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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Andre Schwarz-Bart

THE BOOK: In every generation, according to Jewish tradition, thirty-six just men, the Lamed-waf, are born to take the burden of the world's suffering upon themselves. At York in 1185 the just man was Rabbi Yom Tov Levey, whose sacrifice so touched God that he gave his descendants one just man each generation, all the way down to Ernie Levey, the last of the just, killed at Auschwitz in 1943. This, then, is the story of Ernie Levey.

The Last of the Just

Adrian Tinniswood

2 SEPTEMBER 1666: 350 YEARS SINCE THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON 
 
In the early hours of 2 September 1666 a small fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane. In the five days that followed it grew into a conflagration that would devastate the third largest city in the Western world. 
 
This short edition is the essential guide to the Great Fire of London and includes first-hand descriptions from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, as well as a gripping account from renowned historian Adrian Tinniswood.

The Great Fire of London

The Essential Guide

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

'A compelling novel about the tragedy of corrupting power, set in post-independence Kenya... Ngugi writes with passion about every form, shape and colour which power can take' Sunday Times 
 
 After decades of British rule Kenya has declared its independence, but drought and poor harvests still govern the village of Ilmorog. Undeterred, Munira, Karega, Wanja and Abdulla each move to Ilmorog in search of a more provincial life, only to find themselves suspects in a crime that signals a dark turning of the times. 
 
A classic of modern African literature, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's damning satire of politics and corruption in Kenya would prove the catalyst for his imprisonment by the Kenyan government.

Petals of Blood

Josephine Baker

This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words. 
 
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. 
 
Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance and was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the war she became a civil rights activist, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl of mixed heritage, born in Missouri to a poor mother and a father she did not know. 
 
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century. 
 
‘Translated gorgeously into English… A delightful, nourishing read’ Guardian 
 
‘She was a beacon of joy and fellowship and her smile…reaches out to us across the years’ Financial Times 
 
‘Josephine Baker certainly shook things up. This memoir demonstrates - vividly - the pleasure she took in doing it’ Washington Post 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IJEOMA OLUO 
 
TRANSLATED BY ANAM ZAFAR AND SOPHIE LEWIS

Fearless and Free

A Memoir

Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen's Court describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when Elizabeth Bowen was forced to sell the family house she loved. Bowen reviews ten generations of her family, representatives of the Protestant Irish gentry whose lives were dominated by property, lawsuits, formidable matriarchs, violent conflicts, hunting, drinking, and self-destructive fantasies. 
 
Seven Winters recalls with endearing candour Bowen's family and her Dublin childhood as seen through the eyes of a child who could not read till she was seven and who fed her imagination only on sights and sounds.

Bowen's Court & Seven Winters

Diana Cooper

This last volume of Lady Diana Cooper's memoirs covers the years of the Second World War and its aftermath, when her husband Duff Cooper served as Minister of Information and then in various diplomat posts around the world. We accompany the Coopers on their travels from the Dorchester Hotel during the breathless days of the Blitz, to a happy sojourn farming in Sussex, to Singapore and Algiers and eventual retirement to France, all told with Diana's unique perspective and enchanting style.

Trumpets from the Steep

Christopher Isherwood

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Kathleen and Frank

Anthony Burgess

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.

Little Wilson and Big God

Bruce Chatwin

In 1812, Francisco Manoel da Silva, escaping a life of poverty in Brazil, sailed to the African kingdom of Dahomey, determined to make his fortune in the slave trade. Armed with nothing but an iron will, he became a man of substance in Ouidah and the founder of a remarkable dynasty. His one remaining ambition is to return to Brazil in triumph, but his friendship with the mad, mercurial king of Dahomey is fraught with danger and threatens his dream.

The Viceroy of Ouidah

Michael Ondaatje

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.' 
 
Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society. 
 
In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Running in the Family

Patrick Modiano

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15. 
 
One winter night in 1941, a Jewish girl runs away from her Paris boarding school. Stumbling across her disappearance listed in an old newspaper, Patrick Modiano finds himself propelled on a quest to exhume her fate. 
 
His search will go on to last a decade. Little more will be found, just fragments of a lost family history, a sense of the dark streets of occupied Paris, Dora’s name on a list of those sent to Auschwitz. And the spectre of Modiano’s own troubled past, from which he can no longer look away. 
 
‘One of France’s most important novelists’ The New York Times 
 
'[A] spokesman for the disappeared’ Guardian

The Search Warrant

Dora Bruder

Isaac Bashevis Singer

In this autobiographical work, specifically mentioned in Issac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize citation, Singer remembers his childhood in Warsaw, and especially the bet din, or Jewish Court, in his father's home on working-class Krochmalna Street. Advice seekers and petitioners making wills or seeking marriage settlements daily visit the rabbi in his study. In a world on the brink of modernity, Singer's gentle, learned father and his mother, equally pious but eminently practical, maintain a stubbornly traditional existence. In My Father's Court is a tribute to their efforts, and a fine evocation of life in early-twentieth century Warsaw.

In My Father's Court

Laurie Lee

Andalusia is a passion - and fifteen years after his last visit Laurie Lee returned. He found a country broken by the Civil War, but the totems of indestructible Spain survive: the Christ in agony, the thrilling flamenco cry-the pride in poverty, the gypsy intensity in vivid whitewashed slums, the cult of the bullfight, the exultation in death, the humour of hopelessness-the paradoxes deep in the fiery bones of Spain. Rich with kaleidoscopic images, A Rose for Winter is as sensual and evocative as the sun-scorched landscape of Andalusia itself.

A Rose For Winter

Emmeline Pankhurst

The great leader of the women’s suffrage movement tells the story of her struggles in her own words. 
 
Emmeline Pankhurst grew up all too aware of the prevailing attitude of her day: that men were considered superior to women. When she was just fourteen she attended her first suffrage meeting, and returned home a confirmed suffragist. Throughout the course of her career she endured humiliation, prison, hunger strikes and the repeated frustration of her aims by men in power, but she rose to become a guiding light of the Suffragette movement. This is the story, in Pankhurst’s own words, of her struggle for equality.

My Own Story

Inspiration for the major motion picture Suffragette

Toni Morrison

Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home, the farm where she was kept as a slave. 
 
Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, &lsquo;Beloved&rsquo;. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison&rsquo;s enduring masterpiece and best-known work. 
 
&lsquo;Dazzling. . . Magical. . . An extraordinary work&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours&hellip; Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all&rsquo; Margaret Atwood 
 
&lsquo;An American masterpiece&rsquo; A. S. Byatt 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 
 
**One of the BBC&rsquo;s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Beloved

A special edition of the award-winning classic

THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL

Richard Wright

Richard Wright's memoir of his childhood as a young black boy in the American south of the 1920s and 30s is a stark depiction of African-American life and a powerful exploration of racial tension. 
 
‘A compelling indictment of life in the Deep South between the wars’ Daily Telegraph 
 
 At four years old, Richard Wright set fire to his home in a moment of boredom; at five his father deserted the family; by six Richard was - temporarily - an alcoholic. It was in saloons, railroad yards and streets that he learned the facts about life, about fear, hunger and hatred, while his mother's long illness taught him about suffering. In a world of white hostility and subjugation it would be his love of books and pursuit of knowledge that would propel him to follow his dream of justice and opportunity in the north. 
 
A chronicle of coming of age under the racial prejudices of the American south, as much the story of a writer finding his voice, Black Boy remains one of the great, impassioned memoirs of the twentieth century.

Black Boy

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

One of the world's greatest works of travel and adventure writing, reissued on its 100th birthday. 
 
This is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Scott's team, recorded the experience of his adventure and in doing so created a masterpiece of travel writing. Despite the horrors that Scott and his men faced, Cherry's account is filled with details of scientific discovery, unforgettable descriptions of landscape and a belief in the spirit of human beings. A celebrated and compelling book on Antarctic exploration. 
 
INTRODUCED BY SARA WHEELER 
 
'The Worst Journey in the World is to travel what War and Peace is to the novel... a masterpiece' New York Review of Books 
 
* Voted Number 1 in National Geographic's 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time *

The Worst Journey in the World

Ranked number 1 in National Geographic’s 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

Lost Years

A Memoir 1945 - 1951

A. Anatoli

This gripping story of Kyiv during the Second World War told by a young boy who saw it all. 
 
'Rightly hailed a masterpiece' Daily Mail 
 
'So here is my invitation: enter into my fate, imagine that you are twelve, that the world is at war and that nobody knows what is going to happen next...' 
 
When the German army rolled into Kyiv in 1941 the young Anatoli was just twelve years old. He began writing down what he saw in his journals. 
 
Within ten days of the invasion, the Nazis had begun their campaign of fear and murder in Ukraine. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) was the place where the executions of Jews and many others took place. It was one of the largest massacres in the history of the Holocaust. Anatoli could hear the machine guns from his house. 
 
Anatoli’s clear, compelling voice, honesty and determination guide us through the horrors of that time. Babi Yar has the compulsion and narration of fiction but everything recounted here is true. 
 
'Extraordinary' Orlando Figes, Guardian 
 
'A vivid first-hand account of life under one of the most savage of occupation regimes... A book which must be read and never forgotten' The Times 
 
This is the complete, uncensored version of Babi Yar - its history written into the text. Parts shown in bold are those cut by the Russian censors, parts in brackets show later additions.

Babi Yar

The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers 
 
This is Chatwin's unforgettable novel of a man in war-torn Communist Prague, driven to protect his collection of porcelain figurines at any cost. 
 
Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection. 
 
'Chatwin at his most erudite and evocative' New York Times 
 
'His final tour de force... a pristine miniature' Independent 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers

Jack Hilton

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell 
'Magnificent' W H Auden 
 
A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature. 
 
Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years. 
 
A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Caliban Shrieks

Simone de Beauvoir

In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir took a road trip across America. 
 
She travelled from coast to coast, from New York to Hollywood, taking in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Washington DC. She rode a pony through the Grand Canyon, listened to jazz in New Orleans and visited the nightclubs of Chicago. And she captured the entire experience in her journal. 
 
This captivating book is that journal and an immersive portrait of postwar America. Beauvoir was disturbed by the poverty and segregation she encountered and at the same time delighted by American energy and friendliness. 
 
Intimate, warm, and compulsively readable, this is travel writing from the iconic feminist and thinker, Simone de Beauvoir. 
 
On New York: 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome.' 
 
On Los Angeles: 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chilli con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure.'

America Day by Day

In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation.  As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood describes his dramatic struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution.

Christopher and His Kind

Laurens Van Der Post

Summoned to Whitehall in 1949, Laurens van der Post was told that in old British Central Africa there were two large tracts of country that London didn't really know anything about, and could he go in there on foot and take a look, please? Venture to the Interior is the account of that journey, a journey filled with adventure and discovery, flying from London across Europe and Africa, and after days in small aircraft, on foot across the mountains to the two lost worlds of central Africa.

Venture To The Interior

George Orwell

'You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business' 
 
As a struggling writer in his twenties, Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this, his early memoir, Orwell recalls with vivid clarity his time working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day's worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London's workhouse spikes for a few hours' sleep and tea. With all of the sensitivity and compassion that Orwell is known and loved for, he exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society. 
 
This vivid account is an enduring call to support the world's most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that 'The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.' 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KERRY HUDSON

Down and Out in Paris and London

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