Anita Desai

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Yangzom Brauen

Kusang never thought she would leave Tibet. Growing up in a remote mountain village, she married a monk and gave birth to two children. But then the Chinese army invaded, and their peaceful lives were destroyed forever. Thousands were tortured, prison camps were set up and Kusang's monastery was destroyed. 
 
The family were forced to flee across the Himalayas in the depths of winter, battling cold, fear, starvation and exhaustion. It took a month to reach India, where they were then passed from one refugee camp to another, all the while fighting hunger and disease. Kusang's husband and her younger child died, but somehow Kusang and her daughter Sonam survived. 
 
In Across Many Mountains Sonam's daughter, Yangzom, born in safety in Switzerland, has written the story of her inspirational mother and grandmother's fight for survival, and their lives in exile. It is an extraordinary story of determination, love and endurance.

Across Many Mountains

The Extraordinary Story of Three Generations of Women in Tibet

Jehanne Wake

The Caton sisters were Southern belles descended from the first settlers in Maryland, and were expected to 'marry a Plantation'. But they were independent, fascinated by politics, clever with money, romantic in mood. Arriving In London in 1816 the three sisters forged their own destinies in the face of intense prejudice, against both Americans and Catholics. The widowed Marianne shocked the world by marrying the Wellington's wayward elder brother, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and appearing as a 'Catholic Yankee' among the Protestant Anglo-Irish. Louisa eventually became Duchess of Leeds, and a friend of Queen Victoria, while the sphere in which Bess shone was the stockmarket, as queen of speculators. 
 
Based on intimate unpublished letters, Sisters of Fortune is a brilliant portrait of love between sisters, a most unusual story of money and power and a fascinating glimpse of how these extraordinary women influenced the social and international relations of their time.

Sisters of Fortune

The First American Heiresses to Take England by Storm

Zareer Masani

Thomas Macaulay always inspired both admiration and hostility. He introduced English education to India, creating a class of westernised Indians often reviled as ‘Macaulay’s children’, but today many former ‘Untouchables’ literally worship him as their liberator from caste tyranny. 
 
This biography gives a vivid insight into one of the towering intellects of Victorian Britain: a brilliant, complex, self-made man, who rose from middle-class origins to the highest circles of the world’s largest empire. We follow his meteoric journey from child prodigy to Whig parliamentary orator, then imperial administrator and liberal reformer in India, and later Cabinet minister, revered elder statesman and famed historian back in Britain. 
 
Zareer Masani reclaims Macaulay as a pioneer of globalisation based on the English language and Western values. A strong advocate of liberal interventionism across the globe, he was the ideological precursor of today's Western military interventions in the world’s trouble-spots.

Macaulay

Britain’s Liberal Imperialist

Johanna Adorján

One Sunday morning in October, István and his wife Vera start their day as usual. They tidy their house; Vera makes a festive cake to put in the freezer and cuts fresh roses for a vase in the living room. That evening, after nearly fifty years of marriage, they lie down in their bed and take their own lives. Having survived the tumult of twentieth-century Europe and after raising a family together, they could not accept the words 'until death do us part'. 
 
While sifting through the fragments of the family history in an attempt to understand this glamorous and enigmatic couple, their granddaughter Johanna Adorján imagines their final day. Amid the family stories and portraits by friends, she dares to give voice to their never-mentioned experiences in the Holocaust and their escape from Hungary during the uprising of 1956.

An Exclusive Love

A Memoir

Livia Manera Sambuy

A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War 
 
‘Remarkable and compelling’ Edmund de Waal 
 
‘Thoroughly engaging’ Kamila Shamsie 
 
In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever. 
The caption claims that the Punjabi princess Amrit Kaur sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year. 
 
For Livia, this marks the beginning of a compulsive search for the truth as she delves into the history of the British Raj, the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, and the lives of extraordinary figures: bankers, jewellers, explorers and spies. 
 
‘An ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes’ Jhumpa Lahiri 
 
‘A tantalizing true story . . . In Search of Amrit Kaur plunges into the glittery world of Indian royalty’ New York Times Book Review

In Search of Amrit Kaur

An Indian Princess in Wartime Paris

Gerard DeGroot

For a very brief moment during the 1960s, America was moonstruck. Every boy dreamed of being an astronaut; every girl dreamed of marrying one. But despite the best efforts of a generation of scientists, the almost foolhardy heroics of the astronauts, and 35 billion dollars, the moon turned out to be a place of 'magnificent desolation', to use Buzz Aldrin's words. 
 
In Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard DeGroot reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans' thirst for heroes in an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting a man on the moon, in the process limiting what could be acheived in space. Drawing on meticulous archival research, DeGroot cuts through the propaganda peddled by the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations - not to mention the NASA spin doctors - and exposes the truth behind one of the most revered myths of American history.

Dark Side of the Moon

The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest

Carmen Callil

Bad Faith tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and 'Commissioner for Jewish Affairs', who dissembled his way to power in the Vichy government and was responsible for sending thousands of children to the gas chambers. After the war he left France, never to be brought to justice. 
 
Early on in his career Louis married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne whom they abandoned in England. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. 
 
In Carmen Callil's masterful, elegiac and sometimes darkly comic account, Darquier's rise during the years leading up to the Second World War mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism. Epic, haunting, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance. 
 
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Bad Faith

A History of Family and Fatherland

Alison Weir

Described by Christopher Marlowe as the 'She-Wolf of France', Isabella was one of the most notorious femme fatales in history. According to popular legend, her angry ghost can be glimpsed among church ruins, clutching the beating heart of her murdered husband. But how did Isabella aquire this reputation? 
 
Born in 1292 she married Edward II of England but was constantly humiliated by his relationships with male favourites and she lived adulterously with Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. Had it not been for her unfaithfulness, history might have immortalised her as a liberator- the saviour who unshackled England from a weak and vicious monarch. 
 
Dramatic and startling this first full-length biography of Isabella will change the way we think of her and her world forever.

Isabella

She-Wolf of France, Queen of England

Louis Fischer

‘A monumental yet intimate biography, a vivid portrait of the man, the statesman and the saint’ The Times 
 
Mahatma Gandhi became a legend in his own time. 
 
 A tireless fighter for human rights and for Indian independence, his strategy of satyagraha, or passive resistance, earned him the admiration of millions. 
 
 Louis Fischer's biography is the definitive account of Ghandi's life; it tells the astonishing story of one man who changed the world forever. 
 
This is the perfect read to celebrate and understand Ghandi in the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth.

The Life of Mahatma Gandhi

Katie Whitaker

Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration.   As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess'. Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644.  In Paris, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a great horseman. They lived together in exile for 10 years, as part of the -migr- royalist circle that included aristocrats and the intellectual giants of the day, such as Descartes and Hobbes.   Margaret had always loved poetry and philosophy - and now she became a writer.   Plays, short fiction, fantasies, 'science fiction' and verse, orations, letters, essays, an autobiography and a biography, six philosophical treatises and one utopia -   She made her mark as one of the most determined and prolific of female writers in an age when less than one per cent of published work was by women and society was shocked that she dared to publish under her own name.

Mad Madge

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic

Sam Miller

A Strange Kind of Paradise is an exploration of India’s past and present, from the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in India for many years. Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans – everyone really, except for Indians themselves – came to imagine India. 
 
His account of the engagement between foreigners and India spans the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire. It features, among many others, Thomas the Apostle, the Chinese monk Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama, Babur, Clive of India, several Victorian pornographers, Mark Twain, E. M. Forster, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles and Steve Jobs. Interspersed between these tales is the story of Sam Miller’s own 25-year-long love affair with India. 
 
The result is a spellbinding, 2,500-year-long journey through Indian history, culture and society, in the company of an author who informs, educates and entertains in equal measure, as he travels in the footsteps of foreign chroniclers, exposes some of their fabulous fantasies and overturns long-held stereotypes about race, identity and migration. At once scholarly and thought-provoking, delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.

A Strange Kind of Paradise

India Through Foreign Eyes

Dr. Yasmin Khan

The Second World War was not fought by Britain alone. India produced the largest volunteer army in world history: over 2 million men. But, until now, there has never been a comprehensive account of India's turbulent home front and the nexus between warfare and India’s society. In The Raj at War we hear the myriad voices of ordinary Indian people, from the first Indian to win the Victoria Cross to the three soldiers imprisoned as ‘traitors to the Raj’ who returned to a hero’s welcome, from the nurses in Indian General Hospitals to labourers and their families in remote villages. 
 
Yasmin Khan presents the overlooked history of India at war, and shows how mobilisation for the war unleashed seismic processes of economic, cultural and social change – decisively shaping the international war effort, the unravelling of the empire and India’s own political trajectory.

The Raj at War

A People’s History of India’s Second World War

John Campbell

In the summer of 1911 David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, hired a young schoolteacher called Frances Stevenson to tutor his daughter in the summer holidays. He was forty-eight, and married with four children. She was twenty-two, highly intelligent as well as very attractive, and Lloyd George soon began to employ her as his secretary. 
 
At the beginning of 1913 they became lovers, on terms spelt out by Lloyd George with ruthless clarity. Their secret relationship was to last for thirty years until his wife's death finally allowed Lloyd George to marry her in 1943. 
 
Combining sex, romance, family feuds and high politics- based on letters, diaries and a vast range of material, published and unpublished - If Love Were All... is the first detailed study of this extraordinary relationship, one that was known about by everyone in politics but never revealed in the press, and the strains that it placed on both parties.

If Love Were All...

The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George

Anne De Courcy

Diana Mosley was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of recent times. For some, she was a cult; for many, anathema. Born in 1910 Diana was the most beautiful and the cleverest of the six Mitford sisters. She was eighteen when she married Bryan Guinness, of the brewing dynasty, by whom she had two sons. After four years, she left him for the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and set herself up as Mosley's mistress - a course of action that horrified her family and scandalised society. In 1933 she took her sister Unity to Germany; soon both had met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. Diana became so close to him that when she and Mosley married in 1936 the ceremony took place in the Goebbels drawing room and Hitler was guest of honour. She continued to visit Hitler until a month before the outbreak of war; and afterwards, for many, years, refused to believe in the reality of the Holocaust. This gripping book is a portrait of both an extraordinary individual and the strange, terrible world of political extremism in the 1930s.

Diana Mosley

Ian Jack

In this selection from over twenty years of reporting and writing, Ian Jack sets out to deal with contemporary Britain - from national disasters to football matches to obesity - but is always drawn back in time, vexed by the question of what came first. 
 
In 'Women and Children First', watching the film Titanic leads into an investigation into the legend of Wallace Henry Hartley, the famous band leader of the doomed liner, while 'The 12.10 to Leeds', a magnificent report on the Hatfield rail crash, begins its hunt for clues in the eighteenth century in the search for those responsible. Further afield, he finds vestiges of a vanished Britain in the Indian subcontinent, meeting characters like maverick English missionary and linguist William Carey, credited with importing India's first steam engine. 
 
Full of the style, knowledge and intimacy that makes his work so special, this collection is the perfect introduction to the work of one of the country's finest writers.

The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

Jane Ridley

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 
 
Edward VII, who gave his name to the Edwardian era but was always known as Bertie, was fifty-nine when he finally came to power and ushered out the Victorian age. The eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Bertie was bullied by both his parents. Denied any proper responsibilities, the heir to the throne spent his time eating (which earned him the nickname ‘Tum Tum’), pursuing women (which Queen Victoria held to be the reason for Albert’s early demise), gambling, going to house parties and race meetings, and shooting pheasants. His arranged marriage to the stunning Danish princess Alexandra gave him access to the European dynastic network; but his name was linked with many beauties, including Lillie Langtry and Winston Churchill’s mother. This magnificent new biography provides new insight into the playboy prince while painting a vivid portrait of the age in all its excess and eccentricity.

Bertie: A Life of Edward VII

Gyatso Palden

In 1992 the Venerable Palden Gyatso was released after thirty-three years of imprisonment by Chinese forces in Tibet. He fled across the Himalayas to India, smuggling with him the instruments of his torture. This powerful text is the story of his life and irrefutable testimony to the appalling suffering of the Tibetan nation at the hands of the Chinese.

Fire Under The Snow

Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner

Caroline Moorehead

A thrilling biography of Benito Mussolini's favourite daughter, and a heart-stopping account of the unravelling of the Fascist dream in Italy 
 
'Engrossing... Moorehead has a spirited turn of phrase, a keen eye for the telling detail and pungent quote, and a gift for marshaling complex material' Jenny Uglow, New York Times Book Review 
 
Edda Mussolini was Benito's favourite daughter: spoilt, venal and uneducated but also clever, brave, and ultimately loyal. She was her father's confidante during the 20 years of Fascist rule and married Foreign Secretary Galeazzo Ciano, making them the most celebrated couple in Roman fascist society. 
 
Their fortunes turned in 1943, when Ciano voted against Mussolini in a plot to bring him down. In a dramatic story that takes in hidden diaries, her father's fall and her husband's execution, we come to know a complicated, bold and determined woman who emerges not just as a witness but as a key player in some of the twentieth century's defining moments. 
 
'Vividly told, engrossing history' CLARE MULLEY, author of The Women Who Flew for Hitler 
 
'Precise, empathic . . . a profoundly satisfying, albeit wistful, read and . . . a worryingly relevant one' GUARDIAN

Edda Mussolini

The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe

Joya Chatterji

This book tells the story of South's Asia's twentieth century in eight chapters. Unlike standard narrative histories of the subcontinent that concentrate exclusively on politics, here nature, objects, technologies, cultures, and people's changing relationships to them and to each other, are central preoccupations. 
 
The structure of the book is unorthodox. Unusually for a work of this kind, it is thematic rather than chronological. Chapters address specific questions that might arise in the minds of a 'lay', but thoughtful, reader; but each chapter is chronological within itself, analysing change over a century in one particular sphere. This format allows the reader to explore particular issues - say, the changing character of nationalism, migration or consumption - over time and in depth. 
 
Shadows at Noon is a bold and innovative work that pushes back against standard narratives of 'inherent' differences between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The purpose of the book is to make contemporary South Asia intelligible, while sharing with the reader its infinite colour and excitement. The book does not 'talk down' to the reader or attempt, in facile ways, to simplify the history of a vast, and almost mythically intricate, society.

Shadows At Noon

The South Asian Twentieth Century

Lizzie Collingham

Curry tells the story of an array of familiar Indian dishes and the people who invented, discovered, cooked and ate them. Curry is vivid, entertaining and delicious. 
 
‘Fascinating and meticulously researched…layers historical fact with mouth-watering dinner table gossip’ Meera Syal, The Times 
 
This imaginative book tells the history of India and its rulers through their food. It follows the story of curry as it spread from the courts of Delhi to the balti houses of Birmingham. 
 
Curry is the product of India's long history of invasion. In the wake of the Mughal conquerors, an army of cooks brought Persian recipes to northern India; in the south, Portugese spice merchants introduced vinegar marinades and the chillies they had recently discovered in the New World; the British soon followed, with their passion for roast meat accompanied by cauliflowers and beans. When these new ingredients were mixed with native spices, they produced these distinctly Indian dishes.

Curry

A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors

Laura Cumming

**WINNER OF THE SALTIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024** 
**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024** 
 
 
A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean. 
 
‘Brilliant’ Edmund de Waal * ‘Captivating’ Nina Stibbe * 'Extraordinary' India Knight 
 
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving behind his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch. 
 
Thunderclap explores what happened to Fabritius before and after the disaster whilst interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her painter father and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. It takes the reader from seventeenth-century Delft to twentieth-century Scottish islands, from Rembrandt’s studio to wartime America and contemporary London. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean, how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. 
 
‘Superb…this book taught me to see anew’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty’ Sunday Times

Thunderclap

A memoir of art and life & sudden death

James Delgado

After finally achieving what had eluded even his grandfather Genghis Khan - the conquest of China - and inheriting the world's largest navy, Khubilai Khan set his sights on Japan. He commanded an immense armada, the largest fleet the world had ever seen and his success seemed assured. The Japanese were vastly outnumbered and facing certain death, but they prayed to their gods for survival and the very next day Khan's entire armada were destroyed by a 'divine wind', the kamikaze. 
 
The legend of the kamikaze has endured for centuries, and was revived as a Japanese national legend during the Second World War, culminating in the suicide bombers they sent to attack the Allies, but the truth has remained a mystery. Only now, after decades of painstaking research and underwater excavation can leading marine archaeologist James Delgado reveal the truth of what really happened to Khubilia Khan's fleet.

Kamikaze

History's Greatest Naval Disaster

Xiaolu Guo

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award* 
*Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award* 
*Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize* 
*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018* 
*A Sunday Times Book of the Year* 
 
Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. 
 
When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. 
 
Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home. 
 
'This generation's Wild Swans' Daily Telegraph

Once Upon A Time in the East

A Story of Growing up

Zarghuna Kargar

'A poignant celebration of human resilience' Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner 
 
Dear Zari gives voice to the secret lives of women across Afghanistan and allows them to tell their stories in their own words: from the child bride given as payment to end a family feud; to a life spent in a dark, dusty room weaving carpets; to a young girl brought up as a boy; to life as a widow shunned by society. Dear Zari uncovers the reality of life in Afghanistan.

Dear Zari

Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan

Nicholas Shakespeare

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France. 
 
For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirées and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat. 
 
But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a precarious existence under German Occupation. 
 
Over half a century later, her nephew, Nicholas Shakespeare, found a box of Priscilla's notebooks and journals. He began investigating the rumours that she had escaped a prisoner-of-war camp and fought for the Resistance - and he finally unearthed the truth behind suspicions of disreputable love affairs and far darker secrets.

Priscilla

The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

Colin Grant

A powerful prescient memoir of life in 1970s Britain for a child of Windrush generation parents. 
 
 'This book is a classic' Sunday Telegraph 
 
To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather there: Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not settle for anything less. 
 
This is the story of a father seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old son. It’s a wry and gentle comedy about unfulfilling day jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale drug-dealing. 
And it is also about a family struggling to belong in post-Windrush Britain and growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia. 
 
LOOK OUT FOR COLIN GRANT'S NEW BOOK: Homecoming - the first oral history of the Windrush generation

Bageye at the Wheel

A 1970s Childhood in Suburbia

Jonny Steinberg

When Asad was eight years old, his mother was shot in front of him. With his father in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that has scattered the Somali people throughout the world. 
 
This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, living in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to towns deep in the Ethiopian desert. 
 
By the time he reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had made good as a street hustler, brokering relationships between hardnosed Ethiopian businessmen and bewildered Somali refugees. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya, and married her, to the astonishment of his peers. 
 
Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1,200 in his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, whose streets he believed to be lined with gold. So began an adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined. A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human – personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad’s is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.

A Man of Good Hope

One Man's Extraordinary Journey from Mogadishu to Tin Can Town

Deborah Baker

Winner of the Kekoo Naoroji Award for Mountain Literature 2019 
 
An engrossing story of passion and exploration that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order. 
 
John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers – W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender – achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest. To this rivalry was added another: their shared love for a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties. 
 
From Calcutta to pre-war London to Everest itself, The Last Englishmen tracks a generation obsessed with a romantic ideal. With a cast including writers, artists, political rogues and spies, this is narrative history at its most engaging and illuminating. 
 
'Wholly original... It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there is something Tolstoyan to Baker's vast project... Remarkable' Neel Mukherjee 
 
 ‘An exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography’ Spectator

The Last Englishmen

Love, War and the End of Empire

Adrian Fort

In 1919, Nancy Astor became the first woman to take a seat in parliament. 
 
She was not what had been expected. Far from a virago who had suffered for the cause of female suffrage, she was already near the centre of the ruling society that had for so long resisted the political upheavals of the early twentieth century, having married into the family of one of the richest men in the world. She was not even British. She would prove to be a trailblazer and beacon for the generations of women who would follow her into Parliament. 
 
This new biography charts Nancy Astor's incredible story, from penury in the American South, to a lifestyle of the most immense riches, from the luxury of Edwardian England, through the 'Jazz Age', and on towards the Second World War: a world of great country estates, lavish town houses and the most sumptuous entertainments, peopled by the most famous and powerful names of the age. But hers was not only the life of power, glamour and easy charm: it was also defined by principles and bravery, by war and sacrifice, by love and bitter disputes. 
 
With glorious, page-turning brio, Adrian Fort has brought to life this restless, controversial American dynamo, an unforgettable woman who left a deep and lasting imprint on the political life of our nation.

Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor

Michael Taylor

Discover how the campaign to end slavery divided Britain and was almost thwarted by some of the most powerful and famous figures of the era. 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING** 
 
In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. But for the next 25 years more than 700,000 people remained enslaved, due to the immensely powerful pro-slavery group the 'West India Interest'. 
 
This ground-breaking history discloses the extent to which the 'Interest' were supported by nearly every figure of the British establishment - fighting, not to abolish slavery, but to maintain it for profit. Gripping and unflinching, The Interest is the long-overdue exposé of one of Britain's darkest, most turbulent times. 
 
A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
'Scintillating . . . compulsively readable' Guardian 
 
'A magnificent book . . . riveting' Evening Standard 
 
'A critical piece of history and a devastating exposé' Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire 
 
'Thoroughly researched and potent' David Lammy MP 
 
'Essential reading' Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Interest

How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

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