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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John Healy

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John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

The Defense

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.

Night Flight

Soetsu Yanagi

Our lives are filled with objects. Everyday things used in everyday settings, they are our constant companions. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe - an aesthetic fulfilment of our practical needs. They should, in short, be things of beauty. 
 
Long revered as the authority on craftsmanship and Japanese aesthetics, Yanagi devoted his life and writing to defend the value of craft. In an age of feeble and ugly machine-made things, this now-classic book is a call for each of us to deepen our relationship with the objects that surround us. Inspired by the work of the simple artisans Yanagi encountered on his lifelong travels through Japan and Korea, it is a heartfelt defence of modest, honest, handcrafted objects, from traditional teacups to jars to paper. Objects that exemplify the beauty of everyday things. 
 
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The Beauty of Everyday Things

Just in time for the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic, this graphic deluxe edition compiles first hand accounts, testimonies, and letters by notable Titanic survivors, including Archibald Gracie, Lawrence Beesley, Elizabeth W. Shutes, and the "unsinkable" Molly Brown. Full of historically accurate details and an afterword by the grandson of Lawrence Beesley, Titanic Survivors and author of The Loss of the S.S. Titanic, it will be the gift to give die-hard Titanic buffs. Authoritative, commemorative and in a striking, luxurious package with and introduction by Titanic enthusiast and expert, Tim Maltin, this will be the authoritative work on the disaster.

Titanic: First Accounts (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

William Langewiesche

In the essays collected here William Langewiesche considers how flying has altered not only how we move about the earth, but also how we view our world and our place in it. With vivid descriptions of the aesthetics and excitement of flight, Langewiesche also writes of the risks that go with this beauty: the perils of air traffic control, and the dangers of nervous passengers and bad weather. 
 
Full of spare and elegant prose, Aloft is a fascinating journey into the new, profound dimension that flight has added to the human experience.

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