctant sobriety. 
 
A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

McGlue

Michael Ondaatje

The poems in Handwriting are memories of Sri Lanka: the rituals and traditions, history and geography, the smells and tastes and colours of his first home. Here are sunless forests, cattle-bells, stilt-walkers 'with the movement of prehistoric birds'; a Buddha buried 'so roots/like fingers of a blind monk/spread for two hundred years over his face'; 'saffron and panic seed, lotus flowers, sandalwood; a lover, who lay her fearless heart/light as a barn owl/against him all night'. 
 
Handwriting is an elegy for lost childhood, for a culture and language lost to the turmoil of history, but it is also a glimpse of the source of the writer's delicate, erotic, mysterious imagination. By focussing on writing frankly about beautiful things, Ondaatje takes the poems beyond narrative to these simple, deeply sensual images - given to us in a language that is pared, cursive and exquisite.

Handwriting

Posy Simmonds

The brilliant graphic novel behind the major new film starring Gemma Aterton (Quantum of Solace), Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Fabrice Luchini (In the House) and Mel Raido (Spooks) 
 
Gemma is the bored, pretty second wife of Charlie Bovery, the reluctant stepmother of his children and the bête-noire of his ex-wife. Gemma's sudden windfall and distaste for London take them across the Channel to Normandy, where the charms of French country living soon wear off. 
 
Is it a coincidence that Gemma Bovery has a name rather like Flaubert's notorious heroine? Is it by chance that, like Madame Bovary, Gemma is bored, adulterous, and a bad credit risk? Is she inevitably doomed? These questions consume Gemma's neighbour, the intellectual baker, Joubert. Denying voyeurism, but nevertheless noting every change in the fit of her jeans, every addition to Gemma's wardrobe, her love-bites and lovers, Joubert, with the help of the heroine's diaries, follows her path towards ruin. Adultery and its consequences. Disappointment and deception. The English in France. Fat and slim. Then and now.

Gemma Bovery

Adrian Tinniswood

'Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.' 
LUCY WORSLEY 
 
Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country house 
 
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. 
 
This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. 
 
The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all. 
 
'A wonderful book.' 
JUDITH FLANDERS 
 
'Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.' 
GARETH RUSSELL 
 
**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR**

The Power and the Glory

The Country House Before the Great War

Alex Halberstadt

'Engrossing' Daniel Beer, Guardian 
 
'A beautiful book... incisive, radiant' Olivia Laing 
 
'Illuminating, dramatic... majestic writing' Spectator 
 
'Enthralling... a triumph' Andrew Solomon 
 
Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia, the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family, in this haunting work of memoir and history. 
 
In Ukraine, Halberstadt tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his own story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. 
 
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a moving investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

A Memoir and a Reckoning

Woody Brown

Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving debut novel takes us to sun-bleached California, to a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community. 
 
Among the clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path. 
 
At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us. With his wit, empathy and astonishing gifts as a storyteller, Woody Brown immerses us in life as we have never experienced it before.

Upward Bound

From independence movements in Sri Lanka to train stations in contemporary Ontario, an intimate and witty selection of Michael Ondaatje’s most widely loved poems taken across fifty years 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric family, to his life in rural southern Ontario with its beloved rivers, celebrations of treasured friends, the close ties of children. 
 
Ondaatje is one of the great poets of love, and here we follow him through the exhilarations of youth into that ‘storm of music’, the passionate, sensuous swerves of longing and desire, until we reach the calm of that moment when ‘only a cloud’s reflection holding you up / You swim into late afternoon’. 
 
The Distance of a Shout offers us a glimpse into the interwoven life and art of one of our most cherished poets and novelists – a reminder itself of the power of great poetry to shine a light on living. 
 
'Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry' TERRANCE HAYES

The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems

Amie Barrodale

A mortally funny story of a mother's quest to save her son against all odds 
 
'Transcendent and dazzlingly weird' New York Times 
 
'Amie Barrodale is the most important writer of my generation' Ottessa Moshfegh 
 
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world in a desert in New Mexico, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth. 
 
But Sandra soon discovers that a mother’s work is never done, not even when you’re dead. It turns out limbo is a great place from which to keep an eye on your errant son. When Trip is picked up on the side of the road by a strange man, Sandra is the only one who knows where he is. 
 
As Trip ventures further south towards the coast and directly into the eye of a hurricane, Sandra’s struggle to save him from the other realm begins. 
 
From Florida’s Gulf Stream to the raging seas, through Munich-bound aeroplanes and from one body to another, Trip takes us on an absurd, profound and irresistibly entertaining odyssey - a story of childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between. 
 
'Beautifully crafted, hard-boiled fun' Nell Zink 
 
'I was captivated and charmed for its entirety' Adelaide Faith 
 
'An extraordinary novel' Akhil Sharma

Trip

Raymond Briggs

A marvellous, life-enhancing book for all ages, now a major animated film starring Jim Broadbent, Brenda Blethyn and Luke Treadaway 
 
Utterly original, deeply moving and very funny, Ethel &amp; Ernest tells the story of Raymond Briggs' parents' marriage, lady's maid Ethel and milkman Ernest, from their first chance encounter in 1928, through the birth of their son Raymond in 1934, to their deaths, within months of each other, in 1971. 
 
Told in Brigg`s unique strip-cartoon format, Ethel and Ernest live through the defining moments of the twentieth century: the darkness of the Great Depression, the build up to World War II, the trials of the war years, the euphoria of VE Day and the emergence of a generation from post war austerity to the cultural enlightenment of the 1960s. 
 
Ethel &amp; Ernest is a heartfelt and affectionate tribute to an ordinary couple and an extraordinary generation.

Ethel & Ernest

Blake Bailey

'Superlative... definitive and genuinely gripping' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Utterly engrossing' EVENING STANDARD 
 
'Compulsively readable... Beautifully written... Definitive' OBSERVER 
 
Appointed by Philip Roth and granted complete access and independence, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the post-war literary scene. 
 
Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of post-war American culture. 
 
*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN*

Philip Roth

The Biography

Discover the quirky tale of single parenting and heavy metal behind the film from director Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners) 
 
'When someone looks back and writes a history of this summer, two people they will almost certainly leave out are Sue and Daniel Bagnold...' 
 
So begins Joff Winterhart's sublimely funny and perceptive graphic novel, Days of the Bagnold Summer. Sue, 52, works in a library. Daniel, 15, is still at school. This was the summer holidays Daniel was due to spend with his father and his father's pregnant new wife in Florida. When they cancel his trip, Sue and Daniel face six long weeks together... 
Joff Winterhart perfectly captures the ennui, the tension, the pathos and yes, the affection of this mother-son relationship. Already well-known for his animated films like Violet and Turquoise, he here shows himself to be a comics author of extraordinary talent. 
 
Shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Award for Best Novel

Days of the Bagnold Summer

Guy Delisle

Famously referred to as part of the 'Axis-of-Evil', North Korea remains one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. A series of manmade and natural catastrophes have also left it one of the poorest. When the fortress-like country recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city. 
 
Armed with a smuggled radio and a copy of 1984, Delisle could only explore Pyongyang and its countryside while chaperoned by his translator and a guide. But among the statues, portraits and propaganda of leaders Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il - the world's only Communist dynasty - Delisle was able to observe more than was intended of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered. 
 
His astute and wry musings on life in the austere and grim regime form the basis of this remarkable graphic novel. Pyongyang is an informative, personal and accessible look at an enigmatic country.

Pyongyang

A Journey in North Korea

Helen Smith

THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 
 
Over a career spanning nearly fifty years Edward Garnett – editor, critic and publisher’s reader – would become one of the most influential men in twentieth-century British literature. Famed for his incisive criticism and unwavering conviction in matters of taste, Garnett was responsible for spotting and nurturing the talents of a constellation of our greatest writers. 
 
In The Uncommon Reader Helen Smith brings to life Garnett’s fascinating, often stormy, relationships with those writers – from Joseph Conrad to John Galsworthy, D.H. Lawrence to T.E. Lawrence, Henry Green to Edward Thomas. All turned to Garnett for advice and guidance at critical moments in their careers, and their letters and diaries offer an insight into their creative processes, their hopes and fears. 
 
Addressing questions of culture, fame and success, this absorbing portrait of a man who shaped the literary landscape as we know it asks us to consider genius – what it is, where it comes from and to whom it belongs.

The Uncommon Reader

A Life of Edward Garnett

Jane Shaw

In 1919, in the wake of the upheaval of World War I, a remarkable group of English women came up with their own solution to the world's grief:a new religion. At the heart of the Panacea Society was a charismatic and autocratic leader, a vicar's widow named Mabel Barltrop. Her followers called her Octavia, and believed that she was the daughter of God, sent to build the New Jerusalem in Bedford. 
 
Proclaiming the female aspects of God, Octavia attracted former suffragettes, middle-class Christian women and passionate spiritual seekers to Bedford, where they followed her in rigorous religious practices. She appointed twelve women as her apostles, and put the rest to work to spread her Word: that human beings, through Panacea, could achieve immortal life on earth. 
 
Acclaimed historian Jane Shaw found the last living members of the Panacea Society, who revealed to her their immense, painstakingly-preserved archives. She discovered a utopian community that once had seventy residents, thousands of followers, and an international healing ministry that reached 130,000 people around the globe. 
 
Octavia, Daughter of God is a fascinating group biography and a revelatory work of cultural and narrative history. Vividly told, by turns funny and tragic, it reveals in intimate detail the complex, out-sized personality of Octavia; the faith of her devoted followers, who believed they would never die; and the intricacies and intrigues of her close-knit community. 
 
But Octavia, Daughter of God is also about a moment at the advent of modernity, when a generation of newly empowered women tried to re-make Christianity in their own image. Startlingly modern in their resolve and curiously reactionary in their social views and politics, their story is a portrait of an age. It offers a window into the anxieties and hopes of the interwar years through the lives of ordinary people who believed extraordinary things about God, this world and the next.

Octavia, Daughter of God

Don McCullin

The updated retrospective published for McCullin's 80th birthday. 
 
Contains 40 new unpublished photographs and a new introduction — the definitive edition. 
 
McCullin’s reputation has long been established as one of the greatest photographers of conflict in the last century. In the fourteen years since the first publication of the book, McCullin has shed the role of war photographer and become a great landscape artist. He has also travelled widely through Africa, India, the Middle East and among the tribes living in Stone Age conditions in Indonesia. His journey from the back streets of north London to his rural retreat in the depths of Somerset is unparalleled. It includes a passage through the most terrible scenes of recent history, for which his stark views of the West Country offer him some redemption.

The New Definitive Edition

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by him' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
'A generous, moving book' GUARDIAN 
 
Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived there since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world &ndash; describing himself as a 'mongrel', someone born out of diverse cultures. 
 
Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Molière&rsquo;s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the Californian coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. As he writes in the opening poem: 
 
Reading the lines he loves 
he slips them into a pocket, 
wishes to die with his clothes 
full of torn-free stanzas 
and the telephone numbers 
of his children in far cities 
 
Poetry &ndash; where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

A Year of Last Things

From the bestselling author of Persepolis comes this humorous and enlightening look at the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together Marjane's tough-talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbours for an afternoon of tea-drinking and talk. Naturally, the subject turns to loves, sex and vagaries of men...

Embroideries

A tragicomic portrait of one man's unravelling in an absurd, twisted world, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson. 
 
'The undisputed British master of black comedies' Observer 
 
In the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed – the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature? 
 
The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who sees him as complicit in genocide, Draxler fixates on bad news. He shouts at the television. He carries his own tin of paint to cover up graffiti. The staffroom at the primary school of which he is headmaster has become a battlefield of inflamed opinion he does nothing to quiet. 
 
His wife Charmian is a beacon of calm but even she isn't sure she can save Ferdie from himself. 'Don't worry about me,' he tells her. 'I don't have what it takes to go mad.' 
 
'Jacobson's writing is virtuoso. He is the master of shifting tones, from the satirical to the serious. His prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command' Independent

Howl

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