About Gabriel García Márquez: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a short-story writer, novelist, journalist and a screenwriter from Colombia. He was a reporter for a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, and also a foreign correspondent stationed in New York, Rome, Paris and Barcelona. Marquez is the author of numerous popular novels and short stories. He is well known for his unique literary style known as magical realism, in which he describes reality through magical events and elements. His most popular novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Gabriel García Márquez

Kami Garcia

Eric Garcia

Helena Garcia

About Justin Garcia: Dr. Justin R. Garcia is an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher. He is Executive Director &amp; Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute. He is also the Scientific Advisor to Match Group and Match.com, where he provides expertise to the company’s annual Singles in America study. His research has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TIME, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair.

Justin Garcia

About Héctor García / Hector García: Héctor García is a citizen of Japan, where he has lived for over a decade, and of Spain, where he was born. He is the author of several books about Japanese culture, including two worldwide bestsellers, A Geek in Japan and Ikigai. A former software engineer, he worked at CERN in Switzerland before moving to Japan.

Héctor García

About Eduardo Garcia: Eduardo Garcia has written dozens of stories for the New York Times on how people can reduce their carbon footprint. He has written news stories and features from more than a dozen countries in his more than fifteen years as a journalist. A native of Spain, Eduardo cut his teeth working as a Reuters correspondent in Guatemala, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador. Eduardo strives to lead a sustainable lifestyle and believes in using words to empower people.

Eduardo Garcia

Roberto Garcia

Lisa Gabriele

Sarah Gabriel

About Gabriel Weston: Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She studied English at Edinburgh University before attending medical school in London and becoming a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. Her Sunday Times bestselling debut, Direct Red, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the PEN-Ackerley Award for Autobiography, while her novel Dirty Work won the McKitterick Prize. The presenter of several BBC TV series, including Trust Me I’m a Doctor and Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook, she currently works as a part-time surgeon and lives in London with her husband and children.

Gabriel Weston

About Gabrielle Kent: Gabrielle Kent worked as a graphic artist on video games before becoming a senior lecturer in games development. Now a full-time author, her work includes Alfie Bloom - a series about a boy who inherits a castle and a whole load of magical problems, Knights and Bikes - a series based on the video game of the same name, and Rani Reports, featuring a girl who wants to be an investigative journalist and her adventures with her rambunctious Mauritian nani. Gabrielle lives in the North East of England with her husband, daughter and agoraphobic cat.

Gabrielle Kent

About Philip Gabriel: Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

Philip Gabriel

About Gabriel Tallent: Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast. His first novel, My Absolute Darling was a Sunday Times bestseller, a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Tallent lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and children.

Gabriel Tallent

About Gabriel Pogrund: Gabriel Pogrund is Whitehall Editor at the Sunday Times. He was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards (2023). He won Scoop of the Year at the London Press Club Awards (2022) and was the Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post in 2018.

Gabriel Pogrund

Gabrielle Pinto

About Gabrielle Grillo: Gabrielle Grillo lives in Bordeaux, France and she likes to knit conventional stuff like scarves and cardigans. She discovered the world of strange knits in 2010 and chose to start a Tumblr about it.

Gabrielle Grillo

About Gabriel Weinberg: Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of the multi-billion dollar internet privacy company, DuckDuckGo. He contributes to a number of publications including Medium and is the co-author of Traction.

Gabriel Weinberg

Gabrielle Mander

Ester García-Cortés / Ester García-Cortes.

Ester García-Cortés

Elizabeth Gabriel

Gabrielle Rifkind

About Gabriel Gatehouse: GABRIEL GATEHOUSE is a journalist and broadcaster. The former International Editor of Newsnight and co-host of Ukrainecast on BBC Sounds, he has reported from almost every recent conflict around the world, from Ukraine to Syria, Libya to Iraq. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, most recently the 2023 Broadcasting Press Guild (for The Coming Storm podcast) and the 2020 Foreign Press Association award for his coverage of the Hong Kong protests. He has reported extensively from the United States on the rise and fall of Donald Trump. His podcast, The Coming Storm, which launched in January 2022 to critical acclaim, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Gabriel Gatehouse

Gabrielle Marcola

About Gabriele Marcotti: Born in Italy and now living in London, Gabriele Marcotti is a senior writer and analyst for ESPN, World Football Correspondent for The Times and UK correspondent for Corriere dello Sport. His previous books include The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures, shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and Capello: Portrait of a Winner.

Gabriele Marcotti

Adolfo García Ortega

Gabrielle Hatfield

Gabriel Chevallier

Gabrielle Hamilton

About Gabrielle Griffiths: Gabrielle Griffiths grew up in Aberdeenshire and now lives in Brighton. She was a Madeleine Milburn Agency mentee in 2021 and is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

Gabrielle Griffiths

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John Batchelor

An entertaining account of an extraordinary cultural and historical event: - the establishment by one highly intelligent woman of a salon of the arts in a beautiful country house in Northumberland. Wallington Hall was remote from the major centres of artistic activity, such as London and Edinburgh. Yet Pauline Trevelyan single handedly made it the focus of High Victorian cultural life. Among those she attracted into her orbit were Ruskin, Swinburne, the Brownings, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Michael), Carlyle, and Millais and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
The penniless but clever daughter of a clergyman, Pauline Jermyn married an older man whom she met through a shared passion for geology. Sir Walter Trevelyan was a philanthropist, teetotal, vegetarian, pacificist ... and very rich. With his encouragement, she collected works of art and decorated Wallington Hall with a cycle of vast paintings on the history of Northumberland. She was a patron of the arts who provided a fostering environment for many of the geniuses of her day. After her death, Swinburne wept every time her name was mentioned.

Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Roberto Bolaño

'Between Parentheses is a treasure chest' - The Nation 
 
Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. "Taken together," as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide "a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented 'autobiography.'" 
 
Bolano's career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his "ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior" he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: "I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels."

Between Parentheses

Norman Sherry

The much-anticipated third and final volume of Norman Sherry's biography follows the tireless wanderings of Graham Greene, the writer's final forays into the fulminating trouble spots of the world which beckoned as sirens all his days. From the perils of Batista's Cuba, the privations of the Belgian Congo and the tumult of Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama, to his confrontation with the French mafia, his travels in Spain and, finally, his quiet death in Switzerland at the age of eighty-six. The rigour and attention to detail that gained praise for the first two volumes remains undiminished as Sherry retraces Greene's footsteps, criss-crossing the globe to visit the places that inspired Greene's novels and meeting the people who provided the models for some of literature's most memorable characters: the whiskey priest; the honorary consul; the zany aunt. Never losing sight of the very real religious, emotional and political struggles that made up Greene's complicated personality - his constantly questioned but never abandoned Catholicism, his two long-term affairs with married women, his determination to stand up for the victims of injustice - Sherry illuminates Greene's mind, methods and motivation with an unswervingly critical, yet always compassionate eye. With exclusive access to Greene's letters, journals and dream-diaries, Norman Sherry has written a monumental tribute to one of the greatest of English writers. The three volumes of The Life of Graham Greene will remain the standard work on Greene for decades to come.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume Three

1955 - 1991

Margaret Reynolds

Jonathan Noakes

In Vintage Living Texts teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Sebastian Faulks. This guide will deal with his themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will be accompanied with likely exam questions, and contexts and comparisons - as well as providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.

Sebastian Faulks

The Essential Guide

S Warner

Very early in her career Sylvia Townsend Warner won recognition of a discerning group of writers and readers on both sides of rare imagination and originality increased with each new publication. In addition to publishing some twenty books she wrote thousands of letters, mainly to close friends and acquaintances, and these quite naturally provide a record of almost fifty years of the writer’s life. 
 
As the editor of the selection says, she had a connoisseur’s eye for the bogus and a hatred for assumptions of privilege – her heart was with the hunted, always, and her deep understanding of human behaviour makes the whole a remarkably compassionate volume. Her interests are wide-ranging, and we read of the pleasures of travel, Proust’s shortcomings as a literary critic, current politics, Rupert Brooke at the Café Royal, an eccentric moorhen, the Spanish Civil War. 
 
Above all, apart from their intrinsic interest and literary quality, Miss Warner’s letters reveal the special brand of wit and humour that pervades every word she writes.

Letters Of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Roger Osborne

Spell-binding, horrific, poetic, apocalyptic, heart-rending, disturbing, prophetic, seditious, compelling and utterly fascinating - the dreams of Lucrecia de Leon have lain virtually undisturbed in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition for more than four hundred years. Lucrecia was a nineteen-year-old Madrilena when, in 1587, her dreams began to be recorded and published by a disaffected group of clerics. Over the next three years they transcribed four hundred of Lucrecia's dreams which they considered to be messages from God. The dreams warned of the defeat of the Armada, of the death of King Philip II, of the fall of Spain and of a new beginning under a new king - all told in bold and highly original visions. As some of her prophecies came true and as the Spanish court grew more discontented, she fell foul of the authorities and was arrested by the Holy Order. The Dreamer of the Calle de San Salvador produces thirty-five of Lucrecia's most captivating dreams. The imagery and inventiveness of her visions are astonishing, while the stories that they tell are compelling and of immense historical significance. Roger Osborne weaves a commentary around each dream, which allows us to see the world through the eyes of Lucrecia and helps us to understand the nature of her visions and the time and place she inhabited. This pioneering work shows us what history is like seen from the inside out.

The Dreamer Of Calle San Salvador

Adam Thirlwell

The secret history of novelists is often a history of exile and tourism - a history of language learning. Like the story of Gustave Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, it is a history of loss and mistakes. As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. 
 
Miss Herbert provides a map to the imaginary country shared between writers and readers. For translation, and emigration, is the way into a new history of the novel. We assume that we can read novels in translation. We also assume that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. Miss Herbert explores the solutions to this conundrum. 
 
This book demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams. And it includes a slim appendix: 'Mademoiselle O', a story by Vladimir Nabokov, which he worked on in three languages, over thirty years, and whose original French version is now translated into English by Adam Thirlwell. 
 
 Adam Thirlwell was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013.

Miss Herbert

Jane Dunn

Antonia White is best known for her masterpiece Frost in May, for having come back from Bedlam and madness, and for the public feud between her daughters over the editing of her diaries. This is the first biography to tell the complete story of a life courageously lived against most difficult odds: 'Oh I DID want to be happy as a woman...But I'm a monster and must accept being one. Not all writers are monsters. But my kind is.' 
 
With full access to White's unexpurgated diaries, the analysis journals, the asylum records and her voluminous correspondence, Jane Dunn has explored the woman and the writer, the persecutor and the victim. This biography charts Antonia White's ambivalence about her parents; her three marriages, two of them unconsummated; her lovers; her friendships with poets and writers like Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas and Bertrand Russell; her secret war work; her bizarre thraldom to 'dominating women'; her harrowing relationship with her two daughters; and her endurance of the ravages of manic depression, experienced without the benefits of modern day therapy. 
 
This is the story of a woman who - two generations too soon - attempted to live the modern female life of single parent and working mother, but longed for the artistic and intellectual stage. Antonia White wrestled throughout with the large questions of faith, the attractions and repulsions of Catholicism, the problems of being a woman and an artist. And over it all lowered the threat of madness. This book reveals her as a woman unafraid of extreme experience and honest enough to accept the consequences: self-obsessed, funny, fascinating and tragic - and ultimately heroic.

Antonia White

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Martin Amis. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with Martin Amis, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Amis's themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.

Martin Amis

Ruth Padel

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 
 
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. 
 
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Poems from The Mara Crossing

David Bellos

Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more. He wrote more than two dozen books and a score of short stories under several different names in two languages, English and French, neither of which was his mother tongue. Gary had a gift for narrative that endeared him to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics far more intellectual than he could ever be. His varied and entertaining writing career tells a different story about the making of modern literary culture from the one we are accustomed to hearing. 
 
Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (now Lithuania) in 1914 and raised by only his mother after his father left them, Gary rose to become French Consul General in Los Angeles and the only man ever to win the Goncourt Prize twice. 
 
This biography follows the many threads that lead from Gary's wartime adventures and early literary career to his years in Hollywood and his marriage to the actress Jean Seberg. It illuminates his works in all their incarnations, and culminates in the tale of his most brilliant deception: the fabrication of a complex identity for his most successful nom de plume, Émile Ajar. 
 
In his new portrait of Gary, David Bellos brings biographical research together with literary and cultural analysis to make sense of the many lives of Romain Gary - a hero fit for our times, as well as his own.

Romain Gary

A Tall Story

Simon Inglis

Simon Inglis is a fan with a mission. Fed up with being labelled an anorak, yet repeatedly led astray by the glimpse of a grandstand accross a crowded city, he searches the world for a deeper meaning behind his fascination with stadiums. 
 
What is it, he asks en route from ancient Olympia to Sydney 2000, about men and neatly-edged turf? Why are there more football grounds in Buenos Aires than public libraries? Why do Auckland residents resent their local stadium while those in Chicago celebrate theirs? And what can we learn from the Indians, the Irish and a huckster from Huston? 
 
The perfect companion volume to his bestselling books on football grounds, Sightlines is full of insight, wit, anecdotes and characters from a world beyond that every sports fan will recognise. It is proof that he is not alone.

Sightlines

A Stadium Odyssey

Rich Cohen

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. 
 
A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. 
 
Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

The Fish that Ate the Whale

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

Valerie Lester

'Phiz' - Hablot Knight Browne - was the great illustrator of Dickens' fiction. For over twenty-three years they worked together, and Phiz's drawings brought to life a galaxy of much-loved characters, from Mr Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby and Mr Micawber, to Little Nell and David Copperfield. But, from the mystery of his birth onwards, Phiz himself led a life as rich as any novel. 
 
In this vivid, lively memoir - the first full biography, long-awaited by Victorian scholars - his great-great-granddaughter Valerie Browne Lester tracks the struggles of the abandoned Browne family and follows Phiz's path to marriage and fame, his travels around England and Ireland and work with Dickens, Lever, Trollope and others, and his colourful private life. 
 
Based on a mass of unpublished material, this enchanting book, packed with surprising and delicious illustrations, is a perfect present for all who love Dickens and enjoy the hidden byways of Victorian life.

Phiz

The Man Who Drew Dickens

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams begins his brilliantly perceptive study of the English novel in the 1840s, a period of rapid social change brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democratic reform, and the growth of cities and towns. Unsettling, indeed critical, for individuals and communities alike, this process of change prompted the novelists of the time to explore new forms of writing. The genius of Dickens, the powerful originality of the Bront? sisters, the passionate vision of George Eliot – all gave new force and humanity to the English novel, whose roots in the evolving community Raymond Williams proceeds to trace through the work of Hardy, Gissing and Wells, and on to D.H. Lawrence.

The English Novel From Dickens To Lawrence

Zachary Leader

In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist. 
 
Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on hundreds of previously unpublished letters, Leader's biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis's childhood, school days, life as a teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. 
 
He explores Amis's fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis's work. As the editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, hailed in The Sunday Telegraph as 'one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art', Leader is more than qualified to be his authorised biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.

The Life of Kingsley Amis

Helen Carr

The Verse Revolutionaries tells the story of the Imagists, a turbulent and colourful group of poets, who came together in London in the years before the First World War. As T. S. Eliot was to say, appropriately re-invoking the Imagist habit of turning anything they admired into French, the imagist movement was modern poetry's point de repère, the landmark venture that inaugurated Anglo-American literary modernism. A disparate, stormy group, who had dispersed before the twenties began, these 'verse revolutionaries' received both abuse and acclaim, but their poetry, fragmented, pared-down, elliptical yet direct, exerted a powerful influence on modernist writers, and contributed vitally to the transformation of American and British cultural life in those crucial years. 
 
Among those involved were the Americans Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, and the British T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence. On the edges of the story are figures such as W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. They came from very different class backgrounds, a heterogeneous mélange then only possible in a great metropolis like London. 
 
The Verse Revolutionaries traces the passionate interactions, love affairs and bitter quarrels of these aspiring poets from 1905 to 1917. Helen Carr unpicks the story of how they came together, what they gained from each other in the heady excitement of those early days, and what were the fissures that eventually broke up the movement and their friendships in the dark days of the Great War. Her compelling account challenges the conventional view of Imagism, and offers an acute analysis of the poetry, of the psychology of the individuals involved, and of the evolution and emergence of a transformative cultural movement.

The Verse Revolutionaries

Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists

Frederick Brown

Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary outraged France's right-thinking bourgeoisie when it was first published in 1857, is brought to life in Frederick Brown's new biography in all his singularity and brilliance. Frederick Brown's portrayal is of an artist fraught with contradictions - his wit and bravado coexisting with great vulnerability. 
 
A sedentary man by nature, Flaubert undertook epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East. He could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to a beautifully cadenced prose. While energized by his camaraderie with male friends, such as Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Zola and Maupassant, he depended for emotional nurturing upon maternal women, most notably George Sand. 
 
Nineteenth-century France literally put Flaubert on trial for portraying 'lewd behaviour' in Madame Bovary. But it also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin, probably hastening his sudden death at the age of fifty-nine. Although writing was something like torture for him, it preoccupied his mind and dominated his life. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he achieved with Madame Bovary, but adamantly refused to sacrifice to it his ideal of artistic integrity. 
 
Of Flaubert's life, his inner world, his times and his legacy, Frederick Brown's magisterial biography is a revelation. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize for biography and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Flaubert

A Life

Evan S Connell

Evan S. Connell explores the quixotic obsession with the new, the hidden, the unattainable that burns in an individual's soul. 
 
Each essay is an extraordinary account of passionate pursuit by legendary explorers, visionaries, and seekers compelled by a singular desire. Here we find Marco Polo, El Dorado, Paracelsus, Columbus, the thousands of children in the Innocents' Crusade, Magellan, Mary Kingsley (a Victorian naturalist, ethnologist, sailor, scholar, and guest of cannibals, and Ibn Batuta (an indefatigable explorer of the fourteenth century whose travels in the Arab world and beyond made 'the journey of Marco Polo look like a stroll around the block'). 
 
'There's no end to the list, of course,' Connell adds, 'because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard.'

El Dorado And Other Pursuits

James Lasdun

James Lasdun's third book of poems explores the themes and tensions of his last two with a new boldness and exuberance, in a series of poems about life in the Catskill mountains outside Woodstock, where the author moved with his family some years ago. 
 
Questions of exile and belonging, cutting ties and forming new bonds, figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world of the mountain wilderness - at once a stunning companion and a ferocious competitor. Out of this - 'the need to carve out a niche for ourselves;/our singular relation to what we love' - rises the book's central image: the chainsaw. Very much a real machine (given to the alarmed poet by his wife), it also comes to form a complex symbol in which all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical, brilliance. 
 
A brilliantly assured, deftly lyrical sequence, Landscape with Chainsaw melds passion with wit, the classical with the quotidian, in a thrilling meditation on history, love, cultural identity and the anxiety of displacement. As an examination of the complexities of deracination and domesticity, it marks the matured genius of one of England's most important poets.

Landscape With Chainsaw

Raghu Karnad

Raghu Karnad’s “Everybody’s Friend” is a poignant pilgrimage to the military grave of a great-uncle, fallen defending the obsolescent Raj against the oncoming army of imperial Japan. The most brutal fighting unfolded on the unforgiving northeast Indian border with Burma, and Karnad takes himself and the reader deep into Nagaland to find the war graves of Imphal. There he broods without heavy reproach but with stoical sorrow on the marginalisation of memory offered to Indian troops who, in the authorised epic of Indian independence, fought on the “wrong” side for their imperial masters while the much thinner ranks of the Indian National Army, Subhash Chandra Bose’s fighters, have been accorded the rites and respects of freedom fighters

Everybody’s Friend

Leslie Garis

Leslie Garis's grandparents, Howard and Lillian Garis, were, from the turn of the century to the 1950s, phenomenally productive (and incredibly popular) authors of books for children. Every American child grew up reading the Uncle Wiggily stories, The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift. House of Happy Endings tells how in a large romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, her parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created. But inside the Dell all was not right. 
 
Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist and magazine writer led him to believe that he was a failure as father, husband and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterised by raging mood swings, drug abuse and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. House of Happy Endings is Leslie Garis's mesmerising, tender and harrowing account of growing up in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

The House of Happy Endings

Emma Gerstein

In the early 1960s Anna Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein to record her own memories of the renowned Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam.  But Gerstein's vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what she had expected. When first published in Moscow in 1998 Gerstein's memoirs provoked responses from condemnation to rapturous praise amongst Russian readers. A shrewd observer, a close member of the Mandelstam and Akhmatova family circles, and a serious literary specialist in her own right, Gerstein is uniquely qualified to remove both poets from their pedestals without diminishing them, or their work, and to bring back to life the Soviet 1930s. Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of Russia's two greatest 20th century poets, providing memorable glimpses of numerous other figures from that partly forgotten and misunderstood world, and offers several unforgettable vignettes of Boris Pasternak.  Gerstein's integrity and perceptive comment make her account compulsively readable and enables us to re-examine that extraordinary epoch.

Moscow Memoirs

Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.

A Local Habitation

Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40

Piers Brendon

This illuminating biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-75) unravels fully the famous Cornish parson-poet's rich personality. Drawing on a mass of unpublished material, Piers Brendon re-creates one of the most bizarre of Victorian lives, revealing the mixture of truth, over-simplification and falsehood in the legend which has built up around him. 
 
The popular account depicts Hawker as a youth of wild high spirits who delighted in hoaxes and practical jokes. As an Oxford undergraduate he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and married his rich 41-year-old godmother. In 1834 he became vicar of Morwenstow and spent the rest of his life in his desolate country parish on the storm-swept coast of north Cornwall. He was a charitable, hard-working Anglo-Catholic but, owing to the remoteness of his position and lack of sympathy from his parishioners, his true genius became warped and he succumbed to wayward eccentricity. 
 
His dress was, to say the least, unorthodox, and he became obsessed with antiquarian lore, lending a haunting reality to the arcane superstitions which he cultivated. He entertained no doubt whatever about the active agency of demons and angels, ghosts and brownies. He talked to birds, invited his nine cats into church and excommunicated one of them when it caught a mouse on Sunday. Out of the timbers of wrecked ships he built a hut, a forbidding sanctuary perched on the high cliff-edge, where he invoked mystic visions and composed romantic poetry. 
 
Piers Brendon here rescues Hawker from legend, and his fascinating book substitutes character for caricature. An even more interesting and idiosyncratic Hawker emerges, scarred and moulded by the stark isolation of his hostile seaboard benefice, a man of remarkable insight and compassion, who submitted in strange ways to his calling, and who, it turns out, proves to have been a true prophet in his yearning exclamation: 'what a life mine would be if it were all written and published in a book.'

Hawker Of Morwenstow

Portrait of an Eccentric Victorian

Andrew Baker

To the armchair fan, the life of the sports writer is one of unalloyed joy: all-expenses-paid trips to the most exciting events in the world, the best seats in the house, and one-on-one interviews with Anna Kournikova... Well, up to a point. 
 
Where Am I And Who's Winning? describes what it's really like to make your way through the world of sport, always on deadline, always between time zones, on a frantic, chaotic and hilarious tour of the planet's most famous and most bizarre sporting venues. There's football to be watched. And Formula One. And tennis. And two Olympics, two Commonwealth Games, ocean racing, curling, and of course the queen of sports - synchronised swimming. 
 
Permanently handicapped by jet-lag and ignorance, Andrew Baker travels by bullet train, bobsled, go-kart, and (most dangerous of all) bus in his constant quest to arrive at the match/race-meeting/mountain-top on time. Between soul-enhancing visits to the Dead Goat Saloon and the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum, he breakfasts with Steve Redgrave, dines with Sebastian Coe and even takes in a game or two. 
 
Because nothing - not Brazilian muggers, nor Chinese security services - shall stand between him and his noble calling: to bring the great British public its daily sporting fix. 
 
Andrew Baker's brilliant comic debut will appeal to the armchair traveller and the armchair sports fan alike. But most of all to anyone who enjoys the misfortunes of others...

Where Am I And Who's Winning?

James Wood

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives, and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works – among others, Chekhov’s story ‘The Kiss’, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, and Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. 
 
Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to Life is not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic – it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to re-consider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

The Nearest Thing To Life

Harry Ricketts

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas's widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began. 
 
Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

Strange Meetings

The Poets of the Great War

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 
 
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. 
 
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

The Mara Crossing

Alan Jenkins

ALAN JENKINS - POERTY IS EXHILARATING. . . . . IT IS CHARGED WITH EROTIC ENERGY, RAGE, SORROW AND CONFUSION. - DAVID LEHMAN The poeoms in Alan Jenkin's magnificent new collection are closely linked, forming a movingly autobiographical book which deals with the disjunction between the aspirations of youth and the realities of middle-age. The narrator looks back on his twenties, full of the grand ambition to be the next Rimbaud, and wryly contrasts it with his current situation: friends dead, women lost, opportunities missed. Images of drifting, of the random patterns that fate imposes on existence, weave their way through poems full of sea-scapes and sailing boats. Ghosts loom through the mist; objects imbued with memory accumulate like driftwood. But although Alan Jenkins writes about a sense of loss and failure -his rich poetry formally dextrous and inventive, witty and subtle in its allusions - acts as a counterbalance, showing how the twisting of an emotion into shape can salvage feelings of pointlessness. Through his personal experience, he explores themes that will resonate with a broad audience: the difference between men and women.

The Drift

Gabriel's Inferno

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