Nigella Lawson has written eleven bestselling cookery books including the classics How to Eat and How To Be A Domestic Goddess – the book that inspired a whole new generation of bakers. These books, and her TV series, have made her a household name around the world. 
 
www.nigella.com 
@Nigella_Lawson

Nigella Lawson

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Zahra Hankir

'Fascinating' Nigella Lawson 
'Awe-inspiring' Funmi Fetto 
'A treat to read' Kassia St Clair 
 
A Sunday Times Style Barometer and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick 
 
For centuries, humans have been drawn to lining our eyes. The aesthetic trademark of icons from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse, eyeliner is one of our most enduring cosmetic tools: ancient royals and Gen Z influencers alike have harnessed its power. 
 
Through Zahra Hankir&rsquo;s kohl-lined eyes, this ubiquitous product becomes proof of the stunning variety among cultures across time and space. Exploring intimate conversations &ndash; with Chadian nomads, Japanese geisha, Indian dancers, New York&rsquo;s drag queens and more &ndash; Eyeliner embraces the profound significance of its namesake, especially among communities of colour. 
 
What emerges is a delightful and unexpectedly moving journey through streets and stages around the world, and a stirring reclamation of a key piece of our collective history. 
 
Featuring stunning portrait illustrations by Mercedes deBellard

Eyeliner

A Cultural History

Amanda Gorman

The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman 
 
&lsquo;Poetry so alive you want to hold it and protect it&rsquo; Malala Yousafzai 
 
The luminous poetry collection captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future. 
 
&lsquo;A new collection full of hope and healing from the young American poet who electrified the world&rsquo; Guardian 
 
&lsquo;Reading these poems, I feel at once haunted, heartened and formidably ministered to&rsquo; Tracy K. Smith 
 
&lsquo;The liberating force of the stories these poems tell about our resilience and survival showcases a powerful griot for our times&rsquo; Oprah Daily

Call Us What We Carry

From the presidential inaugural poet

Edward St Aubyn

From the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, now a major Sky Atlantic television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch 
 
Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. 
 
 Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. Who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?

Dunbar

King Lear, Retold

Julian Barnes

In these seventeen essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure Status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes in his preface, 'Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.' 
 
When his Letters from London came out in 1995, the Financial Times called him 'our best essayist'. This wise and deft collection confirms that judgment.

Through the Window

Seventeen Essays (and one short story)

Gavin Knight

The Penwith Peninsula in Cornwall is where the land ends. In The Swordfish and the Star Gavin Knight takes us into this huddle of grey roofs at the edge of the sea at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 
 
He catches the stories of a whole community, but especially those still working this last frontier: the Cornish fishermen. These are the dreamers and fighters who every day prepare for battle with the vast grey Atlantic. Cornwall and its seas are brought to life, mixing drinking and drugs and sea spray, moonlit beaches and shattering storms, myth and urban myth. The result is an arresting tapestry of a place we thought we knew; the precarious reality of life in Cornwall today emerges from behind our idyllic holiday snaps and picture postcards. Even the quaint fishermen’s pubs on the quay at Newlyn, including the Swordfish and its neighbour the Star, turn out to be places where squalls can blow up, and down again, in an instant. 
 
Based on immersive research and rich with the voices of a cast of remarkable characters, this is an eye-opening, dramatic, poignant account of life on Britain’s most dangerous stretch of coast. 
 
Praise for Hood Rat 
'A gripping novelistic immersion' Louis Theroux 
'A must-read' Owen Jones 
'Britain's Gomorrah' Independent

The Swordfish and the Star

Life on Cornwall's most treacherous stretch of coast

Filled with empathy and wisdom, personal experiences and creative inspiration, this is a vital collection of essays on the power of literature and the craft of writing from an international array of writers of colour. 
 
'Electric essays that speak to the experience of writing from the periphery . . . a guide, a comfort, and a call all at once' Laila Lalami, author of Conditional Citizens 
 
'A whip-smart collection' Kamila Shamsie, author of Best of Friends 
 
What if we reconsidered our assumptions about how fiction should be written? And can we then apply our discoveries to both what we read and how we read? This book explores these questions and encourages us into a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, featuring: 
 
• Taymour Soomro on resisting rigid stories about who you are 
• Madeleine Thien on how writing builds the room in which it can exist 
• Amitava Kumar on why authenticity isn't a license we carry in our wallets 
• Tahmima Anam on giving herself permission to be funny 
• Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the bodily challenge of writing about trauma 
• Zeyn Joukhadar on queering English and the power of refusing to translate ourselves 
• Kiese Laymon on hearing that no one wants to read the story that you want to write 
• Deepa Anappara on writing even through conditions that impede the creation of art 
 
Plus essays from Tiphanie Yanique, Xiaolu Guo, Jamil Jan Kochai, Vida Cruz-Borja, Femi Kayode, Nadifa Mohamed in conversation with Leila Aboulela, Myriam Gurba, Mohammed Hanif and Sharlene Teo. 
 
'This book is essential' Nikesh Shukla 
 
'Bracing and moving . . . No one interested in how we read and should read fiction can afford to miss this' Pankaj Mishra, author of Run And Hide

Letters to a Writer of Colour

Tony Judt

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. 
 
In 2008, historian Tony Judt learnt that he was suffering from a disease that would eventually trap his extraordinary mind in a declining and immobile body. At night, sleepless in his motionless state, he revisited the past in an effort to keep himself sane, and his dictated essays form a memoir unlike any you have read before. 
 
Each one charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the sexual politics of Europe, a series of roadtrips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. 
 
And everything is as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet - a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.

The Memory Chalet

Nick Davies

'This all began quite unexpectedly one rainy autumn evening a couple of years ago in a fairground near to the centre of Nottingham...' 
 
In amongst the bright lights and bumper cars, Nick Davies noticed two boys, no more than twelve years old, oddly detached from the fun of the scene. Davies discovered they were part of a network of children selling themselves on the streets of the city, running a nightly gauntlet of dangers: pimps, punters, the Vice Squad, disease, drugs. This propelled Davies into a journey of discovery through the slums and ghettoes of our cities. He found himself in crack houses and brothels, he befriended street gangs and drug dealers. 
 
Davies' journey into the hidden realm is powerful, disturbing and impressive, and is bound to rouse controversy and demands for change. He unravels threads of Britain`s social fabric as he travels deeper and deeper into the country of poverty, towards the dark heart of British society.

Dark Heart

The Story of a Journey into an Undiscovered Britain

Anne Tyler

'A thoroughly modern love story' Guardian, Book of the Year 
 
Kate Battista is stuck. 
 
How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister Bunny? 
 
Dr Battista has other problems. His brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, his new scientific breakthrough will fall through... 
 
When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Will Kate be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? 
 
Anne Tyler's brilliant retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as surprising as Kate herself. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

Vinegar Girl

The Taming of the Shrew, Retold

Richard Beard

*WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2018* 
 
My younger brother’s name is Nicholas Beard. He was nine years old, and I was with him in the water when he drowned. 
 
Life changes in an instant. 
 
On a family holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and Nicholas are in the sea, jumping the waves. Suddenly and inexplicably Nicholas is out of his depth and then, shockingly, so is Richard. Only one of the brothers returns to the shore. 
 
Richard does not attend Nicholas’s funeral and afterwards the family return to Cornwall to continue the holiday. Soon they stop speaking of that day at the beach altogether. Years later, haunted by grief, Richard sets out to piece together the story. Who was Nicholas? What really happened that day? And why did the family never speak of it again? 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2018 
 
‘This captivating book, both heart-rending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story’ Daily Mail 
 
‘A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft’ Sunday Times

The Day That Went Missing

Rachel Aviv

There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which&hellip; 
 
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities? 
 
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.

Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

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

Rachel Kushner

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000–2020

Afua Hirsch

From Afua Hirsch - co-presenter of Samuel L. Jackson's major BBC TV series Enslaved - the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today. 
 
You're British. 
 
Your parents are British. 
 
Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British. 
 
So why do people keep asking where you're from? 
 
We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch's personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be - and an urgent call for change. 
 
'The book for our divided and dangerous times' 
David Olusoga

Brit(ish)

On Race, Identity and Belonging

Howard Jacobson

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life. 
 
‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ 
 
With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship ... 
 
‘Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream’ Evening Standard 
 
'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

Shylock is My Name

The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

The Merchant of Venice, Retold

Ian Jack

In this selection from over twenty years of reporting and writing, Ian Jack sets out to deal with contemporary Britain - from national disasters to football matches to obesity - but is always drawn back in time, vexed by the question of what came first. 
 
In 'Women and Children First', watching the film Titanic leads into an investigation into the legend of Wallace Henry Hartley, the famous band leader of the doomed liner, while 'The 12.10 to Leeds', a magnificent report on the Hatfield rail crash, begins its hunt for clues in the eighteenth century in the search for those responsible. Further afield, he finds vestiges of a vanished Britain in the Indian subcontinent, meeting characters like maverick English missionary and linguist William Carey, credited with importing India's first steam engine. 
 
Full of the style, knowledge and intimacy that makes his work so special, this collection is the perfect introduction to the work of one of the country's finest writers.

The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

Tim Parks

One of Britain's outstanding novelists, Tim Parks is also a provocative, entertaining and accomplished essayist. This new collection's title is drawn from D. H. Lawrence's fundamental belligerence, and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterised by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict. 
 
Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett or Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongs others. Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Machiavelli and the Medici. 
 
Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on that most serious tussle: World Cup football.

The Fighter

Literary Essays

Jeanette Winterson

‘A shining delight of a novel’ 
New York Times 
 
'Clever and beautiful...it soars' 
Financial Times 
 
A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. 
 
Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out. 
 
Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found. 
 
‘Emotionally wrought and profoundly intelligent... A supremely clever, compelling and emotionally affecting novel that deserves multiple readings to appreciate its many layers’ 
Mail on Sunday 
 
'There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps' 
Observer 
 
'Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it' 
Independent

The Gap of Time

The Winter’s Tale Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

The Winter's Tale, Retold

A. S. Byatt

First published in 1965, A.S. Byatt's Degrees of Freedom examined the first eight novels of Iris Murdoch, identifying freedom as a central theme in all of them, and looking at Murdoch's interest in the relations between art and goodness, master and slave, and the novel of character in the nineteenth century sense. Drawing on Iris Murdoch's own critical and philosphical writing, A.S. Byatt discussed her interest in the thought of Sartre, Plato, Freud and Simone Weil, and related this to the form of the novels themselves. 
 
This edition of Degrees of Freedom has an added dossier of later essays and reviews of Iris Murdoch's work by A.S Byatt, taking us up to the publication of The Book and the Brotherhood in 1987. It also includes a substantial pamplet written for the British Council which follows Murdoch's fiction as far as The Good Apprentice.

Degrees of Freedom

The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch

Lauren Elkin

*Shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay* 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 by the Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman, Observer, The Millions and Emerald Street 
 
'Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. 
 
That is an imaginary definition.' 
 
If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia – then what exactly is a flâneuse? 
 
In this gloriously provocative and celebratory book, Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities. 
 
From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, Flâneuse considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.

Flaneuse

Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

Christopher Isherwood

Don Bachardy

Christopher Isherwood was a celebrated English writer when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. They spent their first night together on Valentine’s Day 1953. Defying the conventions, the two men began living as an openly gay couple in an otherwise closeted Hollywood. The Animals provides a loving testimony of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until Chris’s death in 1986 – and survived affairs (on both sides) and a thirty-year-age-gap. 
 
In romantic letters to one another, the couple created the private world of the Animals. Chris was Dobbin, a stubborn old workhorse; Don was the playful young white cat, Kitty. But Don needed to carve out his own identity – some of their longest sequences of letters were exchanged during his trips to London and New York, to pursue his career as an artist and to widen his emotional and sexual horizons. 
 
Amidst the intimate domestic dramas, we learn of Isherwood’s continuing literary success –the royalty cheques from Cabaret, the acclaim for his pioneering novel A Single Man – and the bohemian whirl of Californian film suppers and beach life. Don, whose portraits of London theatreland were making his name, attends the world premiere of The Innocents with Truman Capote and afterwards dines with Deborah Kerr and the rest of the cast, spends weekends with Tennessee Williams, Cecil Beton, or the Earl and Countess of Harewood, and tours Egypt and Greece with a new love interest. But whatever happens in the outside world, Dobbin and Kitty always return to their ‘Basket’ and to each other. Candid, gossipy, exceptionally affectionate, The Animals is a unique interplay between two creative spirits, confident in their mutual devotion.

The Animals

Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk's world has been, well, different from yours and mine. 
 
The pieces that comprise Non-Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer - each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.

Non-Fiction

Andrew Solomon

In 1991 Andrew Solomon faced down tanks in Moscow with a band of Russian artists protesting the August coup. We find him on the quest for a rare bird in Zambia in 1998, and in Greenland in 2001 researching widespread depression among the Inuit. In 2002 he was in Afghanistan for the fall of the Taliban. He was brought in for questioning in Qaddafi’s Libya in 2006. In 2014 he travelled to Myanmar to meet ex-political prisoners as the country fitfully pushed towards freedom. Far and Away tells these and many other stories. With his signature compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities shift when governments change. 
 
A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon chronicles a life’s travels to the nexus of hope, courage, and the uncertainty of lived experience and tracks seismic shifts – cultural, political and spiritual. He takes us on a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences via intimate, deeply moving stories that reveal and revel in our common humanity.

Far and Away

How Travel Can Change the World

‘Determination, grit and humour shine through’ Lindsey Hilsum, Observer 
 
Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it’s like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection. 
 
A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat – female journalists – are working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. 
 
Here, nineteen of these women tell us, in their own words, about what it’s like to report on conflicts that (quite literally) hit close to home. Their daring and heartfelt stories, told here for the first time, shatter stereotypes about the region’s women and provide an urgently needed perspective on a part of the world that is frequently misunderstood. 
 
With a foreword by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. 
 
INCLUDING ESSAYS BY: Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam, Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim, Asmaa al-Ghoul, Hind Hassan, Eman Helal, Zeina Karam, Roula Khalaf, Nour Malas, Hwaida Saad, Amira Al-Sharif, Heba Shibani, Lina Sinjab, and Natacha Yazbeck

Our Women on the Ground

Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World

James Wood

Rediscover this deep, practical anatomy of the novel from 'the strongest ... literary critic we have' (New York Review of Books) in this new revised 10th anniversary edition. 
 
What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? 
 
What constitutes a 'telling' detail? 
 
When is a metaphor successful? 
 
Is realism realistic? 
 
Why do most endings of novels disappoint? 
 
In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions. 
 
Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page. 
 
'Should find a place on every novel-lover's shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it' Financial Times

How Fiction Works

In her powerful opening essays - 'Fathers', 'Forefathers' and 'Ancestors' - A. S. Byatt considers the renaissance of the historical novel and discusses particularly the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new 'Darwinian novel'. 
 
These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Muriel Spark, and other contemporary authors, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Pat Barker. 
 
She also offers fascinating insight into her own translation of historical fact into fiction in the two novellas which make up Angels and Insects.

On Histories and Stories

Selected Essays

Colin Grant

One day Colin Grant’s teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed with epilepsy. In A Smell of Burning Colin Grant tells the remarkable story of this strange and misunderstood disorder. He shows us the famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc and Vincent van Gogh, the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works, and, through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

A Smell of Burning

A Memoir of Epilepsy

The Story of Epilepsy

Ruth Padel

*First published as The Mara Crossing, now with new and updated material* 
 
'A prodigy, a book of wonders. Wonder, pity and terror, the searing section of voices in transit coercing compassion - and beyond that, empathy' Independent 
 
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 weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration - from the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts to Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, braving a river filled with the largest 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.

We Are All From Somewhere Else

Migration and Survival in Poetry and Prose

'A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life… Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph 
 
Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives. 
 
Homecoming is an unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of our history. 
 
** A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week** 
**A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year**

Homecoming

Voices of the Windrush Generation

Paul Mason

Globalisation has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s and up to today's anti-globalisation movement. 
 
Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today's front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London's Docklands - and how they're being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot. 
 
It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Live Working or Die Fighting

How The Working Class Went Global

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12 Vintage books that make perfect Christmas gifts

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The Penguin books that helped us through hard times

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