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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Kamil Rahman is working as a waiter at an Indian restaurant when his boss Anjoli receives a strange email titled Invitation to a Beheading. It claims to be a celebration of Anne Boleyn's 500th anniversary of her imprisonment and death, but when the pair arrive at the Bloody Tower, things take a sinister turn. Anjoli discovers an old friend has been kidnapped, and the only way to save her is to solve a series of clues leading then across London to her whereabouts. In a race against the clock, can Kamil and Anjoli find the missing woman before time runs out? 
 
Ajay Chowdhury has partnered with Google's Pixel Fold to launch a first of its kind interactive eBook of The Invitation, which is also available to download for free. It offers a fun and interactive read, ideal for filling the average commute. Embedded with puzzles designed to stimulate and challenge, the eBook is optimised for the Pixel Fold - Google's first foldable phone.

The Invitation

Salman Rushdie

On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay a terrible thing happened: twelve-year-old Luka's storyteller father, Rashid, fell suddenly and inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one could rouse him. To save him from slipping away entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through the Magic World, encountering a slew of phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and exceedingly dangerous task. 
 
With Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie proved that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables, and it proved to be one of his most popular books with readers of all ages. While Haroun was written as a gift for his first son, Luka and the Fire of Life, the story of Haroun's younger brother, is a gift for his second son on his twelfth birthday. Lyrical, rich with word-play, and with the narrative tension of the classic quest stories, this is Salman Rushdie at his very best.

Luka and the Fire of Life

Chris Newens

2017 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
In this quest across India during the recent cash crisis, Chris Newens follows in the footsteps of TV chef Rick Stein in search of divine truth and the perfect curry. Steeped in the smells and colours of south India, Cash and Curry is a brilliantly funny and intelligent journey of discovery that muses on the love of food, various incarnations of godliness, the power of belief and the true meaning of value.

Cash and Curry

An Unlikely Pilgrimage

Aman Sethi

Every morning in Sadar Bazaar, one of the oldest markets in Delhi, a gang of men gather looking for work in the building trade. For five years, Aman Sethi shared their lives, and in particular that of Mohammed Ashraf. Ashraf is a mazdoor, an itinerant house-painter, but he's not a typical labourer - he's studied biology in college, and after college learnt how to repair TV sets, cut suits, and slice chicken. He lived all over India, but now he finds himself in Delhi: the second most populous city in the country. The morning will bring hangovers, whisky breakfasts and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf. How did he get here? Why is he the way he is? And is there a way back home? 
 
One of the very best young journalists in India, Aman Sethi brings Ashraf vividly alive and illuminates the lives of countless others like him. Wry, humorous and insightful, A Free Man is an unforgettable portrait of an invisible man in his invisible city, and an extraordinary human story.

A Free Man

A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

Snigdha Poonam

In a small rural town in India, a female police officer, known as Lady Singham, has achieved local fame for one thing: she has made it her professional and personal mission to launch a violent attack on love. 
 
Before her arrival, no one had even seen a female police officer riding a motorbike. But now she is indispensable to the community. She prowls the streets and public places – parks, bars, cafés – looking for couples who are kissing, holding hands or simply in the same place at the same time. Her solutions range from violent beating to on-the-spot weddings and her work is praised by everyone. 
 
In a country that is modernising and growing at an astounding rate, concerns about morality are rife; with young people glorifying big-city culture and Bollywood films, many feel that Lady Singham’s justice is more necessary than ever. 
 
Through extraordinary first-hand reportage, Lady Singham's Mission Against Love provides an unusual and surprising insight into small-town Indian life.

Lady Singham's Mission Against Love

Raghu Karnad

Raghu Karnad’s “Everybody’s Friend” is a poignant pilgrimage to the military grave of a great-uncle, fallen defending the obsolescent Raj against the oncoming army of imperial Japan. The most brutal fighting unfolded on the unforgiving northeast Indian border with Burma, and Karnad takes himself and the reader deep into Nagaland to find the war graves of Imphal. There he broods without heavy reproach but with stoical sorrow on the marginalisation of memory offered to Indian troops who, in the authorised epic of Indian independence, fought on the “wrong” side for their imperial masters while the much thinner ranks of the Indian National Army, Subhash Chandra Bose’s fighters, have been accorded the rites and respects of freedom fighters

Everybody’s Friend

India is home to almost three million HIV cases. But AIDS is still a disease stigmatized and shrouded in denial. It is stigma that prevents people from openly discussing the facts around HIV, and keeps them from getting treatment. Stigma leads to discrimination against HIV positive people in hospitals, schools and even among families. 
 
In this ground-breaking anthology, sixteen of India's well-known writers go on the road to tell the human story behind the epidemic. William Dalrymple meets the devadasis ('temple women'), many of whom have become victims of HIV; Kiran Desai travels to the coast of Andhra where the sex workers are considered the most desirable and Salman Rushdie spends a day with Mumbai's transgenders. These writers travel the country to talk to housewives, vigilantes, homosexuals, police and sex-workers and together they create a complex and gripping picture of AIDS in India: who it is affecting, how and why. 
 
Eye-opening, hard-hitting and moving, AIDS Sutra will show you a side to India rarely seen before. 
 
This anthology was produced in collaboration with Avahan, the India AIDS Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Proceeds will be used to support programs for children affected by HIV in India.

Aids Sutra

Untold Stories from India

Deborah Moggach

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling novel that inspired the beloved film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 
 
 The book that inspired the box office hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Dev Patel and Penelope Wilton 
 
 Enticed by advertisements for a luxury retirement home in India, a group of strangers leave England to begin a new life. 
 
 On arrival, however, they discover the palace is a shell of its former self, the staff are more than a little eccentric and the days of the Raj appear to be long gone. 
 
 But, as they soon discover, life and love can begin again, even in the most unexpected circumstances. 
 
 'One of Britain's foremost women writers' Daily Telegraph

These Foolish Things

Dur e Aziz Amna

2019 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
'Surkh gulaaban day mausam vich, 
Phulaan de rang kaalay. 
 
(In the season of red roses, 
These flowers are turning black.)' 
 
Your Tongue Is Still Yours is a poetic meditation on language, regional cultures and how identity exists in the many layers between the two. Punjabi. Urdu. English. Arabic. Balti. Shina. Khowar. Wakhi. 
 
Dur e Aziz Amna goes back to Pakistan, traversing its different regions before returning to New York, considering how language has shaped her past and how it might do the same for her children’s future.

Your Tongue Is Still Yours

Reflections On Language

Sarvepalli Gopal

The third and final volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru covers the last eight years of his life and Prime Ministership. It deals with his efforts to sustain economic and social advance of the Indian people and not to lose hold of the principles of his foreign policy even while relations with China deteriorated, culminating the large scale aggression in both the western and eastern sections of the long boundary between the two countries.

Jawaharlal Nehru

A Biography Volume 3 1956-1964

Saranya Subramanian

RUNNER-UP OF THE 2020 BODLEY HEAD / FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
'It's an exhausting, futile battle, really. Every night, the same smug cockroach squeezes herself out of my bathroom drain's grilled lid, scuttles into the toilet and shower area, and waltzes around like she owns the place.' 
 
The Cockroach and I is an astonishingly vivid, funny, trenchant portrait of life in Bombay in 2020 during the pandemic. It is alive to the nameless and the numberless of the city, alive to history, and alive to the special strangeness of a year of living surrounded by death and uncertainty. 
 
Here are innumerable human beings pushed inside their homes while insects and animals roam freely, each playing their roles.

The Cockroach and I

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Books tell the story of the irrepressible Mowgli, who is rescued as a baby from the jaws of the evil tiger, Shere Khan. Raised by wolves and guided by Baloo the bear, Mowgli and his animal friends embark on a series of hair-raising adventures through the jungles of India.

The Jungle Books

Abhishek Mukherjee

2017 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
In this sharp, witty essay, written from inside the Indian banking system, we witness the absurdities and mundanities of corruption and bureaucracy, set against a backdrop of modern urban India. In a personal battle with his moustachioed boss, Mukherjee illuminates a Kafkaesque system of compliance inherited from the British Raj and shows us how to walk away from it laughing.

Stranger in a Strange Land

100 Days in the Credit Analysis Department of an Indian Bank

Sarvepall Gopal

The second volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s remarkable work covers the first nine years of Nehru’s prime ministership. Like the first volume, it is more than a biography, describing and analysing in detail both domestic and foreign issues of the period of struggle between India and Pakistan for Kashmir, the first elections of frr India based on adult suffrage; Korea, the Suez crisis, the invasion of Tibet and Hungary and the demand at home for the creation of new linguistics provinces.

Jawaharlal Nehru Vol.2 1947-1956

Elaine di Rollo

Lilian and Alice are the bright young twin daughters of the eccentric Mr Talbot, who resides in a huge mansion stuffed full of fossils, inventions, suits of armour, botanical specimens and other specimens of his sprawling collection of curiosities. 
 
When Lilian rebels against Victorian standards of morality she is packed off to India as the bride of a dreary missionary, leaving Alice alone and in danger of falling victim to her father's bizarre and hair-raising schemes. 
 
This lively and entertaining novel follows the two girls on their very different paths to freedom and is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Shortlisted for the Saltire First Book prize, the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award and the Guildford Literary Festival First Book Award.

A Proper Education for Girls

Laurens Van Der Post

This is a story of an almost vanished Africa; a world of myth and magic in which the indigenous peoples of the continent lived for uncountable centuries before the Europeans came to shatter it. 
 
The main character is a boy who has a relationship with this Africa not unlike Kipling's Kim with the antique world of India. François Joubert, whose Huguenot ancestors settled in Africa three hundred years ago, lives as a solitary child on his father's farm. 'Hunter's Drift'. Here, in the far interior of Africa, he experiences the wonder and mystery of an ageless, natural primitive life, his perception of it heightened by the influence of three people in particular - his Bushman nurse, the head herdsman of the local Matabele clan (his father's chosen partners in the pioneering of Hunter's Drift), and a hunter of legendary fame, now the chief ranger of a vast game reserve nearby. 
 
François' meeting with an untamed Bushman, Xhabbo, whose intuitive teaching nourishes his spirit; his strange pilgrimage to the distant krall of a powerful witch-doctor; his dramatic encounter and relationship with the daughter of a retired colonial governor; all are examples of African point and European counterpoint, in a highly original theme, moving to a strangely presaged and omened climax.

A Story Like the Wind

C. K. Stead

A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young 'colonials', England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe. 
 
There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn't quite understand. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love. 
 
The great writers of the time, and the details of their lives are recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all of that and more, and then there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them, despairing at his academic prospects, and gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller. Now, years later, from the other side of the world, the people seem to spring to life again, in this beguiling work by one of New Zealand's foremost writers.

The Secret History Of Modernism

Among the few great statesmen to emerge in Asia, Jawaharal Nehru achieved a national metamorphosis in some ways even more astonishing than that of another towering patriarch, Mao Tse-tung. Not only did he wrest from the British their most prized and dearly loved Imperial possession and give his people independence, he brought his culturally rich yet economically improvised nation into the twentieth century as a force to be reasoned with. The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s remarkable biographic, covering Nehru’s youth and ending with Independence in 1947, is written from first-hand knowledge of the man who served for ten years in the Ministry for External Affairs and from the unlimited access granted him by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to her father’s private papers.

Jawaharlal Nehru;a Biography Volume 1 1889-1947

Soumya Bhattacharya

The great C L R James once asked: 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' For some of us answering that can keep you awake at night. 
 
Soumya Bhattacharya knows this: he has a steady job, a loving wife, a daughter he dotes on. But most of all he has cricket. Or perhaps more accurately: cricket has him. Ever since he can remember, he's loved the game. From his first knockabouts on the living-room carpet - with his mother's paper bats and balls - he progressed to Test Match Special on short-wave, then to the whole panoply of obsession: one-dayers, Test matches, TV highlights, re-runs of TV highlights, always following one team - India. When you come from a country where the game is more than a religion, you must like cricket, right? 
 
In this sparkling memoir of a lifetime spent in the company of eleven men, a green field and a billion other worshippers, Soumya Bhattacharya gives us a guided tour of the soul of a cricket obsessive. Part reportage, part travelogue, part cultural politics, You Must Like Cricket? takes us from his home in Kolkata to Lord's and back again as Bhattacharya explores the joys and the lows (mostly the lows) of a thirty-year love affair, how one game has become so closely tied to a nation's identity, and the troubling hold cricket has over him. But if your home ground was called Eden Gardens, where else would you rather be?

You Must Like Cricket?

Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan

Irvine Welsh

Will Jason King ever charm the young rider Jenni Cahill and gain long-anticipated access to her jodhpurs? 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection If You Liked School, You'll Love Work.

Kingdom of Fife (Storycuts)

Katharine Davies

When her twin brother breaks a promise and returns to their childhood home in Sri Lanka on his own, Valentina decides that it's time to make some changes in her life.  She cuts off her hair and takes a job as a gardener (although she'd prefer to be a writer) in a small town near the sea in Wales. And so the story takes us to Illerwick, an alluring, timeless place, and to the people who live there.  Leo Spring, an eccentric musician, lives alone in Beech House with a once beautiful garden that has now become overgrown and wild.  Valentina has come to help Leo restore the neglected garden to its former glory, and she soon falls in love with him.  But Leo is consumed by his unrequited infatuation with Melody, the beautiful headmistress in mourning for her brother who leapt to his death from the cliffs.  Mr Boase, the alcoholic and bullying deputy head, also holds a flame for Melody; and one of her pupils, Fitch, is another who daydreams about her.  As summer draws near, and the garden is gradually transformed, Leo organises a garden party in an attempt to impress Melody.  But on the night of the party, events come to a head, secret passions are revealed, and the characters are jolted into understanding that facing their feelings can be a matter of life or death. A Good Voyage is a magical story that charts the voyages of its characters as they move from the pain and comedy of loss and longing to self-realisation and love.  Katharine Davies writes with an astounding poise and lightness of touch, making this first novel, with its air of disquiet and enchantment, an unforgettable pleasure.

A Good Voyage

David Bellos

Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more. He wrote more than two dozen books and a score of short stories under several different names in two languages, English and French, neither of which was his mother tongue. Gary had a gift for narrative that endeared him to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics far more intellectual than he could ever be. His varied and entertaining writing career tells a different story about the making of modern literary culture from the one we are accustomed to hearing. 
 
Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (now Lithuania) in 1914 and raised by only his mother after his father left them, Gary rose to become French Consul General in Los Angeles and the only man ever to win the Goncourt Prize twice. 
 
This biography follows the many threads that lead from Gary's wartime adventures and early literary career to his years in Hollywood and his marriage to the actress Jean Seberg. It illuminates his works in all their incarnations, and culminates in the tale of his most brilliant deception: the fabrication of a complex identity for his most successful nom de plume, Émile Ajar. 
 
In his new portrait of Gary, David Bellos brings biographical research together with literary and cultural analysis to make sense of the many lives of Romain Gary - a hero fit for our times, as well as his own.

Romain Gary

A Tall Story

Adrian Fort

Archibald Wavell was born a few years before Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee and died shortly after the end of the Second World War (1883-1950). During that time the country in which he was born and brought up in changed beyond recognition, undergoing a fundamental revision in the attitudes, expectations, prejudices and hopes of the British people. His life epitomises that of a generation of famous men whose education and upbringing equipped them for a future that was to prove an illusion. 
 
At seventeen, Archibald Wavell joined the army and as a young officer saw action in the Boer War and on the North West Frontier.In the Great War, he was often close to the greatest generals in the British Army; he fought in the trenches, was decorated for bravery and lost an eye. Between the wars his career included command of troops attempting to keep the peace in Palestine as revolt engulfed the country. His victorious campaigns early in the Second World War attracted a blaze of public admiration and renown; but he also tasted defeat and rejection, both in Africa and from 1941 as commander-in-chief of Allied forces in India, wilting before the Japanese onslaught in Burma and Singapore. In 1943 he was appointed Viceroy of India, where he took on the task of guiding that country's destiny as it crossed the brink of Empire into the turmoil of independence.

Archibald Wavell

The Life and Times of an Imperial Servant

Jamal Mahjoub

Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Mersyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back in London, but also for the daughter Miranda gives birth to. Almost half a century later, Jade finds herself grappling with the very questions that drove her father into the arms of her mother, and realising that a successful career cannot define an identity; nor can you separate your existence from all the many other stories connected to it ... 
 
Like the jazz that snakes its way though this beautiful novel, The Drift Latitudes is about how we improvise our lives and the chances we take. From the Nubian boy who flees the tedium of home to find the bright lights of New York's jazz scene, to Ernst's daughter Rachel who turns her back on Europe and follows her husband to the Sudan, it is about the movement of people around our globe and the interdependence of our dreams. Awash with memorable characters, filled with unputdownable stories, this is a brilliantly intricate novel that lingers in the mind long after its final note.

The Drift Latitudes

Tom Hiney

This is the strange and wondrous story of an eight-year voyage and a mission to save souls. Their mission started in the South Seas, where they reported scenes of chiefs surfing, perpetual warfare and a sudden surge of Christianity. From there they went via New Zealand, Australia and its aboriginal hinterland, through 'the Orient' to India and slave-ridden Mauritius. Based on contemporary journals, mission reports, letters and illustrations, and bursting with character and anecdote. ON THE MISSIONARY TRAIL is both the enthralling narrative of the longest missionary voyage ever undertaken and a colourful, detailed, eye-opening snapshot of little-known worlds, set against the wider picture of evangelism and guilt, heroism and humanity.

On The Missionary Trail

Stephen Jay Gould

Among Stephen Jay Gould's many gifts was his ability to write eloquently about baseball, his great passion.  Through the years, the renowned palaeontologist published numerous essays on the sport which have now for the first time been collected in a volume alive with all the candour and insight that characterized Gould's writing.  Here are his thoughts on the complexities of childhood streetball and the joys of opening day; tributes to Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, and lesser-knowns such as deaf-mute centerfielder 'Dummy' Hoy; and a frank admission of the contradictions inherent in being a lifelong Yankees fan with Red Sox season tickets.  So, too, does Gould deftly apply the tools of evolutionary theory to the demise of the 0.400 hitter, the Abner Doubleday creation myth, and the improbability of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. This book is a delight - an essential addition to Gould's remarkable legacy, and a fitting tribute to his love for the game.

Triumph And Tragedy In Mudville

Arthur Cotterell

The chariot changed the face of ancient warfare. First in West Asia and Egypt, then in India and China, charioteers came to dominate the battlefield. Its use as a war machine is graphically recounted in Indian epics and Chinese chronicles. Homer's Iliad tells of the attack on Troy by Greek heroes who rode in chariots. In 326 BC Alexander the Great faced charioteers in northern India, while in 55 BC, on a Kent beach, Julius Caesar was met by British chariots. 
 
Because of the danger involved, chariot racing attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators. So enthusiastic were they that the Roman emperor Nero could not resist driving his own ten-horse chariot at the Olympic Games: he fell out but still won the prize. Rivalry between groups of spectators at chariot races often ignited urban riots. In Constantinople, in 532 AD, a three-day disturbance left 30,000 dead.

Chariot

The Astounding Rise and Fall of the World's First War Machine

Rose Tremain

From the author of The Gustav Sonata 
 
Fat and fifty, educated only to be a wife and mother, Ruby Constad has reached a point of crisis. Her husband, Leon, lies in a nursing home after a stroke that has left him paralysed; her grown-up children are gone. In her anguish Ruby appeals for help to a half-remembered figure from her colonial Indian girlhood - Sister Benedicta. Gradually the events leading up to Leon's stroke are revealed and a woman emerges whose capacity to love, hope and understand are far greater than she realises. 
 
Over a million Rose Tremain books sold 
 
‘A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I 
 
‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times 
 
‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times 
 
'Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists' Salman Rushdie 
 
‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness’ Marcel Theroux, Guardian

Letter To Sister Benedicta

Grace Coddington

For decades, Grace Coddington’s personal touch has steered wildly imaginative fashion spreads in Vogue magazine. Then came The September Issue, the behind-the-scenes documentary that turned the spotlight on a woman with a no-nonsense attitude and an unerring visual instinct. Overnight, the flame-haired Grace became a heroine for fashion insiders and the general public alike. 
 
Witty and forthright, and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs and exclusive line-drawings, Grace: A Memoir shares the excitement and vision that go into producing so many unforgettable fashion images. Here are the designers, models, photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists and celebrities with whom Grace has created her ‘stories in pictures’ – whether it be Jerry Hall conquering the USSR or Tom Ford falling down a rabbit hole in Annie Leibovitz’s version of Alice in Wonderland. 
 
Grace’s own life has been as dreamlike as one of her madcap fashion spreads. Brought up in windswept wartime Anglesey, she arrived in London, aged eighteen, and quickly became a face of the Sixties. The muse behind Vidal Sassoon’s Five Point Cut, she posed for Bailey, Donovan, Duffy and Norman Parkinson in Swinging London and jumped into a pool in Saint-Tropez for Helmut Newton. Surviving a serious car-crash, she later became a fashion editor at British Vogue and during the Seventies and the Eighties started to create the fantasy travelogues that would become her trademark. 
 
Friendships bloomed – with Bruce Weber and Calvin Klein, whose offer of a job took Grace to New York. While two early marriages to restaurateur Michael Chow and photographer Willie Christie were brief, her romance with the hairstylist Didier Malige has endured. And her professional partnership with Anna Wintour – with whom she has collaborated for over twenty years – continues to have an astonishing influence on modern style.

Grace

A Memoir

Atiq Rahimi

For every crime, there must be a punishment… 
 
Rassoul’s world consists of little more than a squalid rented room – strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad – and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything. 
 
So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel’s anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred. 
 
Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.

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