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Helen Macdonald

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
'Thrilling dispatches from a vanishing world' Observer 
 
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. 
 
From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. 
 
Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches. 
 
Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers. 
 
'Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working' The Telegraph

Vesper Flights

The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of H is for Hawk

John Cooper Clarke

‘Yes, it was be there or be square as, clad in the slum chic of the hipster, he issued the slang anthems of the zip age in the desperate esperanto of the bop. John Cooper Clarke: the name behind the hairstyle, the words walk in the grooves hacking through the hi-fi paradise of true luxury’ 
 
Punk. Poet. Pioneer. The Bard of Salford’s seminal collection is as scabrous, wry &amp; vivid now as it was when first published over 25 years ago. 
 
‘The godfather of British performance poetry’ 
Daily Telegraph

Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt

Ann Wroe

'She's a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches.' Hilary Mantel 
 
A Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Goethe claimed to know what light was. Galileo and Einstein both confessed they didn't. On the essential nature of light, and how it operates, the scientific jury is still out. There is still time, therefore, to listen to painters and poets on the subject. They, after all, spend their lives pursuing light and trying to tie it down. 
 
Six Facets of Light is a series of meditations on this most elusive and alluring feature of human life. Set mostly on the Downs and coastline of East Sussex, the most luminous part of England, it interweaves a walker's experiences of light in Nature with the observations, jottings and thoughts of a dozen writers and painters - and some scientists - who have wrestled to define and understand light. From Hopkins to Turner, Coleridge to Whitman, Fra Angelico to Newton, Ravilious to Dante, the mystery of light is teased out and pondered on. Some of the results are surprising. 
 
By using mostly notebooks and sketchbooks, this book becomes a portrait of the transitoriness, randomness, swiftness, frustrations and quicksilver beauty that are the essence of light. It is a work to be enjoyed, pondered over, engaged with, provoked by; to be packed in the rucksack of every walker heading for the sea or the hills, or to be opened to bring that outside radiance within four dark town walls. 
 
Lifescapes by Ann Wroe is coming in August 2023.

Six Facets Of Light

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE.* 'One of the greatest writers of our time' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
The Perfect Nine is a glorious epic about the founding of Kenya's Gikuyu people and the ideals of beauty, courage and unity. 
 
Gikuyu and Mumbi settled on the peaceful and bounteous foot of Mount Kenya after fleeing war and hunger. When ninety-nine suitors arrive on their land, seeking to marry their famously beautiful daughters, called The Perfect Nine, the parents ask their daughters to choose for themselves, but to choose wisely. 
 
First the young women must embark on a treacherous quest with the suitors, to find a magical cure for their youngest sister, Warigia, who cannot walk. As they journey up the mountain, the number of suitors diminishes and the sisters put their sharp minds and bold hearts to the test, conquering fear, doubt, hunger and many menacing ogres, as they attempt to return home. But it is perhaps Warigia's unexpected adventure that will be most challenging of all. 
 
Blending folklore, mythology and allegory, Ngugi wa Thiong'o chronicles the adventures of Gikuyu and Mumbi, and how their brave daughters became the matriarchs of the Gikuyu clans, in stunning verse, with all the epic elements of danger, humour and suspense. 
 
'A tremendous writer... it's hard to doubt the power of the written word when you hear the story of Ngugi wa Thiong'o' Guardian

The Perfect Nine

The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi

Tim Parks

In Hell and Back, Tim Parks reminds us just how exciting the essay form can be - turning his attention to classic authors like Dante, Borges and Leopardi, as well as various contemporary writers including Vikram Seth, W.G. Sebald and Salman Rushdie.

Hell And Back

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Fredrik Ekelund

Karl Ove Knausgaard and fellow writer Fredrik Ekelund kick around thoughts and ideas on football, life, art and politics. 
 
Karl Ove Knausgaard is sitting at home in Skåne with his wife, four small children and a dog. He is watching football on TV and falls asleep in front of the set. He likes 0-0 draws, cigarettes, coffee and Argentina. 
 
Fredrik Ekelund is away in Brazil, where he plays football on the beach and watches matches with friends. Fredrik loves games that end up 4-3 and teams that play beautiful football. He likes caipirinhas and Brazil. 
 
In Home and Away, two writers use football and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil to reflect on life and death, art and politics, class and literature and the most important question: was this the best football championship ever?

Home and Away

Writing the Beautiful Game

Gabriel Pogrund

Patrick Maguire

'THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR' Tim Shipman 
 
A blistering narrative exposé of infighting, skulduggery and chaos in Corbyn's Labour party, now revised and updated. 
 
* A Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and i Newspaper Book of the Year * 
 
Left Out tells, for the first time, the astonishing full story of Labour's recent transformation and historic defeat. 
 
Drawing on unrivalled access, this blistering exposé moves from the peak of Jeremy Corbyn's popularity and the shock hung parliament of 2017 to Labour's humbling in 2019 and the election of Keir Starmer. It reveals a party at war with itself, and puts the reader in the room as tensions boil over, sworn enemies forge unlikely alliances and lifelong friendships are tested to breaking point. 
 
This is the ultimate account of the greatest experiment seen in British politics for a generation. 
 
'Gripping... Every bit as good as people say' Guardian 
 
'Reads like a thriller...told with panache and pace' Financial Times 
 
'The definitive post-mortem of the Corbyn project' Sunday Times

Left Out

The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn

Ben Wilson

From the Sunday Times bestselling author, a dazzling, globe-spanning history of humankind's greatest invention: the city. 
 
'Brilliant...enchanting' Evening Standard 'Exhilarating' New York Times 
 
The story of the city is the story of civilisation. From Uruk and Babylon to Baghdad and Venice, and on to London, New York, Shanghai and Lagos, Ben Wilson takes us through millennia on a thrilling global tour of the key urban centres of history. 
 
Rich with individual characters, scenes and snapshots of daily life, Metropolis is at once the story of these extraordinary places and of the vital role they have played in making us who we are. 
 
'Panoramic...entertaining and rich in wondrous detail' Tom Holland 
 
'A towering achievement... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time' Wall Street Journal

Metropolis

A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention

A History of Humankind’s Greatest Invention

Martin Amis

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction – his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. 
 
The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis’s heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump’s rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

The Rub of Time

Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016

Aidan Higgins

THE BOOK: Flotsam and Jetsam is a selection of prose, some previously unpublished, written over the last thirty five years by one of Ireland's greatest writers. It includes work adapted from earlier novels, short stories and radio plays.

Flotsam And Jetsam

Julia Blackburn

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE AND THE HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 
 
A journey told through stories and songs into Doggerland, the ancient region that once joined the east coast of England to Holland 
 
Time Song tells of the creation, the existence and the loss of a country now called Doggerland, a huge and fertile area that once connected the entire east coast of England with mainland Europe, until it was finally submerged by rising sea levels around 5000 BC. 
 
Julia Blackburn mixes fragments from her own life with a series of eighteen 'songs' and all sorts of stories about the places and the people she meets in her quest to get closer to an understanding of this vanished land. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilised in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man who, despite having lain in a peat bog since the start of the Bronze Age, seems to be about to wake from a dream... 
 
'This book is a wonder' Adam Nicolson, Spectator 
 
'A clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past' Antony Gormley

Time Song

Searching for Doggerland

Timothy Garton Ash

'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free 
 
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe. 
 
Drawing on half a century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered. 
 
Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe. Highly personal and deeply felt, this book is also full of vivid experiences, encounters and anecdotes: from his father's memories of D-Day to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo, and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe and the US. 
 
Homelands is both a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. At its heart, this book is an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

Homelands

A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

A Personal History of Europe

Andy Mitchell

Psychedelics have made a comeback, but the truth is they remain a mystery. 
 
In this daring, profound and wildly entertaining investigation, clinical neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell tests the claims being made for these substances by taking ten different psychedelics in ten different settings. 
 
Journeying from a neuroimaging lab in London to the Colombian Amazon via Silicon Valley and his friend&rsquo;s basement kitchen, his encounters with scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and con men, psychonauts and shamans, and above all with the drugs themselves, take us beyond the hype and reveal the reality of psychedelics &ndash; that they are as enchanting but ultimately unfathomable as experience itself.

Ten Trips

A Psychedelic Adventure

The New Reality of Psychedelics

David Lodge

A collection of essays on writers and writing by the Booker-shortlisted novelist and critic. 
 
Writing about real lives takes various forms, which overlap and may be combined with each other: biography, autobiography, biographical criticism, biographical fiction, memoir, confession, diary. 
 
In these thoughtful and enlightening essays David Lodge considers some particularly interesting examples of life-writing, and contributes several of his own. The subjects include celebrated modern British writers such as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett, and two major figures from the past, Anthony Trollope and H.G.Wells. Lodge examines connections between the style and the man in the diaries of the playwright Simon Gray and the cultural criticism of Terry Eagleton, and recalls how his own literary career was entwined with that of his friend Malcolm Bradbury. 
 
All except one of the subjects (Princess Diana) are or were themselves professionally “in writing”, making this collection a kind of casebook of the splendours and miseries of authorship. In a final essay Lodge describes the genesis and compositional method of his recent novel about H.G.Wells, A Man of Parts, and engages with the critical controversies that have been provoked by the increasing popularity of narrative and dramatic writing that combines fact and fiction. 
 
Drawing on David Lodge’s long experience as a novelist and critic, Lives in Writing is a fascinating study of the interface between life and literature.

Lives in Writing

Umberto Eco

Holography, wax museums, the secret meaning of spectator sports, Superman and the intellectual effects of over-tight jeans are just a few of the subjects covered in this collection of witty, entertaining and thought-provoking delights from Umberto Eco, celebrated author of The Name of the Rose.

Faith in Fakes

Elena Passarello

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans. Here are the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin’s tortoise Harriet, and in an extraordinary essay, Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to electrocute him). Modelled loosely on a medieval bestiary, these witty , playful, provocative essays traverse history, myth, science and more, introducing a stunning new writer to British readers.

Animals Strike Curious Poses

Ian Urbina

'Just incredible' Naomi Klein 
'Gripping and shocking...with the pace of a thriller' The Times 
 
A New York Times bestseller, The Outlaw Ocean is a riveting, adrenalin-fuelled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. 
 
The oceans are some of the last untamed frontiers on our planet. 
 
Too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these treacherous waters play host to the extremes of human behaviour and activity. 
 
From traffickers, smugglers and pirates to vigilante conservationists, stowaways and seabound abortion-providers, Ian Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world and their risk-fraught lives. Through their extraordinary stories, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil and shipping industries - but to which all of us are connected. 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2019 
 
'An astonishing book about a world most of us don't even know exists' Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland 
 
'An outstanding investigation of a global criminal culture on the high seas' Guardian 
 
'Truly important... A complex portrait of an unseen and disturbing world' New York Times

The Outlaw Ocean

Crime and Survival in the Last Untamed Frontier

Tracy Chevalier

‘A compact and intense read full of twists, turns and intrigue’ Daily Express 
 
The bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Last Runaway returns with a tale of jealousy, bullying and revenge. 
 
 Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day – so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again. 
 
 The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard in Tracy Chevalier's powerful drama of friends torn apart.

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