Anita Desai

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Kate Hubbard

‘The definitive biography’ Roy Strong 
 
The remarkable story of Bess of Hardwick, her ascent through Elizabethan society and the houses she built that shaped British architectural history. 
 
Born in 1521, Bess of Hardwick, businesswoman, money-lender and property tycoon, lived an astonishing eighty-seven years. Through canny choices, four husbands and a will of steel she rose from country squire’s daughter to Dowager Countess, establishing herself as one of the richest and most powerful women in England, second only to Queen Elizabeth. 
 
Bess forged her way not merely by judicious marriage, but by shrewd exploitation of whatever assets each marriage brought. Wealth took concrete form in her passion for building and she oversaw every stage of the construction of her four houses including Hardwick New Hall, her sole surviving building, which stands as a celebration of one woman’s triumphant progress through Elizabethan England. 
 
‘A dynamic portrait of Bess's life...’ BBC History Magazine

Devices and Desires

Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England

Fatima Manji

A fresh perspective on British history from award-winning broadcaster Fatima Manji 
 
Why was there a Turkish mosque adorning Britain's most famous botanic garden in the eighteenth century? How did a pair of Persian-inscribed cannon end up in rural Wales? And who is the Moroccan man depicted in a long-forgotten portrait hanging in a west London stately home? 
 
 Throughout Britain's museums, civic buildings and stately homes, relics can be found that reveal the diversity of pre-twentieth-century Britain and expose the misconceptions around modern immigration narratives. In her journey across Britain exploring cultural landmarks, Fatima Manji searches for a richer and more honest story of a nation struggling with identity and the legacy of empire. 
 
'A timely, brilliant and very brave book' Jerry Brotton, author of This Orient Isle

Hidden Heritage

Rediscovering Britain’s Relationship with the Orient

Rediscovering Britain’s Lost Love of the Orient

Margaret Forster

‘I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’ 
 
So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.

My Life in Houses

Shelley Klein

'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday Times 
 
Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. 
 
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 
 
'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon 
 
'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian 
 
'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' Telegraph

The See-Through House

My Father in Full Colour

Paul Hendrickson

From the award-winning and best-selling author of Hemingway's Boat – a ground-breaking biography that illuminates the life, mind and work of one of the icons of twentieth-century America. 
 
 Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as both a supreme artist and an insufferable egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius as an architect. But in this masterly work we discover a man dogged by traumas, racked by lies, and stifled by the myths he wove around himself: a man aware of the choices he made, and of their costs. 
 
 This is the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this is the Wright of many other overlooked aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the connection between the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the murder of his mistress, her two children and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home by a servant gone mad; and the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his eventful life. 
 
 Showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a deep and more human understanding of the man, and a fresh appreciation of his monumental artistic achievements. With prodigious research, unique vision and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic and brilliant, he has given us the defining book on one of the greatest creative talents of twentieth-century America.

Plagued By Fire

The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

Peter Ackroyd

Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, so London is a biography rather than a history. It differs from other histories, too, in the range and diversity of its contents. Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. There are chapters on the history of silence and the history of light, the history of childhood and the history of suicide, the history of Cockney speech and the history of drink. 
 
London is perhaps the most important study of the city ever written, and confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called 'our age's greatest London imagination.'

London

The Biography

Jean Sprackland

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary Review 
 
Graveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead. 
 
Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

These Silent Mansions

A life in graveyards

Mark Vanhoenacker

A pilot's love letter to the world's greatest cities from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Skyfaring 
 
 
'A journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energised, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives' ALAIN DE BOTTON 
 
Growing up in his small hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spun the illuminated globe in his bedroom and dreamt of elsewhere - of distant, real cities, and a perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. 
 
Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent more than two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in the cities he'd always longed to see. Imagine a City celebrates the metropolises he has come to know and love through the lens of the hometown his heart has never left. From the sweeping roads of Los Angeles and the old gates of Jeddah to the intricate, dream-inspired plan of Brasília, he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home. 
 
'Vanhoenacker... has a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities... Intimate and thoughtful' PICO IYER, AIR MAIL 
 
'A love letter to the cities he's returned to again and again... Vanhoenacker captivates when describing the silent beauty of a world glimpsed from above' Washington Post 
 
'Eloquent... A love song to cities the world over' Wall Street Journal

Imagine a City

A Pilot’s Love Letter to the World’s Greatest Cities

A Pilot Sees the World

Christopher Woodward

Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws and riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone and ivy?  Do they stir us to remember past glory or warn against future arrogance? In this elegant, provocative book , the brilliant young art-historian Christopher Woodward  looks back to the start of the cult  in the eighteenth century, when follies were built in English landscape gardens,  artists and writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, and in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like  classical ruins. He takes us from Troy  and Pompei to  Sicilian palaces and Nazi fantasies,  and  whirls us forward to modern times - to the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes,  to Florida's Museum of Natural Phenomena, designed as a court-house dumped upside-down by a hurricane and to  Chelsea Flower Show's brand-new 'Millennium Ruin'.  Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple - with its fascinating stories and characters, and its telling illustrations,  In Ruins is full of strange delights  and  startling surprises,  exploring the mysterious, melancholy charm of eternal fragments.

In Ruins

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Stranger Things

East of Eden

Little Black Classics Box Set

Penguin Modern Box Set

Here, from Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie, are five books about families, India, marriage and the rest, to keep you going as the series moves on.

Showing results for: ‘Anita Desai’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter