Meik Wiking founded the world's first Happiness Research Institute in 2013, in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a New York Times and Sunday Times Bestselling author. Meik has been called The Indiana Jones of Smiles and probably the World's Happiest Man by The Times. He is the author of four globally bestselling books which have sold over 2 million copies worldwide: The Little Book of Hygge, The Little Book of Lykke, The Art of Making Memories and My Hygge Home.

Meik Wiking

Sue Meikle has always been obsessed with picture books, and after working as an Early Years Specialist for over 25 years, she has read stories to children from Stockport to South Africa. In schools, in early years centres, while on forest school adventures... Sue has even read stories on a travelling play bus! So, perhaps it was always in the stars for Sue to not just read books, but write them, too! When she's not reading or writing stories, Sue can be found walking her dog or chauffeuring her teenagers around the Greater Manchester area (because that’s where they live… in a home that they made from a derelict barn!)

Sue Meikle

David Meikle is a TV scriptwriter and Sunday Times bestselling author. He has written and co-written seven books, including the autobiographies of Charlie Richardson and Bobby Cummines.

David Meikle

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

An Yu

In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps an apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends her family’s pharmacy of traditional medicine. She has few customers, and even fewer visitors. Her father was found dead by the lake twelve years ago, in unexplained circumstances. Her elder sister, Dong Ji, works at a wellness parlour across town for those who can afford it – which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many. 
 
The town fell on hard times long before the sun began to shrink, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the inhabitants of the town realise that there is no way they can survive. But when the Beacons appear – ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns – the residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, Dong Ji and her sister will uncover a photograph which may offer a clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and finally help them learn what happened to their father. 
 
Sunbirth honours the unique relationship between sisters, their love for each other and their desire to be free. Richly surreal and anchored by searching curiosity and wisdom, it asks how much we can ever know about the deepest mysteries of the world.

Sunbirth

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. 
 
Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a ficitonal journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the Chinese villages her father and mother left in order to come to America.

I Love a Broad Margin To My Life

Kotaro Isaka

'Fascinating and thought provoking with some genuine surprises and incredibly clever ideas that kept me thinking about it long after I finished it… a Japanese Black Mirror!' Ajay Chowdhury, author of The Waiter 
 
Some mother-in-laws are hard. This one might be murder. 
 
Miyako suspects her mother-in-law is a murderer. It’s not just a case of them rubbing each other up the wrong way – there is definitely something suspicious going on. But Miyako isn’t exactly what she seems either. Her husband has no idea about her past life as a secret agent. When she decides to use her professional skills to investigate her mother-in-law, the delicate equilibrium of their lives is thrown wildly out of balance. 
 
Many decades later, in a future world where electronic communication has been irrevocably compromised, confidential messages must be delivered by trusted couriers like Mito. But one delivery pulls Mito into a conspiracy beyond his wildest imaginings, and forces him into a race against time to defeat a world-changing technological threat. 
 
Seesaw Monster contains two sharp, thrilling linked novellas - SEESAW MONSTER and SPIN MONSTER - from the bestselling and multi-award-winning writer Kotaro Isaka, internationally celebrated for his offbeat humour and inventive talent for twists. 
 
PRAISE FOR KOTARO ISAKA: 
 
‘Unlike anything you're likely to have read before . . . white-hot with double-crosses’ Financial Times 
 
‘Entertaining . . . high-speed . . . with lots of twists and turns’ The Times 
 
‘Thoroughly enjoyable’ Guardian

Seesaw Monster

Amil

We had always been rare and mysterious creatures. We’d been taught this ever since we were children. 
 
With strong roots in feminist science fiction and fantasy, Roadkill’s exhilarating stories transport us to strange new worlds. 
 
In a near future where women are an endangered minority, two young friends try to break free from a facility designed for those few who can still give birth. Every year in a secluded seaside village, a maiden is sacrificed to a divine sea serpent. Elsewhere, the last female shaman of an indigenous tribe tells her stories to a visiting research team. And in South Korea’s Alps Grand Park, the residents exist in an exclusive world dominated by giant air purifier towers as others are left to live in the shade. 
 
The women in these stories find themselves trapped – by circumstance, society or tradition – as they fight for a means of escape. This sweeping and subversive collection celebrates their strength and their courage, their desire for independence and self-expression. 
 
Translated by Archana Madhavan

Roadkill

Elaine Feeney

Elaine Feeney brings her poetry to Harvill Secker and Vintage with this powerful, personal, fierce collection about women's lives, bodies, battles and triumphs. 
 
From a searing meditation on the experience and aftershocks of a sexual assault - written as a series of unflinching cantos - to poems of love, place and new beginnings, Feeney's voice is strong and clear, challenging and confessional, rooted in her west coast of Ireland heritage while speaking to and with women everywhere.

All the Good Things You Deserve

Rachel Aspden

In 2003, Rachel Aspden arrived in Egypt as a 23-year-old trainee journalist. She found a country on the brink of change. Of Egypt's 80 million citizens, two-thirds were under 30. The new generation were stifled, broken and frustrated – caught between a dictatorship with nothing to offer them and autocratic parents still clinging to tradition and obedience after a lifetime of fear. 
 
In January 2011, the young people’s patience ran out. They thought the revolution that followed would change everything for them. But as violence escalated, the economy collapsed and as the united front against Mubarak shattered into sectarianism, many found themselves wavering, hesitant to discard the old ways. 
 
What happens when a revolution unravels? 
 
Why is a generation raised on Hollywood movies and global brand names turning to religion? 
 
How do you choose between sex and tradition, consumerism and faith? 
 
Why would people who once chanted for freedom support a military state? 
 
And where will the next generation take the Middle East? 
 
Following the stories of four young Egyptians – Amr the atheist software engineer, Amal the village girl who defied her family and her entire community, Ayman the one-time religious extremist and Ruqayah the would-be teenage martyr – Generation Revolution unravels the complex forces shaping the lives of young people caught between tradition and modernity, and what their stories mean for the future of the Middle East.

Generation Revolution

On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East

Urs Faes

Discover this beautiful winter gem of a novella that makes the perfect stocking filler this Christmas. 
 
'I may have been gone a long time, but I'm no stranger...' 
 
Manfred walks alone through a snowy valley, surrounded by his memories, on a pilgrimage of sorts to his childhood home. He's been estranged from his brother Sebastian for decades, ever since their bitter feud over the love of a woman and the inheritance of the family farm. 
 
Twelve Nights transports us to the wintry depths of Europe's Black Forest, through the stillness of the snow-covered hills, the dense woods, the cold and mist, in those dark, wild days between Christmas and Epiphany. These nights are a time of tradition and superstition, of tales told around the local innkeeper's table of marauding spirits, as tangible as the ghosts of Manfred's past. But the twelfth night, Epiphany, promises new beginnings, and a hope of reconciliation at last. 
 
Twelve Nights is a hymn to the winter landscape and the power of storytelling, a beautiful novella of the natural world and our place in it.

Twelve Nights

Emi Yagi

Rika Horauchi’s new part-time job is to converse with a statue of Venus – in Latin – every Monday, when the museum is closed. 
 
Initially reluctant, Rika starts to enjoy her strange new job. Recommended by her old university professor for her exemplary language skills, Rika leads an otherwise unassuming life, working the rest of the week in a frozen-food warehouse. As Venus comes to life in the quiet of the museum, they talk about everything. Venus opens up new worlds for Rika, both intellectually and emotionally. They soon fall in love. But when the museum’s curator, Hashibami, makes it clear he wants to keep Venus for himself, what will Rika do? 
 
When the Museum is Closed is by turns charming, funny and surprising, a surreal take on our most real emotions and concerns: love, loneliness, freedom, perceptions of beauty and how women are seen in society. A joyful queer love story, this fresh and original new novel confirms Emi Yagi as one of the most exciting Japanese writers published in English today.

When the Museum is Closed

Haruki Murakami

Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this is a unique and wonderfully creepy tale that is sure to delight Murakami fans. 
 
 'All I did was go to the library to borrow some books'. 
 
 On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake. 
 
 Led to a special 'reading room' in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with only a sheep man, who makes excellent donuts, and a girl, who can talk with her hands, for company. His mother will be worrying why he hasn't returned in time for dinner and the old man seems to have an appetite for eating small boy's brains. How will he escape? 
 
'The best novelist on the planet' Observer

The Strange Library

Paul Durcan

WINNER OF THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IRISH BOOK AWARD 2014 
 
Paul Durcan never imagined he would be clasped by a woman again, but life is full of surprises! After all, would it surprise you to learn that at the US Ambassador’s Residence in Dublin his libido almost destroyed the Peace Process? There is a new Pope, too, a ‘man of constant surprise’, although in St Peter’s Square Durcan encounters a monk wholly lacking in the Holy Spirit. 
 
Elsewhere he muses upon the ‘pre-crucifixion scenario’ of being prepared for surgery, the gift of a malacca cane, the joy of retail therapy, the horror that is wheel-clamping, the ‘starry mystique’ of the weather forecaster Jean Byrne, suicide, bird-watching, stammering, art, Mayo, New York City, New Zealand, murder in Syria and the commemoration of 1916. Perhaps the greatest surprise is the voice of the late Seamus Heaney coming down his chimney: ‘Are you all right down there, Poet Durcan?’ The Days of Surprise is proof that the great poet of contemporary Ireland is in fine fettle.

The Days of Surprise

William Peskett

Survivors is William Peskett's second book in the Secker &amp; Warburg Poets series. At one level, it marks his move 'From Belfast to Suffolk' (the title of one of the poems), but more importantly it shows him coming to terms with the world of nature and the world of man with a new maturity.

Survivors

Lawrence Osborne

‘I am taking a few months off to travel and wander, drinking my way across the Islamic world to see whether I can dry myself out, cure myself of a bout of alcoholic excess. It is a personal crisis, a private curiosity… I am curious to see how non-drinkers live. Perhaps they have something to teach me.’ 
 
Booze is mankind's premier drug of choice, the most popular mind-altering substance ever devised, and it plays a furtive, celebrated and subversive role in nearly every culture on earth. In The Wet and the Dry, Lawrence Osborne explores the culture of permission, particularly in the West, and the opposing culture of prohibition, notably in the Islamic East. 
 
Osborne’s globe-trotting odyssey takes him from the luxurious bars of Milan to the vineyards of Lebanon, threatened by Hezbollah; from Swedish vodka to Pakistani strawberry gin; from the Nellie Dean pub in Soho to the dangerous brothels and drinking dens on the Malaysian border; from the boutique scotch produced on Islay to the liquor destroying Native American reservations; and from the only brewery in the dry country of Pakistan to the search for a bottle of New Year’s champagne in Oman. All the while, Osborne’s own Irish family history of terrifying alcoholism fails to deter him from seeking out a drink wherever he can.

The Wet And The Dry

A Drinker's Journey

Louis de Bernières

Emma Chichester Clark

A heartwarming tale about a very special dog. Beautifully illustrated, it is the perfect Christmas gift. 
 
One day, in the days when all the trains were driven by steam, a railway guard found something abandoned on a train... 
 
Mr Ginger Leghorn is used to collecting up umbrellas and other lost property but he's never found a puppy on his train before. He has no intention of keeping it but his five children - Alfie, Arthur, Beryl, Sissy and Albert - have other ideas and Jim is soon a much-loved, but often disruptive, member of the family. 
 
Whether it's his feud with the cat, getting stuck in rabbit-holes, accidentally going to sea, accompanying the children to school or carol singing at Christmas, Jim has a knack of making himself the centre of attention. This little black and tan puppy with his small bright eyes and very waggy rump becomes something of a hero in his town, and even catches the eye of the King himself. 
 
Station Jim is full of Christmas cheer for children and adults alike, and especially dog-lovers. It includes delightful pictures by celebrated illustrator Emma Chichester Clark, the creator of Plumdog.

Station Jim

A perfect heartwarming gift for children and adults

A perfect heartwarming Christmas gift for children and adults

Gail Jones

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 STELLA PRIZE 
 
We travel to find ourselves; to run away from ourselves. 
 
‘A Guide to Berlin’ is the name of a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1925, when he was a young man of 26, living in Berlin. 
 
A group of six international travellers, two Italians, two Japanese, an American and an Australian, meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories. Each is enthralled in some way by the work of Vladimir Nabokov, and each is finding their way in deep winter in a haunted city. A moment of devastating violence shatters the group, and changes the direction of everyone’s story. 
 
Brave and brilliant, A Guide to Berlin traces the strength and fragility of our connections through biographies and secrets.

A Guide to Berlin

Ada Moncrieff

The perfect festive murder mystery for 2024 from 'modern rival to Agatha Christie' Ada Moncrieff 
 
It's Christmas 1937 and an eclectic list of guests and staff have gathered for the grand re-opening of Maybridge castle, a newly renovated yet still crumbling hotel deep in the Cumbrian countryside. They are: 
 
The ex-socialite owner 
The Doctor and his new wife 
The stylish journalist 
The know-all housekeepers 
The still-grieving widower and his son 
The tarot readers 
The passionate academic 
The persistent investigative reporter 
The elder amateur sleuth, and her cat 
 
An innocent game of murder-in-the-dark will turn into a real game of life and death. And by the time the first sherries have been drunk, one of these people will be dead - and one of them the killer. Someone has changed the rules, but who?

Murder at Maybridge Castle

Tim Parks

Daniel Burrow once began a beautiful walk from Konstanz to Como with Julia, mercurial professor of literature, mother to two of his pupils, married, and the love of his life. 
 
After years of their secret affair, they stepped out together on top of the world, full of delight in one another and in the future they imagined. Or was it only Dan who imagined it, really? He never had the chance to find out, because a few days into their adventure a single phone call changed everything. 
 
Now, at the height of summer, with only a rucksack, a few pages of DH Lawrence that had been Julia’s, and his private strata of memory and forgetting, Dan is back on the trail. Step by step, with a tumult of emotions jostling with the demands of the dramatic Alpine landscape, he reckons with what his life is and what it might have been, had he been a different man with different choices. 
 
'A writer operating at the height of his powers. One follows the twists and turns of this story of discovery and self-discovery in a sustained state of delight' J.M. Coetzee 
 
'An intensely satisfying novel, superbly crafted' Nicholas Shakespeare 
 
'Parks is a prolific writer and Mr Geography is one of his finest books, matching virtuoso technical skill with deep emotional resonance' The Tablet

Mr Geography

Jim Crumley

Harry Brockway

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next. 
 
‘A small mound on white feathers lies on a tussock of grass made grey by a Highland winter. It is all the monument there will ever be to the life of a swan.’ 
 
With these words, and those that follow, Jim Crumley has ensured that there will be a more enduring witness to the life of this swan, and of all swans, than that pyre of white feathers. 
 
Crumley watches, year in year out, as a pair of mute swans struggles, against the odds, to raise young on a wild patch of lock. But the pen starts to lose her eggs to predators; and the cob begins to disappear for longer and longer periods. Until comes the day when a third swan, stronger and younger than the first pen, appears at the other end of the loch. 
 
This journal of a swan-watcher, as he calls himself, is an elegy to these noble creatures; and most poignantly it is a memorial to one swan, whose silent drama he has recorded.

The Company of Swans

The international literary icon opens his eclectic closet and shares photos of his extensive unique personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public. 
 
Haruki Murakami's books have galvanized millions around the world. Many of his fans know about his 10,000-vinyl-record collection, and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate, and perhaps more unique, passion: his T-shirt-collecting habit. 
 
In Murakami T, the famously reclusive novelist shows us his T-shirts - including gems found in bookshops, charity shops and record stores - from those featuring whisky, animals, cars and superheroes, to souvenirs of marathons and a Beach Boys concert in Honolulu, to the shirt that inspired the beloved short story 'Tony Takitani'. Accompanied by short, frank essays that have been translated into English for the first time, these photographs reveal much about Murakami's multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona. 
 
'The world's most popular cult novelist' Guardian

Murakami T

The T-Shirts I Love

In The Art of Life Paul Durcan takes us around County Mayo in his "filthy, two-door, bottle-green Opel Astra", stopping off at Westport and Achill Island, where he declares himself to be "globally sad", but "locally glad". Next he travels east to Dublin to hold in his arms his newborn granddaughter and thence to Tuscany, Poland and Japan. Along the way he reflects upon parental pride, the aches and pains of old age, the trim bottoms of snooker players, the wisdom of ex-wives and dogs on Sandymount Strand, while introducing us to a host of colourful characters, including a bishop, a roofer, a milkman, a priest and an unmarried mother. 
 
Is there an art of living or is life a work of art? This magnificent collection - originally published on Paul Durcan's sixtieth birthday - reveals one of Ireland's most successful and popular poets at the height of his powers and continuing to challenge, amuse and delight.

The Art Of Life

Caryl Phillips

What do we mean by 'English'? How does that image square with reality? How does our island look from abroad, and what aspects of our experience do we share with, for example, America - a nation built by outsiders and the huddled masses? 
 
Taking as its starting point a moving recollection of growing up in Leeds during the 1970s, Colour Me English broadens into a reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of essays and other non-fiction writing which ranges from the literary to the cultural and autobiographical. 
 
Elsewhere, Caryl Phillips goes on to describe the experience of living and working in America, and travels in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belgium and France and beyond. He considers the lives and works of many figures including Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Billie Holiday and Luther Vandross, and how their experiences are refracted through the prisms of writing, music and cinema. 
 
But Colour Me English always circles back to questions of identity and belonging, to the nature of tribal belonging and of its reverse, exclusion.

Colour Me English

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.

Hope Abandoned

Askold Krushnelnycky

In December 2004, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered to defy the results of a transparently rigged presidential election. The charismatic popular candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, had been poisoned and disfigured by his opponents. The security forces threatened violent repression. But the demonstrators stayed and, as international pressure grew, the corrupt old regime that had been supported by Putin's Kremlin was deposed. It was the most significant moment for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. 
 
 
An Orange Revolution is the gripping account of this historic uprising and the events that led to it. Ukraine was treated roughly by the twentieth century, occupied by the Germans and annexed by the Soviets. It saw guerrilla fighting after the Second World War and dissent was crushed by successive Communist administrations. Its history has been one of corruption, power struggles, organised crime, but a resiliently optimistic population. 
 
Based on firsthand observation and interviews with major players and anonymous demonstrators alike, this is about a people who have forced a lasting change: judges who defied death threats, a murdered journalist, amateur musicians who composed an anthem for the people, and soldiers who staked their lives to back the opposition. An Orange Revolution also traces the story of the author's family, who paid a high price for speaking out. 
 
An Orange Revolution is a captivating book about a defining moment in European history.

An Orange Revolution

A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History

Andrey Kurkov

-16°C, sunlight, silence. I drove the children to school, then went to see the revolution. I walked between the tents. Talked with rev­olutionaries. They were weary today. The air was thick with the smell of old campfires. 
 
 Ukraine Diaries is acclaimed writer Andrey Kurkov's first-hand account of the ongoing crisis in his country. From his flat in Kiev, just five hundred yards from Independence Square, Kurkov can smell the burning barricades and hear the sounds of grenades and gunshot. 
 
 Kurkov's diaries begin on the first day of the pro-European protests in November, and describe the violent clashes in the Maidan, the impeachment of Yanukovych, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the separatist uprisings in the east of Ukraine. Going beyond the headlines, they give vivid insight into what it's like to live through - and try to make sense of - times of intense political unrest.

Ukraine Diaries

Dispatches From Kiev

Diogo Mainardi

'The Fall is a moving portrait of a relationship with a child and a place. It is a rare book: by turns heartbreaking, angry and lyrical' – Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes. 
 
Step 1: Tito has cerebral palsy. 
 
Step 2: I blame Tito’s cerebral palsy on Pietro Lombardo. 
 
Join Diogo Mainardi and his son Tito in a journey of 424 steps, starting with Tito’s disastrous birth in Venice, in Lombardo’s Renaissance hospital. 
 
It’s a journey full of joy and reflection, and an honest exploration of fatherhood. It’s a journey that follows the arc of Western culture, from Dante Alighieri, Rembrandt van Rijn and Claude Monet to Marcel Proust, Neil Young and Assassin’s Creed, to show how one boy’s fate has been shaped by history. 
 
Above all, it’s a celebration of love and courage, and of the hope and faith we place in our children.

The Fall

George Orwell

Volume 2 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Burmese Days was first published in the United States, by Harper &amp; Brothers, in October 1934. It was Orwell's second book to be published and his first novel. It draws on his experiences serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (some preliminary sketches survive on Government of Burma paper). he resigned from the Burma Police in autumn 1927 'because he disliked putting people into prison for doing the same things which he should have done in their circumstances'. 
 
Orwell was convinced that publication of his novel in England would be impeded by the India Office because of his exposure of the evils of colonialism - his title, so appropriate to a volume of conventional memoirs, is subtly ironic - but his difficulties proved quite different. Victor Gollancz, though keen to publish Burmese Days, feared action for defamation and libel. 
 
After modification, an English version was brought out in June 1935. Although at the time Orwell considered the changes required to be 'trifling', he later rejected the English edition as 'garbled'. However, as well as forced changes, it does include genuine authorial revisions, something which Orwell had forgotten.

Burmese Days

Mia Couto

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017 
A finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize 
 
My sister Silência was the most recent victim of the lions, which have been tormenting our village for some weeks now… 
 
When Mariamar Mpepe’s sister is killed by lions, her father imprisons her at home. With only the ghost of her sister for company, she dreams of escape, and of the hunter who abandoned her years before. 
 
I’m the last of the hunters. And this is my last hunt. 
 
Archangel Bullseye, born into a long line of marksmen, is summoned back to Kulumani. But as he tracks the lions in the surrounding wilderness, his suspicions grow – that the darkest threats lie not outside the village, but at its very heart. 
 
What was happening was what always happened: The lions were coming back… 
 
Set in a forgotten corner of East Africa haunted by superstition, tradition and the shades of civil war, this is a struggle that blurs the savagery of nature, and the savagery of man.

Confession of the Lioness

Maria Gainza

At a hotel in Buenos Aires, a woman checks in under a pseudonym. She wears a black fur shawl and has no luggage. She is alone. 
 
Over the coming days and nights, she tells a story, which begins with a secret shared in a local bath house, revealing art forgery and fraud on a dazzling scale. At its heart is an enigmatic genius who for years forged portraits of the city's elite, before disappearing without trace. It is a story of influence and intrigue, in which nothing is as it seems. We're not to expect 'names, numbers or dates', she cautions, but a more subtle kind of reckoning... 
 
Told in a mordant, irresistible voice and full of sharp surprises, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a captivating enquiry into what we mean by 'authenticity', in life as in art. At once poised and capricious, elegant and bold, it is a thrilling exploration of the relationships between what is lived, what is told, what is remembered, and what is real.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Volume 4 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Originally published in 1936, before Orwell achieved fame, Keep the Aspidistra Flying takes Money as its theme. Gordon Comstock gives up a good job in an advertising agency to become a part-time bookshop assistant at a meagre wage, thereby gaining leisure for writing. However, after some modest success in the world of letters he eventually slides into the abyss, to be rescued by the faithful Rosemary. 
 
Ironically, Gordon’s voyage of discovery leads him back to commercial security, marriage, and the unexpected pleasures of domesticity. But above all he learns of the courage of keeping up appearances despite hardships. The symbol of this is the potted aspidistra: the ugly, stubborn, organic emblem of social and biological survival. 
 
This new edition restores most of the material censored on first publication due to fears of action for libel, defamation and obscenity. Of particular interest are the previously suppressed advertising slogans of the 1930s and, in light of the censorship he experienced, Orwell's ironic choice of surname for Gordon: Comstock.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

East of Eden

White Nights

Wuthering Heights

A decorative banner with a portrait of David Larbi and small illustrations of everyday sources of comfort like a cup of tea, flowers and a candle.

Showing results for: ‘Meik-Wiking’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter