Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Hester Grant

The enthralling story of an eighteenth-century family and their extraordinary achievements. 
 
Four brothers, three sisters. Brought up in a Northumberland rectory and in the close of Durham Cathedral, the Sharps would achieve exalted positions at the heart of British society. In 1781, the celebrated painter Johan Zoffany put the final brush strokes on the luminous portrait that immortalised the siblings’ rise, and their remarkable unity and passion for life. 
 
Ambitious, free-thinking and courageous, the Sharps were pioneers in the major movements that defined the eighteenth century – from political reform and philanthropy to medicine and industry. John, an eminent priest, established a model welfare state at Bamburgh Castle and commissioned the world’s first lifeboat; William became surgeon to George III; while James was a visionary inventor, canal promoter and engineer. Most famously of all, Granville, the youngest son, battled tirelessly as Britain’s first great campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade. Despite the social strictures of their day, Elizabeth, Judith and Frances claimed significant independence, and played key roles in hosting the Sharps’ famous musical parties on barges on the Thames. 
 
In this vivid, moving biography, Hester Grant charts the siblings’ shared journey to prominence, and explores the values and enduring bonds that inspired their success. The Good Sharps brings to life not just these men and women who realised that the future could be different, but also the new world they created.

The Good Sharps

The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain

The Brothers and Sisters Who Remade Their World

Clancy Martin

Sixteen-year-old high-school drop-out Bobby moves to Dallas to join his big brother Jim in the jewellery trade. Jim's glamorous girlfriend Lisa is the best saleswoman in the business and from the moment Bobby meets her he falls under her spell. 
 
Bobby discovers a new world - glitzy, trashy and hedonistic - where sex and money rule. As the brothers' fortunes explode will their rivalry for Lisa ruin everything?

How to Sell

Jane Miller

In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experience of being a daughter and a sister, about the intensities of family life and the illuminations that come from the last days of parents. Relations describes a record-keeping kinship and offers portraits of her parents' long marriage, its mysteries and incompatibilities, of her grandfather, the scientist Redcliffe Salaman, and of her great-aunt Clara Collet, one of the first women civil servants. It is a story in which Karl Marx and George Gissing have parts to play. 
 
Here are the tensions of belonging and yet not belonging to an English middle-class at once hospitable to difference and internally divided. More than two hundred years of English history are present in these portraits, which show the dawning emancipation of women and the effects of empire on family life. It is the story of an evolution, of a move out of trade towards public service and the professions, and towards the dramas and family romance of recent times.

Relations

Stuart Heritage

Stuart Heritage got where he is today by being decent, thoughtful, hardworking and kind. He is, in short, a model citizen. The favourite son. 
 
His younger brother Pete is quick-tempered, peevish and aggressively pig-headed and, for a while, known to his friends as 'Shagger'. 
 
But now, Stu has returned to his hometown to discover that Pete has taken his place. 
 
Don’t Be A Dick, Pete is a hilarious examination of home and family; sons, fathers, fatherhood, sibling relationships and how hard it is to move on in a system that’s loaded with several decades of preconceived ideas about you.

Don't Be a Dick Pete

Lucy Mangan

'Beautiful and moving... It will kickstart a cascade of nostalgia for countless people' Marian Keyes 
 
When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up different worlds and cast new light on this one. 
 
She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library. 
 
In Bookworm, Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and disinters a few forgotten treasures poignantly, wittily using them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm. 
 
'Passionate, witty, informed, and gloriously opinionated' Jacqueline Wilson

Bookworm

A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Adrian Tinniswood

The Rainborowes bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World. 
 
Starting with William Rainborowe, a prominent merchant-mariner and shipmaster, and his equally formidable sons and daughters between 1630 and 1660, we follow their astonishing story through the Civil War, the Putney debates, and settling in America. The Rainborowes explains America and mourns England’s failed revolution. It spans oceans and ideologies and encompasses personal tragedies and triumphs, the death of kings and the birth of nations. 
 
Using rare printed material from the period and unpublished manuscripts from collections in Britain and America The Rainborowes recreates day-to-day life on both sides of the Atlantic during one of the most tumultuous periods in Western history. In their efforts to build a paradise on earth, the Rainborowes and their friends encounter pirates and witches, prophets and princes, Muslem militants and Mohican Indians. They build new societies. They are ordinary men and women, and they do an extraordinary thing. 
 
They change the world.

The Rainborowes

Howard Marks

Howard Marks was released from Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana in April 1995 after serving seven years of a twenty-five year sentence for marijuana smuggling. It was time for a change of career. 
 
So he wrote two best-selling books, became a sports writer and travel writer, stood as a parliamentary candidate in Norwich North, Norwich South, Southampton Test and Neath, applied to become the country's Drug Czar, and embarked on a long-running sell-out series of one man shows. 
 
While performing in his home town of Kenfig Hill, he fell among old friends who made extraordinary claims for Welsh culture (Was Elvis really Welsh? Was there really a tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans?) At the same time his elderly aunt told him of his outlaw ancestry: William Owen, the legendary Welsh smuggler (who had operated for some time in South America) and his great-great-grandfather Patrick McCarty, the half brother of Billy the Kid, who had joined Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Patagonia. He decided to explore South America. 
 
His travels took him to Jamaica and Panama in the footsteps of the Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan; he went to Brazil looking for groups of Welsh settlers so obscure he never found them (although he did succeed in finding his musical idol Jimmy Page); and he searched among the thriving Welsh community in Patagonia for signs of Billy the Kid's half brother. Richly comic and charged with the sense of adventure that would induce an Oxford graduate to become the world's most notorious marijuana smuggler, Señor Nice is the hugely entertaining sequel to Mr Nice.

Senor Nice

Straight Life from Wales to South America

Keggie Carew

Discover a daughter's journey into her father's past in this Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the 2016 Costa Biography Award. 
 
Keggie Carew grew up under the spell of an unorthodox, enigmatic father. An undercover guerrilla agent during the Second World War, in peacetime he lived on his wits and dazzling charm. But these were not always enough to sustain a family. 
 
As his memory began to fail, Keggie embarked on a quest to unravel his story once and for all. Dadland is that journey. It takes us into shadowy corners of history, a madcap English childhood, the poignant breakdown of a family, the corridors of dementia and beyond. 
 
'OH THIS BOOK. Beautiful and fierce and brave. Memory and war and family and loss and, well, wow' Helen Macdonald, bestselling author of H is for Hawk 
 
'A thrilling history of Churchill's Special Operations Executive... combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author's father' Nick Hornby, Observer

Dadland

A Journey into Uncharted Territory

Colin Grant

A memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, which build into a poignant, insightful and unforgettable testimony of West Indian British experience. 
 
***A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Grant is a natural storyteller... Compelling and charming' 
BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
'Grant's most revealing work' 
NEW STATESMAN‘I’m black, so you don’t have to be,’ Colin Grant’s uncle Castus used to tell him. If Colin – born in Britain to Jamaican parents – worked hard and became a doctor, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden his parents’ generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. 
 
This is a memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, including of Grant’s mother Ethlyn, his father Bageye, his sister Selma, and his great uncle Percy. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant’s own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively, these stories build into an unforgettable testimony of black British experience.

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be

A Memoir in Eight Lives

Rosemary Ashton

142 Strand was the home of the brilliant, unconventional young publisher John Chapman. All the daring and avant-garde writers and thinkers of Victorian London gathered here, among them Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray; Americans like Emerson and refugees from revolutionary Europe like Mazzini. In 1851 Chapman brought Marian Evans - the future George Eliot - to London where her arrival caused rows in the household, which included Chapman's wife and also his mistress. 
 
The Strand was packed with booksellers, magazine publishers, theatres, clubs, and quack doctors. Only a short distance away were Westminster, the Houses of Parliament and the disreputable pornographers of Holywell street. Chapman's circle touched all these worlds, and the vivid story of these unconventional lives and unorthodox views - marvellously told by Rosemary Ashton - takes us to the heart of Victorian culture, uncovering its surprising energy, its doubts and arguments, and, above all, its passionate reforming spirit.

142 Strand

A Radical Address in Victorian London

Thomas Lynch

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched cottage that his great-grandfather had left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, Thomas Lynch's elderly, unmarried, distant cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the author, 'it changed my life'. 
 
Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories. It is a magnificent hymn of praise to Ireland.

Booking Passage

We Irish & Americans

Blake Morrison

In his masterpiece of family literature, And When Did you Last See Your Father?, Blake Morrison's mother appears as an intriguing but mostly silent figure. This is her startling and touching story - and a son's search to discover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself again to adapt to a quieter post-war family life. At the heart of the book there's a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny, furious letters his parents wrote during their courtship. It evokes a surprising picture of life and love in WWII. From the obstacles the lovers faced, to their moments of hilarity and joy Things My Mother Never Told Me is a revealing and poignant anatomy of family conflict, love, war, and finally marriage. Kim Morrison emerges quietly, magically from the shadows, a determined heroine for our times.

Things My Mother Never Told Me

Theo Richmond

The extraordinary story of a small Jewish ghetto in a small town in Poland - and of one man's obsessive quest to discover its fate and its survivors. Since his early childhood in London, Theo Richmond had heard his relatives mention a place called Konin, the Polish Shetetl from which both his parents came. He felt an irresistible urge to find out more about this small town and its Jewish community, to place on record something of what the Nazis had destroyed and thus to remember. He searched for its few survivors, scattered in many lands. Starting with an old man in London, he traced others, not only in Britain, but in Brooklyn, Florida, Texas, on a kibbutz in Israel, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Konin

A Quest

Gillian Tindall

When Gillian Tindall discovered a cache of tightly folded letters in a deserted house in central France, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she uncovered the obscure and moving life of one woman, Celestine Chaumette. This is Tindall's brilliantly original recreation of the vanished world of a French village.

Celestine

Frances Stonor Saunders

*Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022* 
 
'This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday Times 
 
If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again. 
 
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. 
 
So begins a captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stoner Saunders decides to unpick her family's past.

The Suitcase

Six Attempts to Cross a Border

Jody Rosen

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023** 
 
'Full of delightful anecdotes and interviews and fascinating historical tales' Mail on Sunday 
 
A panoramic portrait of the wonderous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine. 
 
A toy, a tool, a liberator, or complete nuisance: the bicycle has been many things to many people over the decades, yet it endures as the most popular form of transport in the world. How has such a simple machine achieved so much? 
 
Combining history, travelogue and memoir, Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous vehicle from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a 'green machine'. Readers meet unforgettable characters: women's suffragists who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity. 
 
By examining the bicycle's past and peering into its future, Two Wheels Good forms a joyful ode to an engineering marvel of global importance. 
 
'Funny, precise, surprising' Adam Gopnik 
 
'Love for two-wheeled transport runs through every sentence' Economist 
 
'Wry, rich, deeply researched' Patrick Radden Keefe

Two Wheels Good

The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

Edmund de Waal

**WINNER OF THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Edmund de Waal uncovers the history of a family through a turbulent century through 264 objects. 
 
264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined. 
 
From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de siecle Paris, from occupied Vienna to Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke's journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. 
 
'You have in your hands a masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
'The most brilliant book I've read for years... A rich tale of the pleasure and pains of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY*

The Hare With Amber Eyes

Carmen Callil

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

Oh Happy Day

Those Times and These Times

Beth Raymer

The Lucky Charm. The Sure Thing. The Long Shot. The Jinx. 
 
Beth Raymer came to Vegas to live the dream. Instead she winds up waiting tables in a low-rent diner and living in a fleapit motel. 
 
Then she meets Dink, the King of Last Vegas sports betting. Dink introduces her to the testorsterone fuelled underworld of high stakes gambling a dog-eat-dog realm of grifters, and strippers, wise-guys and hardened cons. 
 
New to the game but with big ambitions, Beth must get smart to get ahead. The real money is off-shore, where gambling regulations don't count. But nor do other rules. In the free-wheeling caribbean Beth discovers that the difference between winning big and losing everything comes down to how sharp you play.

Lay the Favourite

A True Story about Playing to Win in the Gambling Underworld

Tim Moore

A book that tells the story of London since the thirties through the 28 streets, stations and utililties of the Monopoly board. In the wonderful world of Monopoly it still only cost -50 to buy a house in Islington, you can move around London with the shake of a dice and even park your car for free. 
 
In Do Not Pass Go Tim Moore, belying his reputation as a player who always paid that -10 fine rather than take a Chance, fearlessly tackles the real thing and along the way tells the story of a game and the city that frames it. Sampling the rags and the riches he stays in a hotel in Mayfair and one in the Old Kent Road, enjoys quality time with Dr Crippen in Pentonville Prison and even winds up at the wrong end of the Water Works pipe. And, solving all the mysteries you'll have pondered whilst languishing in jail and many other you certainly wouldn't, Tim Moore reveals how Pall Mall got its name, which three addresses you won't find in your A-Z and why the sorry cul-de-sac that is Vine Street has a special place in the heart of Britain's most successful Monopoly champion. 
 
The stirring travelogue of one man's erratic progress around those 28 streets, stations and utilities, Do Not Pass Go is also an epic and lovingly researched history of London's wayward progress in the 66 years since the launch of the world's most popular board game

Do Not Pass Go

Howard Jacobson

'One of the all-time great memoirs' Daily Telegraph 
'Wonderful...candid, shrewd and moving' William Boyd 
'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious' Simon Schama 
 
Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. 
 
Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. 
 
Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 
 
'Hilariously brilliant' David Baddiel 
 
'Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Mother's Boy

A Writer's Beginnings

Leanda de Lisle

Sunday Times bestseller 
Selected as one of The Times' Best Books about The Tudors 
A Telegraph Book of the Year 
A History Today Book of the Year 
A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 
 
The Tudors are a national obsession; they are our most notorious family in history. But beyond the well-worn headlines is a family still more extraordinary than the one we thought we knew. 
 
The Tudor canon typically starts with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, before speeding on to Henry VIII and the Reformation. But this leaves out the family’s obscure Welsh origins; it passes by the courage of the pregnant thirteen-year-old girl who would help found the Tudor dynasty; and the childhood and painful exile of her son, the future Henry VII. It ignores the fact that the Tudors were shaped by their past – those parts they wished to remember and those they wished to forget. 
 
With this background, Leanda de Lisle enables us to see the Tudors in their own terms and presents new perspectives and revelations on key figures and events, from the princes in the Tower to the Tudor Queens. 
 
Tudor tells a family story like no other. 
 
'A lively history of the ambitious Tudor family... It casts plenty of light on the strong women in the dynasty' The Times

Tudor

The Family Story

Martin Rowson

A few months after two of his parents had died, Martin Rowson had a dream about the house he grew up in which was crammed with tons and tons of stuff, both physical and emotional. In this book Rowson delves into all that 'stuff'; weaving together dreams, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, advice, history, smells, sounds and sights of the past. The result is a funny, thought-provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease and the existentialist horrors of clearing out the attic.

Stuff

A Memoir of Death and Life

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean first met John Laroche when visiting Florida to write for the New Yorker about his arrest for stealing rare ghost orchids from a nature reserve. Fascinated both by Laroche and the world she uncovered of orchid collectors and growers, she stayed on, to write this magical exploration of obsession and the strange world both of the orchid obsessives and of Florida, that haunting and weird 'debatable land' of swamps and condos, retirement communities and real-estate scams. 
 
The world of the orchid hunters, breeders and showmen, their rivalries, vendettas and crimes, smuggling, thefts and worse provide the backdrop to a fascinating exploration of one of the byways of human nature, the obsessive world of the collector, and the haunting beauty of the flowers themselves.

The Orchid Thief

Laura Cumming

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Guardian 
 
Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. 
 
Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 
 
'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times 
 
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

On Chapel Sands

My mother and other missing persons

Juliet Nicolson

One woman’s investigation into the nature of memory, the past, and above all, love. 
 
All families have their myths and Juliet Nicolson’s was no different: her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother’s Tory-conventional background. 
 
A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from

A House Full of Daughters

Nicholas Shakespeare

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France. 
 
For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirées and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat. 
 
But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a precarious existence under German Occupation. 
 
Over half a century later, her nephew, Nicholas Shakespeare, found a box of Priscilla's notebooks and journals. He began investigating the rumours that she had escaped a prisoner-of-war camp and fought for the Resistance - and he finally unearthed the truth behind suspicions of disreputable love affairs and far darker secrets.

Priscilla

The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

Shelley Klein

'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday Times 
 
Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. 
 
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 
 
'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon 
 
'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian 
 
'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' Telegraph

The See-Through House

My Father in Full Colour

Matthew Kelly

Following the partitioning of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, Matthew Kelly's great grandmother and her two daughters were deported to the East. Thus began an extraordinary ordeal that took them, and many thousands like them, on a journey stretching from Siberia to Pakistan, and beyond. Their male relatives endured a parallel journey; arrested, exiled, and held as prisoners of war. Countless numbers were summarily executed by the Red Army. They saw the steppe, they were put to work in labour camps, they built sections of the trans-Siberian railway, they cleared forests, they toiled on collective farms. They knew hunger, exhaustion, disease and death. 
 
Persecuted by the Soviet Union, Poland was to become its unexpected ally following the German invasion in 1941. A new Polish army, 'The Anders Army' was assembled in Palestine. For a brief moment, in Kazakhstan, families were reunited, before being evacuated; to India, to Britain, to Mexico and East Africa; and from there, across the world. The experiences of these Poles had consequences far reaching and enduring, both to Poland, to Polish identity, and to the families that survived; reverberating through generations. 
 
These incredible stories remain largely untold. In Finding Poland Matthew Kelly embarks on a journey through his ancestor's footsteps, travelling through places they lived, and landscapes they survived, to provide an account of these extraordinary people and their unique history. Part memoir, history and travel book, it is also a profound meditation on the experience of displacement and exile, of the impact of such seismic disruption, and the deep legacies such trauma bequeaths.

Finding Poland

Darran Anderson

‘Astonishing… A marvellous poetic reminder that every place is a universe of magical possibility to the perceptive mind’ Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places 
 
 A smuggler and a deserter, Darran Anderson’s grandfathers skirted the Second World War on the fringes of legality. His father survived the height of the political violence in Northern Ireland and Darran himself came of age during the final years of the Troubles before leaving his hometown to find a way to exist in the world. 
 
 But when another young man in his family disappears, Darran is brought back to Derry. Walking the banks of the River Foyle, he starts on a search for what has been lost. A portrait of a city, a biography of a family, a record of the objects that make up a life, Inventory offers a vital new perspective on a troubled history.

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