Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Margaret Forster

In 1831 John Dodgson Carr, son of a Quaker grocer, set off to walk from his home in Kendal to Carlisle, determined to launch a great enterprise. Within 15 years, Carr's of Carlisle had become one of the largest baking businesses in the world -and is a by-word for biscuits to this day. Following his trail to Carlisle (where she herself was born and grew up), Margaret Forster brings 19th-century daily life into vivid focus and charts the rise and rise of a middle-class family like the Carrs, ambitious, innovative yet sternly religious. This is history as it was lived by the men and women both above and below stairs - from the shop floor to the comfortable bourgeois homes of the paternalistic Carrs. We see the conflict between religion and profit, the family feuds and the changing face of a city through this compelling historical narrative, told with Margaret Forster's characteristic blend of scholarship, readability and marvellous attention to the texture of everyday life.

Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin

A Family and Their Times 1831-1931

A.L. Kennedy

Nathan Staples is consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion for his estranged wife and their teenage daughter, Mary. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possiblity of telling her he is her father, and becoming whole and complete and alive again.

Everything You Need

Annalena McAfee

Tamara Sim, a ruthlessly ambitious young journalist, is thrilled when she is sent to interview veteran war correspondent Honor Tait. Finally - a chance for Tamara to prove that there's more to her than forged expenses claims and the 'what's in/what's out' column she churns out for her tabloid. But Honor isn't an easy subject; cold and evasive to the point of rudeness, it's almost as if she has something to hide. And when Tamara starts to do some digging (not all of it strictly legal) she makes a discovery which has devastating consequences for them both... 
 
In The Spoiler, the former literary editor of the Financial Times and the Guardian offers a first hand glimpse into the world of British journalism.

The Spoiler

Rachel Maddow

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Oil. 
 
Corrupt? Yes. 
 
 Unimaginably lucrative? Of course. 
 
 But, the enemy of democracy? 
 
 Blowout is the oil and gas industry as we've never seen it before, as told by America's most incisive political journalist, Rachel Maddow. A blackly comic journey from Washington to Siberia, to deep within the earth's crust and the icy Arctic seas, it reveals is not just the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas but why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. 
 
 This is our final wake-up call: to stop subsidizing oil and gas, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry before it destroys our democracy 
 
 'It takes enormous talent to balance brutal honesty with scorching wit. Rachel Maddow has it in spades... Each page in Blowout is a revelation into the depth of corruption and greed that is infused into the international economy' David Lammy, MP

Blowout

Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Carmen Callil

'A triumphant family memoir' Hallie Rubenhold 
'Powerfully told...an impressive work' The Times 
'Oh Happy Day gives a voice to the voiceless' Australian Book Review 
 
In this remarkable book, Carmen Callil discovers the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her great-great grandmother Sary Lacey, born in 1808, an impoverished stocking frame worker. Through detailed research, we follow Sary from slum to tenement and from pregnancy to pregnancy. We also meet George Conquest, a canal worker and the father of one of Sary's children. George was sentenced - for a minor theft - to seven years' transportation to Australia, where he faced the extraordinary brutality of convict life. 
 
But for George, as for so many disenfranchised British people like him, Australia turned out to be his Happy Day. He survived, prospered and eventually returned to England, where he met Sary again, after nearly thirty years. He brought her out to Australia, and they were never parted again. 
 
A miracle of research and fuelled by righteous anger, Oh Happy Day is a story of Empire, migration and the inequality and injustice of nineteenth-century England. 
 
'A remarkable tale...drawing chilling parallels to the inequalities of our times' Observer

Oh Happy Day

Those Times and These Times

Michael Booth

'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
Michael Booth has had his fill of celebrity chefs and their 'on the table in five minutes' recipes. He wants to learn how to cook properly, so he burns his cookery books and, together with his young family, heads for a new life in Paris - reasoning that, if anyone can be trusted to make food complicated, it's the French. 
 
Embarking on the ultimate foodie's fantasy, he enrols at the world's most famous cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu, where wise and battle-scarred French chefs commence their transformation of him into a professional cook. 
 
Along the way Booth shares the insider tips and secret techniques of classical cuisine. His odyssey takes him from trauma to triumph, ending in the white-hot heat of the Michelin-starred kitchen of the greatest chef in France.

Doing without Delia

Tales of Triumph and Disaster in a French Kitchen

Sophie Heawood

'Deftly explores expectations of modern womanhood . . . Full of adventure and awe' Dolly Alderton 
 
People always said I'd find love where I least expected it. I always said they were idiots. 
 
I had no idea how to commit to another human being. 
 
I could barely commit to reading a magazine, and I wrote for magazines for a living. My specialist subject was celebrities, and my own relationships made their marriages look eternal. 
 
I'd never paid a household bill that didn't mention bailiffs, and my idea of exercise was to go and stand outside a famous person's house and stare until I'd convinced myself that I lived in it. 
 
 But my life in LA was happy; free of care and consequence. That was, until I came down to earth - with a bump. 
 
 So this is the story of how I staggered from partying in Hollywood to bringing up a baby in Piss Alley, Dalston; how I never did find a copy of What To Expect When You Weren't Even Fucking Expecting To Be Expecting, and why paternity testing is not a good topic for a first-date conversation. 
 
**AN EVENING STANDARD AND COSMOPOLITAN BEST BOOK OF 2020** 
**AN OBSERVER NON-FICTION BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2020** 
___________________ 
 
Praise for THE HUNGOVER GAMES: 
'Funny, dark and true' Caitlin Moran 
'A deeper, funnier, realer, more poignant Bridget Jones' Philippa Perry 
'Sharply observed and funny' Guardian 
'Frank and fearless' Red 
'Outrageously entertaining' David Nicholls 
'This is the first time I've read anything about motherhood that didn't bore me' Sara Pascoe

The Hungover Games

The gloriously funny Sunday Times bestselling memoir of motherhood

Caroline Moorehead

Discover the life of one of the twentieth century's most significant and notorious war correspondents, and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. 
 
Martha Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century; as a young woman she witnessed the suffering of the American Depression and risked her life in the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from the front made her a legend, yet her private life was often messy and volcanic. 
 
 Her determination to be a war correspondent - and her conspicuous success - contributed to the breakdown of her infamously stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. In this mesmerising biography of a life that spanned the twentieth century, Moorehead reveals how passionately Martha fought against injustice, and how determined she was to catch the human story. 
 
'A deeply sympathetic portrait... [it shows] an overwhelming sense of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph

Martha Gellhorn

A Life

Zahra Hankir

'Fascinating' Nigella Lawson 
'Awe-inspiring' Funmi Fetto 
'A treat to read' Kassia St Clair 
 
A Sunday Times Style Barometer and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick 
 
For centuries, humans have been drawn to lining our eyes. The aesthetic trademark of icons from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse, eyeliner is one of our most enduring cosmetic tools: ancient royals and Gen Z influencers alike have harnessed its power. 
 
Through Zahra Hankir&rsquo;s kohl-lined eyes, this ubiquitous product becomes proof of the stunning variety among cultures across time and space. Exploring intimate conversations &ndash; with Chadian nomads, Japanese geisha, Indian dancers, New York&rsquo;s drag queens and more &ndash; Eyeliner embraces the profound significance of its namesake, especially among communities of colour. 
 
What emerges is a delightful and unexpectedly moving journey through streets and stages around the world, and a stirring reclamation of a key piece of our collective history. 
 
Featuring stunning portrait illustrations by Mercedes deBellard

Eyeliner

A Cultural History

Lindsey Hilsum

The gripping life story of the great war correspondent Marie Colvin told by one of her closest friends 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK AWARD 
 
Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. She reported from the most dangerous places in the world and her anecdotes about encounters with figures like Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat were incomparable. She was much admired, and as famous for her wild parties as for the extraordinary lengths to which she went to tell the story. 
 
Fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum draws on unpublished diaries and interviews with friends, family and colleagues to produce a story of one of the most daring and inspirational women of our times. 
 
A Sunday Times Book of the Year 
'A stunningly good biography' WILLIAM BOYD

In Extremis

The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin

Farida Khalaf

Andrea C. Hoffmann

Our world as it once was 
 
In August 2014, Farida was, like any ordinary teenager, enjoying the last days of summer before her final year at school. However, her peaceful mountain village in northern Iraq was an ISIS target as their genocide against the Yazidi people began. 
 
The catastrophe 
 
ISIS murdered the men and boys in the village, including Farida's father and brother, and took the women hostage. Farida was one of them. She was held in a slave camp, in the homes of ISIS members and finally in a desert training camp. Continually she struggled, resisted and fought against her captors, showing unimaginable strength and bravery. 
 
This is my story 
 
Eventually, Farida managed to plot her escape and fled into the desert with five young girls in her care, but defeating ISIS was just the first step in her journey. In this book she tells her remarkable and inspiring story.

The Girl Who Escaped ISIS

Farida's Story

Isabel Buchanan

Winner of the Saltire Society First Book Award 2016 
An Economist Book of the Year 2016 
A Spectator Book of the Year 2016 
 
In 2011, Isabel Buchanan, a twenty-three-year-old Scottish lawyer, moved to Pakistan to work in a new legal chambers in Lahore. The chambers was run by a determined thirty-three-year-old Pakistani lawyer, Sarah Belal, who had finally found her calling in defending inmates on Pakistan’s death row. 
 
Belal and Buchanan struck up an unlikely friendship, forged through working in a system that was instinctively hostile to newcomers – and doubly so if they were female. At Sarah’s side, and with the help of Nasar, the firm’s legendary clerk, Buchanan plunged into the strange and complex world of Pakistan’s justice system. The work was arduous, underfunded, and dangerous. But for a young Scottish lawyer like Buchanan it was an unparalleled education, offering a window onto a much-misunderstood country and culture. Filled with beautifully drawn characters, she creates a narrative brimming with ideas and bursting with humanity. It is a story of Pakistan, but it is also a universal story of the pursuit of justice in an uncertain world.

Trials

On Death Row in Pakistan

Nicky Haslam

Nicky Haslam has always been at the centre of things wherever he is - at parties, opening nights, royal weddings - and has stories to tell of crossing paths, and more, with the cultural icons of our time: Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, Diana Cooper, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to name but a few. Redeeming Features is an exuberantly told and stunningly crafted memoir: a compelling and wholly singular document of our times.

Redeeming Features

A Memoir

Kristen Ghodsee

Throughout history and around the world today, forward-thinking communities have pioneered alternative ways of living together, sharing property and raising children. In Everyday Utopia, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee explores what we can learn from these experiments – from the ancient Greek commune founded by Pythagoras to the trail-blazing feminists of the French Revolution, from the cohousing movement in contemporary Denmark to the flourishing ecovillages of Colombia and Portugal. She shows why utopian thinking is essential to making a fairer world and that many of the best ways of getting there begin at home.

Everyday Utopia

Better Ways of Living Equally

In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home

Neil Chenoweth

In the summer of 2000, Rupert Murdoch is weeks away from realising his life's dream. Three years ago, he set out to challenge every media group in America and he failed. Now unexpectedly the last wave of the tech stockmarket boom has given him a second chance.  Murdoch's gamble is to change the way the world communicates. His plan will establish himself as the most powerful media figure on the planet and put him in direct conflict with Bill Gates. With time running out, Murdoch must beat Gates to the Premier League television rights, then float the world's biggest satellite platform on Wall Street before the market falls over. Battling cancer, his family fraying while the empire falters, Murdoch will do whatever he must to make this final, greatest gamble work.

Virtual Murdoch

Reality Wars on the Information Highway

DG Coutinho

Ellen is tired of being overshadowed at work. Tired of watching less competent, entitled suits take the promotions she’s earned. But when one of them pushes her too far, things take a murderous turn. And it turns out the darker Ellen goes, the shinier her future starts to look. 
 
Business can be murder, but it turns out murder can also be good business for Ellen. Torn between capitalising on her newfound success and desperately covering her tracks she soon discovers that others in the company are also interested in dramatically adjusting its toxic office culture. Will she be able to survive the competition?

The Light and Shade of Ellen Swithin

Afua Hirsch

Our bodies tell our story. 
 
Upon turning forty, Afua Hirsch had an encounter that forever altered her preconceived notions of ancestry and body image, making her question everything from body-modification rituals such as tattoos and piercings to the foundations of sexuality. 
 
Decolonising My Body charts her year-long journey of radical unlearning. Bringing together global scholarship, on-the-ground reportage, personal anecdotes and interviews with beauty experts, practitioners and service users, Hirsch reassesses notions of body image beyond those of the colonial, patriarchal gaze. Taking us from puberty to end-of-life, she shows us that the ways in which we adorn and present ourselves have spiritual implications and shape the possibilities we see for ourselves in the world.

Decolonising My Body

On Ancestry, Tradition and Cultural Reinvention

A radical exploration of rituals and beauty

Lady Hale

Lady Hale is an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and for the causes she has championed. Spider Woman is her story. 
 
 As 'a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire', she only went into the law because her headteacher told her she wasn't clever enough to study history. She became the most senior judge in the country but it was an unconventional path to the top. 
 
 How does a self-professed 'girly swot' get ahead in a profession dominated by men? Was it a surprise that the perspectives of women and other disadvantaged groups had been overlooked, or that children's interests were marginalised? A lifelong smasher of glass-ceilings, who took as her motto 'women are equal to everything', her landmark rulings in areas including domestic violence, divorce, mental health and equality were her attempt to correct that. 
 
 As President of the Supreme Court, Lady Hale won global attention in finding the 2019 prorogation of Parliament to be unlawful. Yet that dramatic moment was merely the pinnacle of a career throughout which she was hailed as a pioneering reformer. 
 
 Wise, warm and inspiring, Spider Woman shows how the law shapes our world and supports us in crisis. It is the story of how Lady Hale found that she could overcome the odds, which shows that anyone from similar beginnings will find that they can cope too.

Spider Woman

A Life – by the former President of the Supreme Court

Gavin Knight

The Penwith Peninsula in Cornwall is where the land ends. In The Swordfish and the Star Gavin Knight takes us into this huddle of grey roofs at the edge of the sea at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 
 
He catches the stories of a whole community, but especially those still working this last frontier: the Cornish fishermen. These are the dreamers and fighters who every day prepare for battle with the vast grey Atlantic. Cornwall and its seas are brought to life, mixing drinking and drugs and sea spray, moonlit beaches and shattering storms, myth and urban myth. The result is an arresting tapestry of a place we thought we knew; the precarious reality of life in Cornwall today emerges from behind our idyllic holiday snaps and picture postcards. Even the quaint fishermen’s pubs on the quay at Newlyn, including the Swordfish and its neighbour the Star, turn out to be places where squalls can blow up, and down again, in an instant. 
 
Based on immersive research and rich with the voices of a cast of remarkable characters, this is an eye-opening, dramatic, poignant account of life on Britain’s most dangerous stretch of coast. 
 
Praise for Hood Rat 
'A gripping novelistic immersion' Louis Theroux 
'A must-read' Owen Jones 
'Britain's Gomorrah' Independent

The Swordfish and the Star

Life on Cornwall's most treacherous stretch of coast

Joseph Hone

‘A page-turner about page-turners’ Janice Hallett 
‘The perfect piece of armchair detection’ Ruth Ware 
‘Hugely entertaining and unexpectedly gripping’ London Review of Books 
 
A true detective story from the age of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: the literary crime that fooled the world - and the daring young booksellers who uncovered it 
 
London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. 
 
One night, two young booksellers stumble upon a strange discrepancy leading them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem. Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core. 
 
‘A thrilling unravelling of bookish fraud that reads like a detective story from the golden age’ Roland Philipps, author of A Spy Named Orphan 
 
‘Hone is a lively and fluent writer, ratcheting up the temperature with snappy sentences and chapters ending on cliffhangers’ Sunday Telegraph

The Book Forger

The true story of a literary crime that fooled the world

Clive Stafford Smith

Shortlisted for the 2013 Orwell Prize. 
THE STORY CONTINUES: TWO NEW CHAPTERS FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION 
 
In 1986, Kris Maharaj, a British businessman living in Miami, was arrested for the brutal murder of two ex-business associates. His lawyer did not present a strong alibi; Kris was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. 
 
It wasn't until a young lawyer working for nothing, Clive Stafford Smith, took on his case that strong evidence began to emerge that the state of Florida had got the wrong man on Death Row. So far, so good - except that, as Stafford Smith argues here so compellingly, the American justice system is actually designed to ignore innocence. Twenty-six years later, Maharaj is still in jail. 
 
Step by step, Stafford Smith untangles the Maharaj case and the system that makes disasters like this inevitable. His conclusions will act as a wake-up call for those who condone legislation which threatens basic human rights and, at the same time, the personal story he tells demonstrates that determination can challenge the institutions that surreptitiously threaten our freedom.

Injustice

Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America

Chelsea Manning

An extraordinarily brave and moving memoir from one of the world's most famous whistle-blowers, activists and trans women. 
 
In 2013, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison for the largest leak of classified documents in history. The next day, Chelsea declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition. 
 
In this radically candid memoir, Chelsea recounts how her challenging youth led her to join the US Army. She writes of the fierce pride she took in her work, the risks of the military's queer underground and the wider culture of silence and unaccountability. She describes fifty-nine days locked in an iron cage after her fateful decision and the community of solidarity she later discovered in prison. Above all, we see the phenomenal courage and resilience it took to survive and become a global advocate for transparency. 
 
'A terrific read, full of unexpected turns and details that counter many of the assumptions made about Manning' GUARDIAN 
 
'Brilliantly told' THE TIMES 
 
'Searing...uplifting...redemptive' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'A full and expansive account of Manning's life, one which is often harrowing but funny and poignant too' DAZED

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A memoir from one of the world’s most famous whistleblowers

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