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.

Ajay Chowdhury

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Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War. 
 
A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit. 
 
In this extraordinarily powerful and diverse selection of diaries, letters and memories – many of which have never been published before – privates and officers, seamen and airmen, munitions workers and mothers, nurses and pacifists, prisoners-of-war and conscientious objectors appear alongside each other. 
 
The war involved people from so many different backgrounds and countries and included here are, among others, British, German, Russian and Indian voices. Alongside testament from the many ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the events of 1914-18, there are extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. What unites them is a desire to express something of the horror, the loss, the confusion and the desire to help – or to protest. 
 
A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered.

A Broken World

Letters, diaries and memories of the Great War

Stanley Middleton

Shortly before his death last year, Stanley Middleton completed this, his last novel, which concludes a unique depiction of middle-class life in 'Middle England', quietly and cumulatively over many volumes and decades. Once again we are in Beechnall, the constant setting of Stanley Middleton's novels, and his sense of place and his feeling for his characters remains as strong as ever. 
 
At the heart of A Cautious Approach is a tentative love story, which begins when two lonely men meet, out walking on Christmas Day: Andy invites George home, and there he meets the captivating Mirabel, Andy's former fiancée. George has been a teacher, but ill health has deprived him of his career and confidence, and he has retrained as a postman. This chance encounter, and others that follow, have the potential to shift George's life, and soon he is drawn into a set of uncertain relationships in which past experience, present stoicism and future expectation all play a part. 
 
As ever, but here for the last time, Stanley Middleton's bold experimentation with flashbacks, and the embedding of one scene or dialogue within another, gives added density to his depiction of ordinary, defiantly unfashionable human lives.

A Cautious Approach

Ruth Rendell

Three classic Ruth Rendell stories: Means of Evil, The Fallen Curtain and The Fever Tree. 
 
Ruth Rendell is unequalled in her ability to weave stories that challenge our preconceptions and prejudices. From Wexford and Burden's investigation of a wife's apparent suicide, with all the evidence pointing to the husband in Means of Evil to the unsettling psychology behind a man's friendship with a boy in The Fallen Curtain and the paranoia that plagues two people who no longer know how to trust, in The Fever Tree.

Collected Stories

P.G. Wodehouse

In the whole delightful world of Wodehouse, the English clergy offers some of the richest sources of good-natured good humour. Confronted by burglars or belted earls, they plough serenely on with the Advent sermon or the opening of the village fete - until that is, they are swept uncontrollably into fiendish plots which only a well-disposed devil or member of the Drones Club could have contrived. 
 
No bishop is more endearingly plump and pompous than a P.G. Wodehouse bishop, no vicar more a pillar of his community (provided his sermons aren't too long), and in this collection of short stories we watch as they are plunged into one hilarious scenario after another.

The Clergy Omnibus

Meet the hilarious British dilettante Bertram 'Bertie' Wooster who can't seem to help finding himself in the middle of awkward social situations, calling upon his valet Jeeves to escape embarrassment.

As always, Bertie is about to find himself in the soup (or 'up to the knees in bisque') and Jeeves is poised to pull him out - quite possibly after pushing him in in the first place. In this omnibus of characteristically hilarious short stories and novels, Jeeves is for the first time shockingly employed to resolve the woes of someone other than Bertie Wooster. Contains The Mating Season, Ring for Jeeves and Very Good, Jeeves...

The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3

(Jeeves & Wooster)

The Oldest Member's reverence for golf does not cramp his style in telling some of the funniest, tallest and most joyful stories in the whole Wodehouse canon. In this splendid omnibus, introduced by Wodehouse himself, love and the links are inextricably intertwined, in this bumper collection of hilarious short stories that show the course of true love is racing down the middle of the fairway.

The Golf Omnibus

Bertie may be in danger of having his spine severed in five places by that jealous gorilla G. D'Arcy (Stilton) Cheesewright, but, as Jeeves insists, the priorities still have to be observed. And so, thanks to Jeeves, they are throughout this bumper volume, whatever mayhem may be loosed upon the befuddled head and generous heart of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster. Gathered in this volume are three of Wodehouse's hilarious Jeeves and Wooster novels: Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves and Jeeves in the Offing.

The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4

Rob Ryan

A stunningly illustrated fairytale for all ages from internationally-acclaimed papercut artist Rob Ryan – the follow-up to THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM. 
 
This is a story about a young boy who doesn’t want to be King. 
 
What he wants, more than anything, is to be normal. 
 
So one night, he runs away from the palace. He climbs out of his four-poster bed, disappears through a hidden door in the ceiling, creeps down a long-forgotten passageway, opens a small window and leaves behind everything he’s ever known. 
 
At first, the world outside the palace seems a magical place that the King delights in exploring. But with no friends to call on, no money in his pocket, in fact nothing apart from the clothes he is wearing, it isn’t long before the young King realises that life on his own is going to be full of challenges. 
 
Meanwhile, Lord Von Dronus, the most senior of all the King’s courtiers, is determined to find the young King before anyone realises he's disappeared. 
 
Beautiful, touching and surprising, The Kingdom Revealed is about appreciating the everyday and learning what matters most.

The Kingdom Revealed

Michael Palin

Now Available for pre-order Michael Palin in Venezuela 
 
THE BOOK BEHIND THE HIT DOCUMENTARY 
 
A glimpse of life inside the world’s most secretive country, as told by Britain’s best-loved travel writer. 
 
In May 2018, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin spent two weeks in the notoriously secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a cut-off land without internet or phone signal, where the countryside has barely moved beyond a centuries-old peasant economy but where the cities have gleaming skyscrapers and luxurious underground train stations. His resulting documentary for Channel 5 was widely acclaimed. 
 
Now he shares his day-by-day diary of his visit, in which he describes not only what he saw – and his fleeting views of what the authorities didn’t want him to see – but recounts the conversations he had with the country’s inhabitants, talks candidly about his encounters with officialdom, and records his musings about a land wholly unlike any other he has ever visited – one that inspires fascination and fear in equal measure. 
 
Written with Palin’s trademark warmth and wit, and illustrated with beautiful colour photographs throughout, the journal offers a rare insight into the North Korea behind the headlines.

North Korea Journal

Robert Harris

______________________________ 
'One of the great triumphs of contemporary historical literature.' The Times 
 
______________________________ 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
'Laws are silent in times of war.' Cicero 
 
One of the great epics of political and historical fiction, The Cicero Trilogy charts the career of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero from his mid-twenties as an ambitious young lawyer to his dramatic death more than thirty years later, pursued by an assassination squad on a cliff-top path. 
 
The extraordinary life that unfolds between these two episodes is recounted by Cicero's private secretary, Tiro: the law cases and the speeches that made his master's name; the elections and conspiracies he fought; the rivals who contended for power around him - Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Clodius, Catalina, and, most menacingly, Caesar; and, at the heart of it all, the complex personality of Cicero himself - brilliant, cunning, duplicitous, anxious, brave, and always intensely humane. 
 
More than ten years in the writing, and now published in a single volume for the first time, The Cicero Trilogy brings the world of the Roman republic vividly to life. Here is its grandeur, ambition and corruption; and here is its tumultuous collapse into dictatorship and anarchy - a story of the fragility of democratic institutions that holds a warning for our own time.

The Cicero Trilogy

Poor Bertie is in the soup again, and throughout this latest omnibus it is only Jeeves who keeps him from being the fish and the main course as well. In these delightful pages you will encounter all the stalwarts who have made the Jeeves novels and short stories the pinnacle of English humour, from Aunts Agatha and Dahlia to Roderick Spode, Tuppy Glossop, Madeline Bassett, Oofy Prosser and Anatole the Chef. At the end even Augustus the cat has come to be much obliged to Jeeves. This volume contains Much Obliged, Jeeves, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen and the short stories 'Extricating Young Gussie', 'Jeeves Makes An Omelette' and 'Jeeves and the Greasy Bird'.

The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 5

Patricia Volk

Patricia Volk’s glittering memoir, written with charm, panache and wit, juxtaposes the lives of two women – the iconoclastic fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the author’s own mother – to tell the story of how young Patricia fashioned herself into a woman. 
 
Patricia Volk’s mother Audrey was an upper-middle class New Yorker, a great beauty, a perfectionist, and a polished hostess who believed in women doing things the proper way. 
 
The iconoclastic Italian fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, on the other hand, never found a rule she didn’t want to break. One of fashion’s most radical provocateurs, she was a cultural revolutionary who embodied the ‘daring’. 
 
For Patricia, who read Schiap’s 'scandalous' autobiography, Shocking Life, at a tender age, these two women offered fabulously contrasting lessons in everything from fashion, make-up, lingerie, family and entertaining, to love, sex, superstition and gambling – lessons that would stay with her for the rest of her life. 
 
Moving seamlessly between the Volks’ 1950s Manhattan home and Schiap’s astonishing life in New York, Rome and Paris (among pals like Dali, Duchamp, Picasso), The Art of Being a Woman weaves Audrey’s notions of female domesticity with Schiap’s groundbreaking creative vision to tell the witty, wise and utterly delightful story of how a young girl learned that there is more than one way to be a woman.

The Art of Being a Woman

My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

'Wodehouse would have made an excellent sports writer' Sunday Times 
 
As Wodehouse’s biographer Frances Donaldson observed, it was vitally important to the boy Plum that he was ‘above average at games’. Luckily, he was known at school as ‘a noted athlete, a fine footballer and cricketer [and] a boxer’, and sport inspired much of his earliest writings, as well as some of his very finest and laugh-out-loud funniest. 
 
Wodehouse wrote with trademark wit on a rich range of games – and on cricket and golf, in particular – as well as anyone ever has, bringing a knowledge and a passion born of practice. 
 
 English cricket inspired in Wodehouse what he himself long considered to be his favourite work; and yet America (which he first visited keenly and then came to call home) led him to the love of baseball, and golf – enthusiasms that drew him to new tales for new audiences, including the celebrated golf stories which John Updike described as ‘the best fiction ever done about the sport.’ 
 
This rollicking anthology, selected, edited and introduced by the novelist Richard T. Kelly, offers a vivid picture of Wodehouse at play – in the ring, at the crease, on the tee – which is guaranteed to please any sporting crowd. Beginning with early journalism, taking in extracts from novels and short stories in their entirety, it all adds up to a medal-winning collection.

Above Average at Games

The Very Best of P.G. Wodehouse on Sport

Shelby Lorman

_____________________________ 
We all know a good boy. 
 
 He's a 'Feminist’... in his Tinder bio. 
 He ghosts you, but then feels bad. (For a moment.) 
 He’s not mansplaining, just aggressively clarifying. 
 And he's open to being wrong. Theoretically. 
 
 Ready to call time on rewarding those who clear the low bar of not being outwardly awful? 
 
 Awards for Good Boys explores why so-called and self-proclaimed good boys are actually not that great, and makes literal our tendency to applaud men for doing the absolute least. It will make you cry-laugh, feel validated, and help you unravel your own assumptions about what makes us good. ______________________________ 
'Shelby and her art are extremely my shit. You need this book.' Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life 
 
 ‘A short book of one woman’s opinions. It’s funny, but I prefer when men are funny or else my ego feels bruised.’ Ben from Twitter

Awards for Good Boys

From the viral Instagram account

The New Girl Friend was published in 1985, and the title story earned Rendell her second Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award. 'Every tale is carefully crafted and climaxed, her feel for lurking malevolence is as assured as ever.' -The Times 
 
Then came The Copper Peacock in 1991, a collection of nine short horror stories in which 'the macabre potential of blameless situations such as village fetes, aquariums and even the broom cupboard are explored to provoke maximum unease in readers.' -Sunday Times 
 
Blood Lines, first published in 1995, includes the long title story and a novella, The Strawberry Tree, as well as nine short murder mystery stories. 'Ruth Rendell remains one of the most stylish, chilling and challenging writers around.' -Tribune 
 
Piranha to Scurfy, a collection of disturbing psychological short stories followed in 2000. 'Horror does not shake its gory locks directly at us, but hovers on the periphery of our inner vision, hidden among the ordinary, the everyday.' - Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

Collected Stories 2

Euny Hong

'A must-read for anyone interested in the art of intuitively knowing what others feel.' Haemin Sunim, author of The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down and Love for Imperfect Things 
 
'A lovely book to have in your home and your lives.' Chris Evans, Breakfast Show 
___________________________ 
 
Nunchi (noon-chee): eye measure. The subtle art of gauging other people's thoughts, and feelings in order to build trust, harmony and connection. 
___________________________ 
 
Why did she get promoted? Why does the party only start when he walks in? And why do they always catch the bartender’s eye? It sounds like they’re all experts in the art of nunchi, even if they don’t know it. 
 
Nunchi is the guiding principle of Korean life, but anyone can use it: it’s the art of reading a room, your way of understanding what other people are thinking and feeling, and using that to get ahead. 
 
Korean parents believe that teaching their children nunchi is as important as teaching them to cross the road safely. With great nunchi, it feels like the world is on your side. Without it, you might get hit by something you never saw coming. 
 
If you’re thinking ‘not another Eastern fad, Marie Kondo already made me throw half my clothes away’, don’t worry: it’s not a fad. Koreans have been using nunchi to overcome slings and arrows for over 5000 years. 
 
The great news is that anyone can hone their nunchi, immediately: all you need are your eyes and ears. In everything, from finding love to excelling at work, improving your nunchi will help you to open doors you never knew existed. 
 
Improve your nunchi, improve your life. 
___________________________ 
 
'Whip-smart, hilarious, and filled with eye-opening insights on every page.' Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother 
 
'Beautifully written and filled with actionable advice . . . It really feels like having a superpower!' Héctor García, co-author of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life 
 
‘Nunchi is the Korean superpower you need now’ Evening Standard 
 
‘We could all help ourselves by practising the ancient art of Nunchi’ The Times

The Power of Nunchi

The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success

Ndaba Mandela

‘You empower yourself and then you reach out to others.’ 
 
Uplifting life lessons from one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known... through the eyes of the grandson whose life he changed forever. 
 
In his book Going to the Mountain, Ndaba Mandela shares the story of his coming-of-age alongside South Africa’s rebirth. It is a remarkable journey, and one that took him from the violent, segregated Soweto ghettos to his grandfather’s presidential home. 
 
As a young boy, Ndaba was constantly shunted from place to place. But at eleven years old he was unexpectedly invited to live with his grandfather, Nelson Mandela, even though he had met him only once before, during a prison visit. And, slowly, they built a relationship that would affect both of them profoundly. 
 
Ndaba's teenage years were complicated, but as he approached his twenty-first birthday, Mandela decided that Ndaba was finally ready to ‘go to the mountain’ – a test of courage during which you become a man. At the end of this gruelling ritual journey, the elders of the Mandelas’ tribe gathered and Ndaba’s grandfather was there, as ever, to share his greatest life lessons. 
 
From Nelson Mandela, Ndaba learned the spirit of endurance, the triumph of forgiveness, the power of resistance and the beauty of reconciliation. And as Mandela grew older, Ndaba had the chance to repay his grandfather’s love and support by demonstrating the ways in which he’d understood all that he had taught him. 
 
Intimate and inspirational, Going to the Mountain is a powerful reminder of how one person can impact profoundly on another, and a testament to the awesome power within us to change ourselves and our world.

Going to the Mountain

Life Lessons from my Grandfather, Nelson Mandela

Collects Right Ho, Jeeves; Joy in the Morning; and Carry on, Jeeves 
 
'If you haven't read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whiskey and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven't lived [...] A book that's a sheer joy to read.' INDEPENDENT 
 
'To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language.' BEN SCHOTT 
______________________ 
Jeeves may not always see eye to eye with Bertie Wooster on ties and fancy waistcoats, but he can always be relied on to whisk his young master spotlessly out of the soup (even if, for tactical reasons, he did drop him in it in the first place). 
 
The paragon of Gentlemen's Personal Gentlemen shimmers through the pages in much the same way he did through the first Jeeves Omnibus. This volume contains one brilliant collection of short stories and two hilarious novels: Right Ho, Jeeves, Joy in the Morning and Carry On, Jeeves.

The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 2

Zoe Williams

Whether we have children or not we all want the future to be fairer and happier; and Zoe Williams believes that we need to make that happen collectively. 
 
GET IT TOGETHER is a rousing call to arms for us all to play our part in creating a more equal society. 
 
Zoe believes that it’s not enough to sit back and watch as our NHS slides away from us; as the young and low earners are forced out of London; as hundreds of thousands of people nationally drift into poverty; as education becomes increasingly divided and as the wealthiest five people in Britain earn more than the poorest 20%. 
 
Zoe will address key questions including: has the NHS had its day; has an immigrant stolen your job; have you ever wondered why you can't afford a house; and who got us into this mess anyway? She will then offer up, in answer, a combination of fact, opinion and debate that will be as inspiring as it is important. 
 
Zoe Williams brings together here all the arguments that occupy the current political landscape and shows us that on all levels, it’s lunacy to be anything other than left-wing unless you’re actually already an oligarch. She offers us the debate in a truly entertaining way - she’s pacey, conversational and funny. This is a road map for a better future that will be a major part of the debate in the run up to the election next May.

Get It Together

Why We Deserve Better Politics

'It beats me why a man of his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my clothes and what not,' says Bertie. 'If I had Jeeves's brain I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something.' 
 
Luckily for us, Bertie Wooster manages to retain Jeeves's services through all the vicissitudes of purple socks and policeman's helmets, and here, gathered together for the first time, is an omnibus of Jeeves novels and stories comprising three of the funniest books ever written: Thank You, Jeeves, The Code of the Woosters and The Inimitable Jeeves.

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