Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

As an English literature professor, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has delighted in sharing his love of reading with his students. Bringing together more than twenty years of teaching, Look Closer explores the iconic works of literature that have formed, sustained and entertained him, from timeless classics like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice to modern masterpieces such as Normal People and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as children’s books, poetry, plays, short stories and comics. It is a masterclass in how to be human. 
 
By revealing the simple techniques to slow down, take note and bring a text to life, Look Closer is the culmination of a life spent reading. This book is for anyone interested in how literature works and makes clear why reading is more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Funny, illuminating and personal, Look Closer ultimately shows us how great writing can change a person’s life. It is a celebration of the simple joy of reading, and how becoming more attentive readers can open up worlds and bring us closer to ourselves in delightful and unexpected ways.

Look Closer

How to Get More Out of Reading

Michael Clune

Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. 
 
As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas and his friends hunt for answers why – in art, music and literature – as they reach for a life beyond the confines of where they’ve grown up and what’s expected of them. Pan takes us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

David Casanave

Yuval Noah Harari

Sometimes history seems like a laundry list of malevolent monarchs, pompous presidents and dastardly dictators. But are they really the ones in the driving seat? Sapiens: A Graphic History – The Masters of History takes us on an immersive and hilarious ride through the human past to discover the forces that change our world, bring us together, and – just as often – tear us apart. 
 
Grab a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth and explore the rise of money, religion and empire. Join our fabulous host Heroda Tush, as she wonders: which historical superhero will display the power to make civilisations rise and fall? Will Mr Random prove that luck and circumstance prevail? Will Lady Empire convince us of the irrefutable shaping force of conquerors? Or will Clashwoman beat them all to greatness by reminding us of the endless confrontations that seem to forever plague our species? 
 
In this next volume of the bestselling graphic series, Yuval Noah Harari, David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave continue to present the complicated story of humankind with wit, empathy and originality. Alongside the unlikely cast of new characters, we are rejoined by the familiar faces of Yuval, Zoe, Professor Saraswati, Bill and Cindy (now Romans), Skyman and Captain Dollar. As they travel through time, space and human drama in search of truth, it's impossible not to wonder: why can’t we all just get along? 
 
This third instalment in the Sapiens: A Graphic History series is an engaging, insightful, and colourful retelling of the story of humankind for curious minds of all ages, and can be browsed through on its own or read in sequence with Volumes One and Two. 
 
Praise for Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: 
 
'I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species.' Bill Gates 
 
'Interesting and provocative . . . It gives you a sense of how briefly we've been on this Earth' Barack Obama 
 
'Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last . . . It may be the best book I've ever read' Chris Evans 
 
'Contains a remarkable piece of information on almost every page and reminds us that we should be grateful to be human.' Matt Haig 
 
'Sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain . . . Radiates power and clarity, making the world strange and new' Sunday Times 'Provocative and fascinating and opinionated...it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar. It altered how I view our species and our world.' Guardian

Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 3

The Masters of History

Katie Kitamura

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. 
 
Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

Audition

Marion Coutts

In the aftermath of catastrophic loss, a mother and her young son cross the Atlantic, taking refuge in a wooden house on a remote strip of land. Viewed from the shore, where land meets sea, the horizon is a line that holds their attention and draws them in. Camera in hand, she charts their progress and starts to imagine new ways of being and a new existence for her small family. 
 
Writing with precision and clarity, Coutts combines the real with the fictional, thinking through art, poetry, geology, maps and Minecraft to present a devastating and fierce reflection on intimacy and separation, the visible and the invisible and the fragility and strangeness of the ocean and its borders.

What Did the Deep Sea Say?

Isabella Hammad

FROM THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION-SHORTLISTED AND RSL ENCORE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF ENTER GHOST 
 
Award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history. 
 
Moving and erudite, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognising the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today. 
 
PRAISE FOR RECOGNISING THE STRANGER 
 
'Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose.' SALLY ROONEY 
 
'A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.' MAX PORTER 
 
‘Hammad’s writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.’ OLIVIA SUDJIC 
 
'Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.' RASHID KHALIDI

Recognising the Stranger

On Palestine and Narrative

Maggie Nelson

In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth – and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialise and demonise such prolific, intimate output. 
 
The Slicks is a heady, rallying and unexpected melding of popular culture and literary criticism – an inspired treatise and unexpected celebration of two iconic female poets by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.

The Slicks

On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift

Dr Sami Timimi

More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism. 
 
More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders. 
 
Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world. 
 
Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment. 
 
So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated? 
 
In Searching for Normal, Dr Sami Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and presents, instead, a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.

Searching for Normal

A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity

Rachel Aviv

You Won't Get Free Of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves), of bonds broken and renewed. With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in six essays, five originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. 
 
'I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,' Aviv writes. 'It was as if I had failed to see the drama that was on the mother’s side, too – her particular longings and humiliations and needs.' 
 
Aviv renders one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, about the writer Alice Munro’s family, a daughter’s abuse is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free Of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape this foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge can form and deform a family and a life.

You Won’t Get Free of It

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

Eyal Weizman

Written while the organisation he directs, Forensic Architecture, works to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel, in Ungrounding Eyal Weizman explores the larger geographical and historical context, from the displacement of the Nakba in 1948 to the present day. In unflinching and forensic detail, Ungrounding shows how architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. 
 
It is an extraordinary and eye-opening journey through the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, settlements and barriers. Territory is never a neutral backdrop nor the location within which a colonisation takes place. Instead, it is a mechanism by which colonisation is undertaken and key to understanding how Israel’s attack on Gaza in the wake of 7 October has escalated into violence so extreme as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.

Ungrounding

The Architecture of Genocide

Rowan Hooper

From evolution to capitalism, 'survival of the fittest' has shaped our view of the world. It has brought us to the brink. And something needs to change. 
 
For the history of life on Earth is much more than a story of competition. The natural world has been forged and sustained by small miracles of co-operation between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria – these partnerships are ubiquitous, lifelong and are an essential guide for the future of a world in crisis. 
 
In Togetherness, Rowan Hooper reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through these remarkable stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, he explores how co-operation is fundamental to life itself and to protecting our shared future. 
 
Togetherness will change the way you see our place in the world, our place in it – and our obligation to its hidden wonders.

Togetherness

Symbiosis and the Hidden History of Life’s Greatest Collaboration

It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind 
 
This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. 
 
Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life. 
 
With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.

Pathemata

Or, The Story of My Mouth

Imaobong Umoren

From the 1500s to the mid-twentieth century, the events that took place in the Caribbean – from conquest, colonisation and capitalism to racial slavery, revolution and migration – and the people who forged them played a seminal role in creating modern Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean. By the 1960s, Western global empires had begun to crumble. Yet the British Empire in the Caribbean did not end. Instead, colonialism was replaced with a new type of power whose impact can still be felt: neo-colonialism. 
 
Empire Without End offers a new interpretation of the British Empire, its enduring entanglement with the Anglophone Caribbean and the longevity of systemic racism. Taking a longer historical perspective starting in the period of European contact with the Caribbean and ending today, Imaobong Umoren looks at the impact and legacies of racial slavery to explore how later linked histories relating to capitalism, class, labour, war, political economy, poverty, gender and culture are crucial to telling the full story. In doing so, she sets out a compelling strategy to define our roles and responsibilities in challenging the legacy of colonialism and hierarchy – a legacy that continues to blight our society and our politics.

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