Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children’s book – Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. 
 
 
The Waiter (Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series about Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures.The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series – The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) – is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

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Yanis Varoufakis

A captivating portrait of number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis’s political awakening, told through the extraordinary lives of five women, and the West’s tumultuous history from 1924 to the present. 
 
Eleni put an arm around him and said: ‘Come, come, life is ahead of us. Raise your soul now. We have much to do.’ 
 
When Yanis Varoufakis was eight years old, his uncle made him a model airplane out of matchsticks and cigarette papers; all he could find in his cell. Yet, to his dismay, his mother Eleni broke open the fragile gift, revealing a hidden message: instructions for fellow dissidents ahead of their forthcoming court martial. It was 1969 and Uncle Panayis was a political prisoner, captured and tortured for resisting the military dictatorship. 
 
Dramatic in scope and deep in feeling, Raise Your Soul is an intimate portrait of three generations caught up in the whirlwind of history. It is also a remarkable narrative spanning one hundred years, beginning in post-colonial Egypt in the 1920s, and then tracing Greece’s tumultuous century through Nazi occupation, communist resistance, civil war, Cold War fracture, fascist dictatorship, socialist revival and present-day economic crisis. 
 
At its heart are the women whose resilience, defiance and courage inspired the visionary economist most: Eleni, Anna, Trisevgeni, Georgia and Danaë. Through their lives, Varoufakis not only lays bare his own political soul, but confronts the dark forces of authoritarianism that still haunt Europe and beyond, reigniting hope in all of us that we can rise once more.

Raise Your Soul

A Personal History of Resistance

Mairi Hedderwick

Join Katie Morag McColl and her family on the Isle of Struay in this beautiful gift collection of classic stories. 
 
There are many adventures to be had on the Isle of Struay. There's her mum and dad's Shop and Post Office, Grannie Island's house across the bay, the dancing classes at the hall - and just wait till the mischevious Big Boy Cousins come to visit - they're lots of fun! 
 
Also included in this new collection are six folk tales, as featured in the popular CBeebies series, specially illustrated by Mairi Hedderwick for the show, and exclusively printed in this collection. 
 
So grab your jumper, don your wellies and discover the delights of Struay! 
 
"Katie Morag lives the life that country dreams are made of" Independent

The Katie Morag Treasury

Christopher de Bellaigue

Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at the pinnacle of world power, while his family and future are at the mercy of their own dynastic law: whichever of his five sons succeeds him must eventually kill all the others, so why not get a head start? 
 
For the next fifteen years, as Suleyman the Magnificent and his terrifying pirate captain Barbarossa face down imperial enemies across two hemispheres, the self-fulfilling curse of the Ottomans gathers its own unstoppable momentum. 
 
From the burning pyres of Paris to the rain-lashed mountains of Transylvania, from Buda to Basra, from Crimea to the coast of India, The Golden Throne is a globe-spanning, ground-breaking reconstruction of the life and world of the most feared and powerful man of the sixteenth century. 
 
Intensely gripping yet entirely historical, it places us in the room with many of the key figures of the era – the conceited, wide-jawed Holy Roman Emperor; the untrustworthy, primping King of France; a leering, beer-soaked Martin Luther – showing them consumed with fury and hurt, venomous yet vulnerable. And it is here, behind closed doors, that we witness Suleyman’s beloved wife Hurrem waging pitiless war against his eldest son, born to her predecessor in the Sultan’s bed, culminating in a chilling act that will define Suleyman’s legacy. 
 
The Golden Throne shows us one of the greatest yet least understood figures in history as never before. It is an epic yet intimate drama of personal power wielded with world-shaping consequences, revealing both the price of succession and the terrible cost of success.

The Golden Throne

The Curse of a King

The Rule of Suleyman the Magnificent

Simon Schama

The final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain spans centuries, crosses the breadth of the empire and covers a vast expanse of topics - from the birth of feminism to the fate of freedom. 
 
The Fate of the Empire asks crucial questions about the nature of empire, journeying from celebrations of industrial and imperialist power at the Great Exhibition, to the catastrophic Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Through the military and economic shocks and traumas of our past, Schama asks the question that is still with us - is the immense weight of our history a blessing or a curse, a gift or a millstone around the neck of our future? 
 
This third and final volume in the series is a vast compelling history, made more so by the lively storytelling and big bold characters at the heart of the action. But alongside flamboyant heroes, like Nelson and Churchill, Schama recalls unsung heroines and virtually unknown enemies. Alongside the grand ideas, he exposes the grand illusions that cost untold lives.

A History of Britain - Volume 3

The Fate of Empire 1776-2000

Jerry White

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. 
 
London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. 
 
In Jerry White's dazzling history we witness the city's unparalleled metamorphosis over the course of the century through the daily lives of its inhabitants. We see how Londoners worked, played, and adapted to the demands of the metropolis during this century of dizzying change. The result is a panorama teeming with life.

London In The Nineteenth Century

Simon Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. 
 
From the beginning of July 1637, battles raged on for 200 years - both at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe, America and India. Most would be wars of faith - waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'. 
 
The British Wars is a story of revolution and reaction, inspiration and disenchantment, of progress and catastrophe, and Schama's evocative narrative brings it vividly to life.

A History of Britain - Volume 2

The British Wars 1603-1776

Ibram X. Kendi

From France to Brazil, Hungary to India, the Netherlands to the United States, the rise of authoritarian movements has reshaped global politics. At their heart lies the myth of the so-called ‘great replacement theory’, which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. 
 
In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi traces how this conspiracy theory, once the preserve of the right-wing fringe, has mutated into a global ideology embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. From Anders Breivik’s massacre in Oslo to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and re-shaped parties of government. 
 
This is not a book about extremists on the margins. It is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they now shape governments across the globe today. Kendi demonstrates how mainstream politicians and billionaires – from Elon Musk to Giorgia Meloni, from Geert Wilders to Pierre Poilievre – have drawn on and spread this dogma through media platforms, cultural battles and populist anger and amplified them in moments of economic crisis, pandemic and migration. He exposes the deep historical lineages of this ideology, with its roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and fascism, that continue to shadow the present and how older prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. 
 
Urgent, authoritative and unflinching, Chain of Ideas is a chilling but essential global history of our authoritarian age and a powerful call to defend democracy before it is too late.

Chain of Ideas

Great Replacement Theory and the Origins of Our Authoritarian Age

Gareth Harney

It was the Greeks that invented money as we know it, striking the first coins in the seventh century BC. Before long this innovative idea of a portable metallic store of wealth spread across the waves of the Mediterranean. But these coins were more than simple units of exchange; they quickly became artistic masterpieces crafted in gold and silver and endure today as some of the most important surviving examples of Ancient Greek art. 
 
More important, they advertised the power and virtues of each polis with patriotic fervour; for the empire of Greece was not a single entity but a rich mosaic of wholly distinct city-states spread across three continents. Yet for all their unique identities and rivalries, these states were bonded by their shared worship of a colourful gallery of gods, their devotion to art, literature and philosophy, and the courage and skill of their citizen-soldiers. 
 
In this thrilling numismatic adventure Gareth Harney introduces us to twelve fascinating coins that provide the perfect introduction to Ancient Greece. We witness the birth of democracy on a sacred hilltop overlooking the Acropolis, battle invading Persians in an existential war on land and at sea, take part in the bitter conflict between Athens and Sparta, and march alongside Alexander the Great as he carries Greek culture all the way to India.

Nomos

A History of Ancient Greece in Twelve Coins

Theo Padnos

In December 2009 the US government launched an air strike against the tiny Yemeni village of al-Majalah where al-Qaeda militants were believed to be in hiding. A second attack a week later targeted the prominent religious leader Anwar Awlaki. He escaped unharmed but many villagers were killed. These two strikes were intended to set back al-Qaeda's operations in Yemen but, within 24 hours, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - a 23-year-old Nigerian man and one of Awlaki's followers - boarded a plane to Detroit with explosives hidden in his clothing. 
 
His is not a unique story: at a time when true pluralism remains an aspiration rather than a reality in the West, young men, disillusioned and angry with the spiritually barren, consumerist societies in which they live, travel to Yemen in search of fulfilment. There, in the country's anarchic wilderness, they find what they could not at home: a pure way of life, submissive wives and like-minded brethren. Some, like Abdulmutallab, find something much more dangerous: the conviction to carry out Jihad. 
 
In Undercover Muslim, Theo Padnos brilliantly evokes a landscape and journey that few Westerners have experienced. He investigates the radicalisation of these disaffected young men as they move, almost unnoticed, from London, Berlin or Paris to their new spiritual home in Yemen. 
 
Padnos's journey takes him from the newsroom of a Yemeni newspaper to the prayer rows and lecture rooms of Yemen's madrassas, from covert Jeep rides into the sacred mountains to a stint in an overcrowded prison. It is through these events, and through the people he encounters, that Padnos shows us how a terrifying gulf has opened between Islam and the West.

Undercover Muslim

A Journey into Yemen

Simukai Chigudu

'Intimate and epic, Chasing Freedom will teach you more about the legacies of colonialism than a hundred op-eds or a dozen textbooks' SATHNAM SANGHERA, author of Empireland 
 
In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’. 
 
Chasing Freedom is the story of the inheritance of violence, of struggle, of African liberation. It is guided by one central question: what does it mean to be truly free? 
 
As a member of the first generation born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe, Simukai Chigudu had heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, and of how his father was imprisoned and tortured as a student activist before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerrilla soldier. Yet, despite his country’s hard-won freedom, Chigudu’s early life was steeped in British tradition. He’d sung English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket. 
 
When Zimbabwe convulsed from political turmoil and economic collapse, Chigudu left his home to attend a Catholic boarding school in Lancashire. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself. 
 
Simukai Chigudu elegantly weaves together his own story with Zimbabwe’s history, from a young Cecil Rhodes on the diamond trail to the making of Rhodesia through plunder and dispossession, from his parents’ meeting in Idi Amin’s Uganda to his family’s fight to free Zimbabwe, and from the undoing of Robert Mugabe to the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford, of which he was a founding member. 
 
Chasing Freedom traces the tangled threads of personal and political history to give a new perspective on race, class, identity and the heavy legacy of colonialism. It is an intimate reckoning with the ghosts of the past that haunt our politics and our psyches in ways we cannot always see.

Chasing Freedom

Coming of Age at the End of Empire

Jason Burke

Immersive, globe-spanning and full of detail and drama, The Revolutionists is an unprecedented account of a seismic decade that transformed the modern world. 
 
In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage-takings. Among them were the glamorous young Leila Khaled with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking Carlos the Jackal in shades and designer suits, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. United by their hatred of Israel, capitalism and ‘Western imperialism’, they unleashed a series of audacious attacks that brought governments to their knees and glued the world to their televisions in morbid fascination. 
 
Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, spies, witnesses and victims, Jason Burke takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these often-deadly operations. Through their eyes – and the eyes of the unrelenting agents who hunted them down – he uncovers a dark, complex world of loyalty, betrayal and commitment to radical change at any cost. 
 
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and packed with revelations about iconic events such as the deadly attack on the Munich Olympic, Israel’s raid on Entebbe, the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamic extremism, this is a sweeping, scrupulously reported historical narrative with the pace and suspense of a thriller. 
 
The Revolutionists pitches the reader into these tumultuous times. Ultimately, it shows how a campaign led by secular, leftist revolutionaries gave way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come. It is impossible to understand the world today without reading this history.

The Revolutionists

The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

Shirley Hughes

The book begins with a small girl in West Kirby who is obsessed with comics: The Daily Sketch, The Daily Express and The Mirror-each of these newspapers helped to shape one of our finest illustrators. Shirley's story takes us from this gentle start, through the second world war, and to a career, which began with Art School in a blitzed Liverpool, led to Oxford, and then to London. Shirley reflects on art, and her own development, in a tale which is fascinating and full of personalities. She describes her own creative process as 'the nearest thing I know to flying into the sun' and it is this passion for the world of illustration, which shines through the book and gives it a unique personality. Lavishly illustrated throughout with sketches from her Italian sketchbooks, doodles from boring meetings, roughs from what would later become classic picture books and perfectly executed paintings done just for the fun of it, this book will be a treasured gift for those who love art and those who have grown up with the enduring characters from Shirley's books who inhabit so many homes through this country and beyond.

A Life Drawing

Ian Watt

This is the story of a most ingenious invention: the novel. Desribed for the first time in The Rise of The Novel, Ian Watt's landmark classic reveals the origins and explains the success of the most popular literary form of all time. 
 
In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers -- Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding -- invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. With penetrating and original readings of their works, as well as those of Jane Austen, who further developed and popularised it, he explains why these authors wrote in the way that they did, and how the complex changes in society – the emergence of the middle-class and the new social position of women – gave rise to its success. Heralded as a revelation when it first appeared, The Rise of The Novel remains one of the most widely read and enjoyable books of literary criticism ever written, capturing precisely and satisfyingly what it is about the form that so enthrals us.

The Rise Of The Novel

Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

Werner Herzog

What if a lie is told to reveal some underlying truth? Are feelings that seem inappropriate, such as hysteria following the death of a celebrity, any less true than the grief we feel over the death of a loved one? Even if the plot of an opera seems preposterous, can’t it still express emotions that ring true with the audience? 
 
At the heart of this fascinating and iconoclastic book lies Werner Herzog’s concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ – a truth that is often hidden behind the facts and our conceptions of reality but can be gleaned through the poetic imagination, in art, literature and cinema, when we open ourselves up to an aesthetic experience. 
 
Written in Herzog’s inimitable style, these stories, anecdotes and reflections take us from present-day deep fakes and the opportunities and perils of AI to ancient Egypt and Rome, where rulers resorted to lies and propaganda in the same way as governments do today; from Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole to alien abduction claims and the making of Herzog’s own films. 
 
With its singular vision and unique voice, The Future of Truth is a compelling meditation on the relationship between fact and fiction – evidence and imagination – by one of today’s most fascinating and idiosyncratic thinkers.

The Future of Truth

Barton Gellman

'A remarkable, authentic and chilling exposé of a global conspiracy that reads like a first-rate conspiracy thriller: a book of gripping, compulsive and disturbing impact' William Boyd 
 
Dark Mirror is the ultimate inside account of the vast, global surveillance network that now pervades all our lives. 
 
Barton Gellman’s informant called himself ‘Verax’ – the truth-teller. It was only later that Verax unmasked himself as Edward Snowden. But Gellman’s primary role in bringing Snowden’s revelations to light, for which he shared the Pulitzer prize, is only the beginning of this gripping real-life spy story. Snowden unlocked the door: here Gellman describes what he found on the other side over the course of a years-long journey of investigation. It is also the story of his own escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries after he discovered his own name on a file in the NSA document trove and realised that he himself was under attack. 
 
Through a gripping narrative of paranoia, clandestine operations and jaw-dropping revelations, Dark Mirror delineates in full for the first time the hidden superstructure that connects government espionage with Silicon Valley and the most powerful corporation whose name you’ve never heard. Who is spying on us and why? Here are the answers.

Dark Mirror

Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

Stefan Aust

The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of post-war Europe. A group of young people, most of them from solid, middle-class backgrounds, took the law into their own hands, and by means of arson, bombing, kidnap and murder sought to alter the direction of national, and indeed international, politics. 
 
Rooted in the student protest movement of the late 1960s, the story of the group begins in May 1970 with the freeing of Andreas Baader - imprisoned for planting fire bombs in protest against the Vietnam War - by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and others. They spent the years that followed requisitioning apartments from left-wing sympathisers, stealing cars and robbing banks in preparation for attacks on US military bases. 
 
After an intense manhunt, the ringleaders of the group, which now called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), were finally captured in 1972. Their prolonged trial began in 1975 and lasted for almost 2 years, in the course of which Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell. The other members of the group were convicted and received life sentences. 
 
The 'war of six against sixty million' (Heinrich Böll) reached its climax in the autumn of 1977 when supporters tried to secure their release by kidnapping the president of the German Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, and later by hijacking a Lufthansa jet, which was eventually captured by German special forces at Mogadishu airport. On the morning the rescue was announced, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were all found dead in their cells. The 'German Autumn' marked the violent peak of a journey that had begun with peaceful protests against the American war in Vietnam : moral outrage had turned into blatant immorality. 
 
Stefan Aust's utterly absorbing account of these events reads like a first-class thriller. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is the definitive chronicle of seven years that changed Germany.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Colin Turnbull

The Forest People is an astonishingly intimate and life-enhancing account of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in harmony with nature -- and an all-time classic of anthropology. 
 
For three years, Colin Turnbull lived with an isolated group of Pygmies deep in the forest of the African Congo, experiencing their daily life first-hand. He attended their hunting parties and initiation ceremonies, witnessed their music and their rituals, observed their quarrels and love affairs. He documented them as an anthropologist but was accepted among them as a friend. 
 
A ground-breaking work in its time, The Forest People made him one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. It remains a transporting account of an earthly paradise and of a legendary and fascinating people. 
 
With a new foreword by Horatio Clare.

The Forest People

Lanre Bakare

We Were There is about a Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored – the one that exists beyond London. 
 
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in tumult: rocked by Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policy, the rise of the National Front, widespread civil unrest. With anti-immigration policies in the political mainstream, Black lives were on the frontline of a racial reckoning. But it was also a time of unrivalled Black cultural creation, organising and resistance. This was the crucible in which modern Britain came into existence. 
 
We Were There brings into the spotlight for the first time extraordinary Black lives in once-rich cities now home to failing industries: the foundries of Birmingham, the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the mills of Bradford. We are in Wigan, Wolverhampton, Manchester and the green expanse of the British countryside. We meet feminists and Rastafarians, academics and rugby-league superstars; witness landmark campaigns and encounter radical artists and thinkers; tread dancefloors that hosted Northern Soul all-nighters and the birth of Acid House. 
 
London was only ever part of the picture – We Were There is about incorporating a vastly broader range of Black Britons into the fabric of our national story. 
 
Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There decisively expands our sense of who we are. Confronting, joyful and thrilling, this is a profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain.

We Were There

How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain

Stephen Witt

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 ** 
 
The riveting account of Nvidia, the tech company that has exploded in value for its artificial intelligence computing hardware, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s charismatic, uncompromising CEO. 
 
In June of 2024, spurred by the frenzy of investment following the launch of ChatGPT, and thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most-valuable corporation on Earth. In The Thinking Machine, acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a manufacturer of video game components shocked Silicon Valley by conquering the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. 
 
Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its iconoclastic CEO, who emerges as a compelling, single-minded, and ferocious leader, and now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures. 
 
The Thinking Machine is the story of how Nvidia evolved from providing components for circuit boards to supplying hundred-million dollar supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in computer architecture, and the small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, which Huang has billed as the 'next industrial revolution', as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and new movies, art, and books, generated on command.

The Thinking Machine

Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip

David Erdal

* Beyond the Corporation is a book for our times. Offering inspiration and vision in the wake of financial Armageddon, it is the story of ordinary people who share the ownership of the businesses where they work. 
 
* The enterprises come in all sizes: from companies employing just a few dozen people, to large corporations: John Lewis in the UK, employing 70,000 'partners'; Mondragon, a highly entrepreneurial group of over 100 businesses in Spain, employing more than 100,000; and many examples in the US, some employing tens of thousands. It would be hard to imagine a better informed, more involved or more enthusiastic set of employees - sharing the efforts of making their companies successful, and sharing all of the rewards. Unusually in the corporate world, they control their own destinies - a situation beyond the dreams of most working people. 
 
* Erdal takes a hard look at those who insist, in the teeth of the evidence, that shared ownership will never work - a sorry tale, he argues, of prejudice masquerading as economic thinking. The book contains detailed case studies as well as interviews with a range of people, whose inspiring stories of success fly in the face of received wisdom. These successes include: high levels of productivity; sustained rapid growth; fast-moving, innovative responses to changing worlds; high levels of investment aimed at long-term prosperity; and, above all, the sheer happiness employees experience in working together in businesses that they own together, sharing the wealth that they create. 
 
* At a time when the 'orthodox' corporate economy has been badly shaken, Beyond the Corporation makes essential reading.

Beyond the Corporation

Humanity Working

Kevin Fong

Military strategists have taught us that no plan survives the first five minutes of battle; but the battle rages on. What happens in minute six of a crisis? 
 
Professor Kevin Fong was flying with the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, making split-second, life-or-death decisions in the most extreme circumstances when he was seconded to the NHS's Covid-19 Strategy Unit on the frontline of the fight against a global pandemic. 
 
Telling stories of astonishing skill and catastrophic error across medicine, aviation and space-flight, and reflecting on his own dramatic experiences as well as those of war medics, pilots and surgeons, Fong brings us lessons from the frontline in leadership, teamwork, strategy and how to fail.

Minute Six

How Great Teams Fail and Prevail

Darragh McGee

A pioneering, eye-opening investigation into the world of online gambling, its explosive growth and the transformational impact it is having on sport, tech, individuals and society. 
 
A little flutter. No harm. All part of the game. Get closer to the action. A friendly, familiar voice, inviting you to join the real fans and get involved. 
 
It has never been easier to place a bet. Wall to wall adverts on repeat surround every sporting event. The smartphone in your pocket all you need to unlock a dizzying array of bets on almost any aspect of any sport. 
 
Since its origins as a provincial cottage industry almost twenty-five years ago, UK online gambling has become a globe-straddling behemoth worth more than £10 billion a year. It can sometimes feel as if the point of sport is to bet on it. 
 
But it didn’t have to be this way. In Imitation Games, Darragh McGee travels the world to tell the incredible story of the individuals and companies who brought this brave new world of betting into being (and got very rich doing so). 
 
He also traces the devastation and destruction that gambling leaves behind it. The inadequate safeguards and the broken lives that show that when the fun stops, it stops hard. And proffers a series of solutions for how we can create a different future.

Imitation Games

How the Gambling Industry Hijacked Sport

Ian Mortimer

This book tells the story of Mearsdon, the house where Ian Mortimer lives in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor. We very rarely have a continuous account of a particular place over a long stretch of history, but Mortimer has a documentary record of all the owners who lived there since the 1260s – although the origins of the building probably date back to the eleventh century. 
 
Blending the broadest national history and the most intimate local events with a description of changing daily life from the Norman Conquest to the present day, Mortimer acquaints us with the people who passed through the house – from its first known owner, John the Palmer, to the folklore collector Charlie Laycock, who turned the house into a museum in the early twentieth century, to Mortimer’s family living there today. And along the way he shows how national events – from the Black Death to the Prayerbook Rebellion, from the Civil Wars to the two world wars – affected a rural community in deepest Devon over a time span of 900 years. 
 
The result is fascinating social history like no other. Bringing to it the brilliant imagination and storytelling gifts that made his Time Traveller’s Guides such a huge success, Mortimer introduces us to lords and merchants, ale brewers and peasants, clergymen and murderers, to create a continuously evolving story. Seeing through its windows, we not only glimpse at the people who lived in the house over the ages; we also see through their eyes as they look out at the changing world around them.

Through the Windows of an Ordinary House: A History of England

A K Benjamin

What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care. 
 
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed. 
 
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends. 
 
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption. 
 
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth. 
 
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves. 
 
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement. 
 
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth. 
 
__________ 
 
Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad 
 
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing 
 
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee 
 
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

The Case for Love

My Adventures In Other Minds

Patrick Maguire

Gabriel Pogrund

Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power under Keir Starmer. 
 
From electoral wipeout in 2019 to landslide victory in 2024 and on into Labour’s first hundred days in government, Get In is a blistering narrative exposé of the most significant and ruthless political transformation in a generation. At its heart is Morgan McSweeney, a mastermind of political subterfuge and author of a strategy, years in the planning, to eviscerate the party, bury the left and rebuild it as a vote-winning machine. In Starmer he saw the perfect vessel for his vision: a man with no political identity but burning with ambition and a single all-consuming principle: to win. 
 
Drawing on unrivalled access throughout the party and extensive leaks of internal party documents and WhatsApp messages, Get In shows how together they betrayed and marginalised Corbyn and his followers, then forged a path in which promises, and at times principles, were readily discarded in pursuit of power. From the near-fatal experience of Beergate to the furore over Israel and Gaza and Labour’s chaotic entry into government under Sue Gray, we are in the room as colleagues considered which of them would run to replace Starmer, as Angela Rayner fought back against demotion and struggled to prove herself in the eyes of the British establishment, and as the leader’s inner circle repeatedly crushed their opponents inside and outside of the party. 
 
Richly peopled with the major figures of Labour present and past, as well as those who were pulling the strings of power out of sight, this is the coming-of-age story of Britain's government and a parable for the politics of our times: in an era in which faith in politics has plummeted, this is how to game your way to the ultimate prize. But what on earth do you do when you get there?

Get In

The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer

James Fox

Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores. 
 
Travelling the length of Britain, from the Scilly Isles to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox seeks out the country’s last remaining master craftspeople. Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bell-founders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life — one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could shape our future. 
 
For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, enriching even the most modest things. And in this increasingly digital age, it is perhaps more valuable than ever. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

Craftland

A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

Dominique Moisi

Samuel Huntington's landmark book, The Clash of Civilizations, presented a vision of a world divided by cultural differences, national interests, and political ideologies. In The Geopolitics of Emotion, Dominique Moïsi brilliantly demonstrates that the world is nowadays more likely to be shaped by the 'clash of emotions'. 
 
Moïsi contends that both Europe and the United States are dominated by a fear of the 'other' and by the loss of their national identity and purpose. For Muslims and Arabs, the combination of historical grievances, exclusion from the economic boon of globalization, and civil and religious warfare has created a culture of humiliation that is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. 
 
And as the West and the Muslim world lock horns, Asia, able to concentrate on building a better future, has come to embody 'the culture of hope'. 
 
By making clear the driving emotions behind today's headlines, Dominique Moisi offers a better understanding of the world we live in and perhaps a more constructive approach to the conflicts that plague us.

The Geopolitics of Emotion

How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World

Simon Morrison

The city of Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, 11 time zones and nearly 150 million people, some 13 million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a “big village”—the demeaning nickname the St. Peterburg nobility gave to its provincial 
neighbour—into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. 
 
That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic—not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back further still, to the founding of the place we now know as Moscow as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of 
external forces—from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler—set their sights on Moscow, reinforcing its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defence and resurrection. 
 
Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, from the birchbark scrawls that record the oldest layer of Russian civilization to the articles in European newspapers heralding the opening of the magnificent Bolshoi theatre, Morrison brings to life the bloody power struggles, cultural marvels, excruciating famines, droughts, storms, and fires that have shaped and re-shaped the city and reinforced its essential character. Having first visited Moscow in 1990 and made some thirty trips since, he excavates the city’s truths from its fictions—while celebrating both—in a style that’s at once deeply learned and deeply personal. 
 
With A Kingdom and a Village, Morrison makes a persuasive, even impassioned case that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past but also, critically, to grasp the grim logic of its present. It is a magisterial biography of a place—and an essential guide to a people and a country that, for many readers, might have remained impenetrable.

A Kingdom and a Village

A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

Louise Brangan

Work, work, work. Pray, pray, pray. 
 
Following independence in 1922, Ireland began to chase a dream: to become the perfect Catholic nation. But purity had a price. The women and girls who did not conform – the wayward, the poor, the disabled, the abused – were purged from the streets and detained in a network of facilities, from Mother and Baby Homes and asylums to industrial schools. 
 
The Magdalene Laundries represented the deep end of this regime of social control. Thousands were sent to these institutions; each was perceived to have fallen in some way. Once locked inside, their hair was shorn off, their names were erased and they were put to work. They washed, they scrubbed and they prayed, labouring in often indefinite captivity in an attempt to salvage their souls. 
 
This is the forgotten story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, told through the voices of those who endured them, the nuns who presided over them and the communities who lived alongside them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies, Louise Brangan recovers the lives of six women: Eileen, Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid and Katie. Unflinching and compassionate, she dismantles long-held myths about what the Laundries were, who was sent there, and why. 
 
When the gates of the last Laundry closed in 1996, Ireland moved on. Or so it seemed. This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels us not only to confront this shameful past, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember?

The Fallen

The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence

Arthur Yorinks

Maurice Sendak

From Maurice Sendak, the unrivalled illustrator of Where The Wild Things Are, and long-time collaborator and friend Arthur Yorinks. 
 
This never-before published tale is an imaginative romp through the world of Limboland. Two great friends – a friendship largely inspired by Maurice Sendak's and Arthur Yorkink's own – must brave a monster, a singing cow, and several berserk goats, to complete their quest. And the quest they're undertaking? To find a present in time for the wedding of the sugar beets! 
 
The pair originally created this tale many years ago, and it has now been reworked by Arthur Yorinks as an ode to their 40-year friendship. With Maurice Sendak's jubilant illustrations and full of the wit and sheer imagination of this creative duo, this new publication is a song to friendship, creativity, and joy. With the classic Maurice Sendak cocktail of depth, spontaneity and humour, this unseen tale will delight fans of both creators.

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