Danielle Steel is one of the world’s most popular and highly acclaimed authors, with over ninety international bestselling novels in print and more than 600 million copies of her novels sold. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina's life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; and Pure Joy, about the dogs she and her family have loved. 
 
To discover more about Danielle Steel and her books visit her website at www.daniellesteel.com 
 
You can also connect with Danielle on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DanielleSteelOfficial or on Twitter: @daniellesteel

Danielle Steel

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Jessica Pan

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat 
 
What would happen if a shy introvert lived as an out-and-out extrovert for one year? Jessica Pan is about to find out… 
 
* 
 
When she found herself jobless and friendless, sitting in the familiar Jess-shaped crease on her sofa, she couldn't help but wonder what life might have looked like if she had been a little more open to new experiences and new people, a little less attached to going home instead of going to the pub. 
 
So, she made a vow: to push herself to live the life of an extrovert for a year. She wrote a list: improv, a solo holiday and... talking to strangers on the tube. She regretted it instantly. 
 
Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come follows Jess's hilarious and painful year of misadventures in extroverting, reporting back from the frontlines for all the introverts out there. 
 
But is life actually better or easier for the extroverts? Or is it the nightmare Jess always thought it would be? 
 
* 
 
‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon 
 
‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan 
 
‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously

Rubina Ali

My name is Rubina Ali. I don't know when my birthday is, and nor does my father, but I do know that I am nine years old. 
 
Rubina is a one-in-a-million-star. After being plucked from among the five-hundred slum children who auditioned for Danny Boyle's multi-Oscar-winning film SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, she saw her fairytale dream of stardom come true. But what does the future hold for a little girl now trapped between Hollywood glamour and the bleak poverty of her Mumbai slum? 
 
Now she tells her own incredible story, from playing marbles with her friends beside the sewers of Garib Nagar , to dancing along to the Bollywood films she and her family watch on their old television set. Rubina brings alive a world of wastelands and rat-infested shanty dwellings, and shows us her home near the raliway line where she lives with her beloved father and siblings. 
She tells us how her co-star came to be covered head to toe in chocolate, and how she came to meet a tall pale lady named Nicole Kidman. But how has this little girl's intimate world changed since Hollywood came knocking? And what will happen to her next? 
 
Royalties from this book will be shared with the author and Medecins du Monde in India.

Slumgirl Dreaming

My Journey to the Stars

Jenni Murray

The only child of an electrical engineer and a mother who resented the fact that she'd never been to university, the broadcaster Jenni Murray grew up in a traditional household in the 1950s. But instead of becoming the conventional housewife her mother expected her to be, Jenni opted to forge her own path in both her career and her personal life. 
 
The resulting tensions have lasted as long as she can remember. How, she has often wondered, could two women be so close, so full of love for each other, and at the same time so full of hate that they broke each other's hearts? 
 
And so Jenni began her remarkable memoir - and continued to write throughout 2006 as her mother lay dying, and Jenni struggled to care for her and her beloved father while herself being treated for breast cancer. 
 
Filled with love and laughter, frustration and heartbreak, and with the courage 'to keep on keeping on' even in the darkest days, it will speak to every mother and daughter, dutiful or not.

Memoirs Of A Not So Dutiful Daughter

Sarah Langford

'As thrilling as a detective novel.' The Times 
'Powerful, moving and often captivating.' Financial Times 
'A compelling read for anyone who cares about fairness, justice and humanity.' Observer 
 
The Sunday Times bestseller 
 
___ 
 
 
Sarah Langford is a barrister. Her job is to stand in court representing the mad and the bad, the vulnerable, the heartbroken and the hopeful. She must become their voice. Sarah weaves their story around the black and white of the law and tell it to the courtroom. These stories may not make headlines but they will change the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways. They are stories which, but for a twist of luck, might have been yours. 
 
With remarkable candour, Sarah describes eleven cases which reveal what goes on in our criminal and family courts: these are tales of domestic fall out, everyday burglary, sexual indiscretion, and children caught up in the law. They are sometimes shocking and they are often heart-stopping. She examines how she feels as she defends the person standing in the dock. She also shows us how our attitudes and actions can shape not only the outcome of a case, but the legal system itself. 
 
___ 
 
 
What readers are saying: 
 
***** 'Absolutely fascinating . . . thought provoking, powerful and a compelling read.' 
***** 'This book broke my heart at times but also contained humour and such poignant insights into the criminal justice system.' 
***** 'Sarah writes incredibly well - she's informative while maintaining suspense and tension, and conveys so much emotion in her writing

In Your Defence

True Stories of Life and Law

Lucy Dent

At the curtain call of her thirties, Lucy Dent finds herself in a marriage where meaningful communication, sexual contact and friendship have all but disappeared. Craving comfort and attention, she turns to the internet to find companionship and finds fulfilment in online sexual liaisons. 
 
Lucy details her sexual encounters with searing honesty - but this book is so much more than a 'sex memoir'. It explores marital disharmony, loneliness, addiction and the ramifications of making the choice not to have children. In an age in which lives are played out via social networks, this compelling book exposes how the supposed security of online interaction doesn't, in fact, stay safe for very long.

Turned On

Abbie Ross

In 1972 Abbie Ross’s cosmopolitan parents move the family from London to rural North Wales, exchanging a town house in Islington for a remote farmhouse on a hill. 
Abbie’s Liverpudlian grandparents – dedicated followers of Liberace, sleek in scented mohair and patent leather – are sure they’ve lost their minds. For Abbie, though, the only cloud on the horizon is the nearby hippy commune and its inhabitants. There are worrying signs that this is the sort of ‘better life’ that her parents have in mind. 
Brilliantly evoking a particular time and place, Abbie’s memoir re-creates a world of dens and pineapple chunks, of John Craven’s Newsround and fishing for sticklebacks – and the joy but also the burning powerlessness of being a child. Disgusted by her father’s ‘yogic flying’ and her mother’s taste for brown bread and billowing cheesecloth (with no bra), Abbie is desperate not to be different. Far better, she thinks, to fit in with shouting, pathologically nosy Sara across the fields,or stay close to Philip next door – paralysingly shy and with a preference for orange food and no trousers (‘nice to have a bit of air’) ... 
Rich with detail that reveals a whole world, Hippy Dinners is very funny and full of heart. It is also a delicate and astute portrait of the brutal realities of ‘a simple life’.

Hippy Dinners

A memoir of a rural childhood

Mary Soames

At ninety years old, Mary Soames is the only surviving child of Winston and Clementine Churchill. A Daughter’s Tale follows her early life from an idyllic childhood in her own ‘Garden of Eden’ at Chartwell to her ATS service in mixed anti-aircraft batteries during the war. With glimpses into her fascinating personal diary, published here for the first time, she draws us into a world where the experiences of a packed family, social and romantic life unfold against a background of cataclysmic events. 
 
When Chamberlain’s declaration of war in 1939 shatters Mary’s world, she begins to share the anxieties and stresses suffered by her family through her father’s position. The mutual love between Mary and her parents is evident on every page, from her Chartwell years to Winston’s defeat at the 1945 general election, when she recounts her own devastation on her father’s behalf. As she meets her future husband Christopher Soames at the end of this charming memoir, it is clear that, at twenty-four, Mary has lived a full life and is well prepared for her future as wife and mother.

A Daughter's Tale

The Memoir of Winston and Clementine Churchill's youngest child

Anne Youngson

**As read on BBC Radio Four** 
 
Uplifting, joyous, hopeful - a novel about late love and second chances, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and winner of the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 
 
'A moving tribute to friendship and love, to the courage of the ordinary, and to starting again' RACHEL JOYCE, author of Miss Benson's Beetle 
'Full of grace and humanity' Sunday Times 
________________________ 
 
This story begins with a letter 
From a housewife 
to the gentle curator 
Of an extraordinary museum 
Where lies peacefully 
An ancient exhibit 
That holds the key 
To Everything 
We are. 
 
Meet Me at the Museum tells of a connection made across oceans and against all the odds. Through intimate stories of joy, despair, and discovery, two people are drawn inexorably towards each other, until a shattering revelation pushes their friendship to the very edge. 
 
This deeply affecting debut novel by seventy-three year-old Anne Youngson won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour 
 
******************************* 
'Tender, wise and moving, Meet Me at the Museum is a novel to cherish.' JOHN BOYNE 
 
'Insightful, emotionally acute and absorbing' DAILY EXPRESS 
 
'Beautiful and affecting' NINA STIBBE 
 
What readers are saying: 
'I loved this book. It was so different from anything else I have read'***** 
'I just loved this book and read it in one sitting. There were times when I felt like underlining the sentences that resonated with me'***** 
'I read this book one letter at a time, just to let the contents sink in. Tears came to my eyes'*****

Meet Me at the Museum

Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2018

Liza Campbell

Liza Campbell was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle, as featured in Macbeth. Her father Hugh, the 25th Thane of Cawdor, inherited good looks,wealth, an ancient title, three stately homes and 100,000 acres of land. But increasingly overwhelmed by his enormous responsibilities, Hugh turned to drink, drugs, and extramarital affairs. Until the castle was transformed into an arena of reckless profligacy, abuse and terrifying domestic violence, leading to the abrupt termination of a legacy that had been passed down through the family for six hundred years. 
 
Title Deeds is a dark yet funny, contemporary fairy story about growing up in an old family where ancient curses and grisly past events are matched by the turmoil of a confusing and frightening present. Liza Campbell shows how even enormous wealth and privilege can hide unspoken abuse and misery: and what it is like to watch your father destroy himself and everything he holds dear.

Title Deeds

At sixty-four, Jenni Murray's weight had become a disability. She avoided the scales, she wore a uniform of baggy black clothes, refused to make connections between her weight and health issues and told herself that she was fat and happy. She was certainly fat. But the happy part was an Oscar-worthy performance. In private she lived with a growing sense of fear and misery that her weight would probably kill her before she made it to seventy. Interwoven with the science, social history and psychology of weight management, Fat Cow, Fat Chance is a refreshingly honest account of what it's like to be fat when society dictates that skinny is the norm. It asks why we overeat and why, when the weight is finally lost through dieting, do we simply pile the pounds back on again? How do we help young people become comfortable with the way they look? What are the consequences of the obesity epidemic for an already overstretched NHS? And, whilst fat shaming is so often called out, why is it that shouting 'fat cow' at a woman in the street hasn't been included in the list of hate crimes? Fusing politics, science and personal pain, this is a powerful exploration of our battle with obesity.

Fat Cow, Fat Chance

The science and psychology of size

Carolyn Slaughter

Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, but for the last twelve years she has been completely silent. She had become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This powerful memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her traumatic childhood. 
 
Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert. Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of the Kalahari itself for solace. 
 
The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book. What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father, siblings. Despite its sometimes harrowing contents, it is a work of great, dangerous beauty.

Before The Knife

Memories Of An African Childhood

Nora Ephron

'Memories, aphorisms and stern good advice from America's favourite naughty aunt' Independent on Sunday 
'This book is as grown-up as a dirty martini' Sunday Times 
'Sharp as a knife' Daily Express 
 
___ 
 
In her final book, Nora Ephron reflects on life, growing older, and everything she will and won't miss. Filled with Nora's trademark wit, wisdom and warmth. 
 
* No one actually likes to admit they're old. The most they will cop to is that they're older. Or oldish. 
 
* Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. 
 
* I have been forgetting things for years-at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to. 
 
___ 
 
Praise for Nora Ephron 
 
'So bold and so vulnerable at the same time. I don't know how she did it' Phoebe Waller-Bridge 
'Oh how I loved Nora Ephron' Nigella Lawson 
'Funny, knowing and smart' India Knight 
'Nora's exacting, precise, didactic, tried-and-tested, sophisticated-woman-wearing-all-black wisdom is a comfort and a relief' Dolly Alderton

I Remember Nothing and other reflections

Memories and wisdom from the iconic writer and director

Ruth McKernan

Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research it is Ruth McKernan's way. When her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse his medical condition. 
 
In this moving account of her father's last year, love, grief and hope are intertwined with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work. The result is an inspired blend where the contrasting view of scientist and daughter ultimately unite.

Billy's Halo

Anya von Bremzen

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR . 
 
In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Steve Lopez

When Steve Lopez sees Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles's skid row, he finds it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years ago, Ayers was a promising student at Julliard - ambitious, charming and hugely talented - until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless and paranoid, but glimmers of his earlier brilliance are still there. 
 
Over time, the two men form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayer's life. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. Their friendship will changes both of their lives in ways that neither could predict. Poignant and ultimately hopeful, The Soloist is a beautifully told story of devotion in the face of seemingly unbeatable challenges, and the inspiring power of music.

The Soloist

Nina Lugovskaya

Does that boy like me? Why are my sisters so mean? Does anyone think I'm pretty? Will my father be arrested? These were the everyday concerns of thirteen-year-old Moscow schoolgirl Nina Lugovskaya, who began to write a diary in 1932. Her indignant outbursts against the brutal raids and purges of Stalin's terror appear alongside the more typical adolescent worries about girlfriends, boys, parties and homework. 
For five years Nina scribbled down her most intimate thoughts and dreams, including her ambition one day to become a writer. Then in 1937 the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, ransacked Nina's home and discovered her diary. Nina's criticism of the regime provided sufficient evidence for the charge of treason, and she, her mother and two sisters were sentenced to five years' hard labour in the Gulag, followed by seven years' exile in Siberia. 
Recently Nina's diary was discovered in the KGB archives, complete with the original passages underlined by the secret police. Like Anne Frank's diary, this journal poignantly reveals life at a time of political upheaval, betrayal and repression through the eyes of an innocent.

I Want To Live

The Diary of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia

Selma van de Perre

Selma van de Perre was seventeen when the Second World War began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had been of no consequence. But by 1941 it was a matter of life or death. Several times, Selma avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. Then, in an act of defiance, she joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years 'Marga' risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as Aryan she travelled the country delivering newsletters, sharing information, keeping up morale  - doing, as she later said, what 'had to be done'. In July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück women's concentration camp as a political prisoner. Unlike her parents and sister - who, she later discovered, died in other camps - she survived by using her alias. It was only after the war ended that she was allowed to reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma. Now, at ninety-nine, Selma remains a force of nature. Full of hope and courage, this is her story in her own words.

My Name Is Selma

The remarkable memoir of a Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück survivor

Clover Stroud

'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 
'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times 
 
Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. 
 
My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. 
 
MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD: 
'Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes 
'As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know' - Rachel Joyce 
'Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life - and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free' - Elizabeth Gilbert 
'I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating' - Alexandra Heminsley 
 
Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child's life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to - not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

My Wild and Sleepless Nights

The brave, raw Sunday Times bestselling memoir

Tom Courtenay

'I suppose my luck is You, Ann and Dad and more so if I could really write.' Annie Eliza Courtenay 
 
Tom Courtenay was born in Hull in 1937 and brought up near the fish dock where his father worked. When he left home for university, his mother, Annie, wrote to him every week and when her letters became more searching and more intimate in response to Tom's unhappiness he kept every one, not knowing that after her early death they were to become his most treasured possession. 
 
Tom has selected the best of them to go in this book and interwoven with them a portrait of what was going on in his life at the time, in the heady days of the early Sixties when successful young working-class actors were coming to the fore for the first time. Annie's letters are astonishing - wise, funny, with a natural instinct for words, but also deeply painful. She knows she's worthy of a better, more creative life, but she hasn't been given the chance. 
 
Partly a memoir of a working-class way of life that has gone for ever, partly a powerfully moving record of the love between mother and son, partly a portrait of the artist as a young actor, Dear Tom is sure to excite admiration and delight in equal measure.

Dear Tom

Mary Portas

* THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * 
 
Young Mary Newton, born into a large Irish family in a small Watford semi, was always getting into trouble. When she wasn’t choking back fits of giggles at Holy Communion or eating Chappie dog food for a bet, she was accidentally setting fire to the local school. Mary was a trouble magnet. And, unlike her brothers, somehow she always got caught… 
 
Britain in the 1970s was a world where R White's lemonade was drunk in secret, curry came in a cardboard box marked Vesta and Beanz meant Heinz. In Mary’s family, money was scarce. Clothes were hand-me-downs, holidays a church day out to Hastings and meals were variations on the potato. But these were also good times which revolved around the force of nature that was Theresa, Mary’s mum. 
 
When tragedy unexpectedly blows this world apart, a new chapter in Mary’s life opens up. She takes to the camp and glamour of Harrods window dressing like a duck to water, and Mary, Queen of Shops is born…

Shop Girl

Candida Lycett Green

From her early childhood, when her inspirational mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of green lanes and tracks, of moving along at horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door. Her insatiable appetite for exploring unknown territory has led her to travel all over the country by horse for weeks at a time, and often these journeys have come at important turning points in her life. 
 
Lyrical yet down-to-earth, framed by a recent 150-mile journey through Yorkshire and Northumberland with a friend, Over the Hills and Far Away dips back into past journeys by horse that also reflect her idyllic childhood in the bohemian Betjeman household, a charmed youth in the Swinging Sixties, a year-long honeymoon journey overland to India, early days at Private Eye, and the ups and downs of thirty-nine years of marriage and motherhood. Her story is made all the more poignant by her recent fight with breast cancer.

Over The Hills And Far Away

Susannah Walker

What do our possessions say about us? Why do we project such meaning onto them? What becomes of the things we leave behind? 
 
Only after her mother's death does Susannah Walker discover how much of a hoarder she had become. Over the following months, Susannah has to sort through a dilapidated house filled to the brim with rubbish and treasures - filling bag after bag with possessions. But what she's really in search of is a woman she'd never really known or understood in life. This is her last chance to piece together her mother's story and make sense of their troubled relationship. What emerges from the mess of scattered papers, discarded photographs and an extraordinary amount of stuff is the history of a sad and fractured family, haunted by dead children, divorce and alcohol. The Life of Stuff is a deeply personal exploration of mourning and the shoring up of possessions against the losses and griefs of life, which also raises universal questions about what makes us the people we are.

The Life of Stuff

Possessions, obsessions and the mess we leave behind

A memoir about the mess we leave behind

Carrie Fisher

When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved - plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Now her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her co-star, Harrison Ford. 
 With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time – and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candour and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into the type of stardom that few will ever experience.

The Princess Diarist

1949: one year in the childhood of Candida Lycett Green in the remote village of Farnborough in Berkshire. Here she lives with her father John Betjeman and her mother Penelope Chetwode, in one of the bleakest and highest spots on the windswept downland.Candida runs wild with the 'gang' of village children. Stimulated by regular excursions to the cinema in Wantage, Candida and her best friend June became fascinated by the idea of love. Their romantic imagination is fuelled by the beautiful Ruby Mason, who cleans the cottage of a reclusive scientist, Dr Fox, employed at the neighbouring Harwell Atomic Research Centre. They stealthily engineer a romance between the two - until it is revealed that none of the children's special adult friends are what they seem, and the real world shockingly intervenes to overturn their innocence.

The Dangerous Edge Of Things

Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton

'An inspirational memoir from an extraordinary woman . . . A humbling, jaw-dropping read' Viv Groskop 
 
'This book will change the way you think. Forever' Cosmopolitan 
 
Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton has been a firefighter for eighteen years. She decides which of her colleagues rush into a burning building and how they confront the blaze. She makes the call to evacuate if she believes the options have been exhausted or that the situation has escalated beyond hope. 
 
Taking us to the very heart of firefighting, she immerses us in this extraordinary world; from scenes of devastation and crisis, through triumphs of bravery, to the quieter moments when she questions herself. Revealing her own story for the very first time, she recounts her years spent sleeping rough and her passion for a career that allows her to rescue others as she was never rescued herself. 
 
This book is the result of everything she has learnt about how we respond in our most extreme moments. 
 
'This book challenges assumptions about who firefighters are, and about what women can do' The Guardian

The Heat of the Moment

A Firefighter’s Stories of Life and Death Decisions

Erik Larson

'A compelling tale... a narrative that makes such a brave effort to see history as it evolves and not as it becomes.' SPECTATOR 
 
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the times, and with brilliant portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler amongst others, Erik Larson's new book sheds unique light on events as they unfold, resulting in an unforgettable, addictively readable work of narrative history. 
 
Berlin,1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, has to his own and everyone else's surprise, become America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany, in a year that proves to be a turning point in history. 
 
Dodd and his family, notably his vivacious daughter, Martha, observe at first-hand the many changes - some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent - that signal Hitler's consolidation of power. 
 
Dodd has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party, his increasingly concerned cables make little impact on an indifferent U.S. State Department, while Martha is drawn to the Nazis and their vision of a 'New Germany' and has a succession of affairs with senior party players, including first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. 
 
But as the year darkens, Dodd and his daughter find their lives transformed and any last illusion they might have about Hitler are shattered by the violence of the 'Night of the Long Knives' in the summer of 1934 that established him as supreme dictator . . .

In The Garden of Beasts

Love and terror in Hitler's Berlin

Beck Dorey-Stein

_____________________________ 
‘If you’ve ever felt like you were out of your element, in over your head or working without a net, you will love this book. Funny, fast-paced, and so emotionally true it hurts.’ Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black 
_____________________________ 
Guidelines for aspiring stenographers: 
· Neutral tones set the tone 
· Be discreet and neat – like a librarian or well-paid prostitute 
· Breathe quietly or not at all 
· Above all else, keep the secrets to yourself… 
 
In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein was just scraping by in Washington DC when an unusual job interview landed her in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama's stenographers. She joined the elite team who accompanied the President wherever he went, recorder and mic in hand. On whirlwind trips across time zones, Beck forged friendships with a tight group of fellow travellers - young men and women who, like her, left their real lives behind to hop aboard Air Force One in service of the President. But as she learned the ropes of protocol, Beck became romantically entangled with a colleague, and suddenly, the political became all too personal. 
 
 Set against the backdrop of a White House full of glamour, drama and intrigue, this is the story of a young woman making unlikely friendships, getting her heart broken, learning what truly matters and discovering her voice in the process. 
_____________________________ 
Praise for From the Corner of the Oval Office 
'Who knew the West Wing could be so sexy? Beck’s unparalleled access is obvious on every page, along with her knife-sharp humour... Lots of books claim to give real insider glimpses, but this one actually delivers.' 
Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada 
 
'This memoir is good and gossipy, will make you wish that you got to hang out with Barack and Michelle on a daily basis and is the missing link between The West Wing and Bridget Jones’s Diary.' Red 
 
'Set against the backdrop of a White House full of glamour, drama and intrigue, this is the story of a young woman making unlikely friendships, getting her heart broken, learning what truly matters and discovering her voice in the process.' GLAMOUR's Best Books of 2018

From the Corner of the Oval Office

A searing summer 2019 holiday read

One woman’s true story of her accidental career in the Obama White House

David Hepworth

The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times. 
 
The resulting fusion of American can-do and British fuck-you didn’t just lead to rock and roll’s most resonant music. It ushered in a golden era when a generation of kids born in ration card Britain, who had grown up with their nose pressed against the window of America’s plenty, were invited to wallow in their big neighbour’s largesse. 
 
It deals with a time when everything that was being done - from the Beatles playing Shea Stadium to the Rolling Stones at Altamont, from the Who performing their rock opera at the Metropolitan Opera House to David Bowie touching down in the USA for the first time with a couple of gowns in his luggage - was being done for the very first time. 
 
Rock and roll would never be quite so exciting again.

Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There

How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America

David Belton

'Tremendous. A moving and haunting tribute to the human spirit' WILLIAM BOYD 
 
Into the heart of a genocide that left a million people dead 
 
6 April 1994: In the skies above Rwanda the president’s plane is shot down in flames. 
 
Near Kigali, Jean-Pierre holds his family close, fearing for their lives as the violence escalates. 
 
 In the chapel of a hillside village, missionary priest Vjeko Curic prepares to save thousands of lives 
 
The mass slaughter that follows – friends against friends, neighbours against neighbours - is one of the bloodiest chapters in history 
 
 
Twenty years on, BBC Newsnight producer David Belton, one of the first journalists into Rwanda, tells of the horrors he experienced at first-hand. Now following the threads of Jean-Pierre and Vjeko Curic’s stories, he revisits a country still marked with blood, in search of those who survived and the legacy of those who did not. This is David Belton's quest for the limits of bravery and forgiveness.

When The Hills Ask For Your Blood: A Personal Story of Genocide and Rwanda

Tamsin Calidas

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Memoir of the year' - Vogue 
 
'A wondrous, sensuous memoir of salt-stung survival . . . clear-eyed and poetic prose' Sunday Times 
 
'A fascinating memoir' - Daily Mail 
 
When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. 
 
Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of rebirth and renewal. Tamsin begins the slow journey back from the brink. 
 
Startling, raw and extremely moving, I Am An Island is a story about the incredible ability of the natural world to provide when everything else has fallen away - a stunning book about solitude, friendship, resilience and self-discovery.

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