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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Thomas Harding

'I was riveted: this is a fascinating social history.' NIGELLA LAWSON 
 
'Five stars... history on a scale at once intimate and grand.' TELEGRAPH 
 
A panoramic new history of modern Britain, as told through the story of one extraordinary family, and one groundbreaking company. 
 
This is the story of how a family transformed themselves from penniless immigrants to build a company that revolutionised the way we eat, drink and are entertained. For over a century, Lyons was everywhere. Its restaurants and corner houses were on every high street, its coffee and tea in every cup, its products in every home. But it was a victory that was not easily won. 
 
Told through the lives of five generations, Legacy is at once intimate and sweeping, charting the tragedy and unimaginable success of one of Britain's most famous families. It is also an illuminating new exploration of Britain and its place in the world, from the bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf and The House by the Lake. 
 
'A magnificent book... endlessly fascinating.' JEWISH CHRONICLE 
 
'How the Lyons company took on the world... a satisfying slab of dynastic history.' GUARDIAN, 'Book of the Day' 
 
'Written with love and imagination... a masterclass in historical empathy.' TLS 
 
'An affectionate and colourful family history.' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'Rich... Fascinating... Harding is to be congratulated on this panoramic history.' EVENING STANDARD 
 
'Endlessly fascinating and hard to put down... this is a tour de force.' JULIA NEUBERGER

Legacy

The Remarkable History of J Lyons and the Family Behind It

One Family, a Cup of Tea and the Company that Took On the World

Nigel Jones

No building has been more intimately involved in the story of Britain than the Tower of London - a mighty, brooding stronghold in the very heart of the capital. Castle, prison, torture chamber, execution site, zoo, mint, treasure house, armoury, observatory: the Tower has been all these things and more, standing at the epicentre of dramatic, bloody and frequently cruel events for almost a thousand years. 
 
Setting this dramatic story firmly in the context of national - and international - events, Nigel Jones's superb history portrays the Tower of London not just as an ancient structure but as a living symbol of the nation.

Tower

David McKie

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Surnames are much more than convenient identity tags; they are windows into our families’ pasts. Some suggest ancestral trades (Butcher, Smith, Roper) or physical appearance (Long, Brown, Thynne). Some provide clues to where we come from (McDonald, Evans, Patel). And some – Rymer, Brocklebank, Stolbof – offer a hint of something just a little more exotic or esoteric. 
 
All are grist to the mill for David McKie who, in What’s in a Surname?, sets off on a journey around Britain to find out how such appellations have evolved and what they tell us about ourselves. En route he looks at the surname’s tentative beginnings in medieval times, and the myriad routes by which particular names became established. He considers some curious byways: the rise and fall of the multi-barrel surname and the Victorian reinvention of ‘embarrassing’ surnames among them. He considers whether fortune favours those whose surnames come at the beginning of the alphabet. And he celebrates the remarkable and the quirky, from the fearsome Ridley (the cry of which once struck terror in the hearts of their neighbours) to the legend-encrusted Tichborne, whose most famous holders were destined to suffer misfortune and controversy. Elegiac and amusing by turns, he offers a wonderfully entertaining wander along the footpaths of the nation’s history and culture, celebrating not just the Smiths and Joneses of these islands but the Chaceporcs and Swetinbeddes, too.

What's in a Surname?

A Journey from Abercrombie to Zwicker

Steve Jones

NOW A LIMITED SERIES DIRECTED BY DANNY BOYLE 
_____________________ 
 
Foreword by Chrissie Hynde 
 
Without the Sex Pistols there would be no punk rock, and without Steve Jones there would be no Sex Pistols. 
 
It was Steve who formed Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols, the band that eventually went on to become the Sex Pistols, with his schoolmate Paul Cook and who was its original leader. As the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of Punk - the influence and cultural significance of which is felt in music, fashion and the visual arts to this day - Steve tells his story for the very first time. 
 
Rising from the streets of Hammersmith, Steve Jones was once a lonely, neglected boy living off his wits and petty thievery. Given purpose by the glam art rock of David Bowie and Roxy Music, he became one of the first generation of punks taken under the wings of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. For the very first time Steve describes the neglect and abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather, and how his interest in music and fashion saved him from a potential life of crime. 
 
From the Kings Road of the early seventies, through the years of the Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and the recording of Never Mind the Bollocks (ranked number 41 in Rolling Stone magazine's Best Albums of All Time), to his self-imposed exile in New York and Los Angeles where he battled with alcohol, heroin and sex addiction - caught in a cycle of rehab and relapse - Lonely Boy, written with music journalist and author Ben Thompson, is the story of an unlikely guitar hero who, with the Sex Pistols, changed history.

Lonely Boy

Tales from a Sex Pistol (Soon to be a limited series directed by Danny Boyle)

Graeme Garden

Tim Brooke-Taylor

Barry Cryer

Jon Naismith

Do words fail you? Never again, once you've become the proud owner of The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary. 
 
Every word has a meaning, but over the years those meanings change. Dip into these helpfully illustrated pages and you'll find many of the words you use every day without ever realising that their up-to-date definition is something entirely different. 
 
Words like 'bunny' (rather like a bun), or 'cherish' (rather like a chair), 'Cardiology' (the study of knitwear) or 'buggery' (the study of insects), 'Venezuala' (a gondola with a harpoon) or 'Norway' (a Geordie exclamation of surprise), 'ivy' (the Roman for "four") or 'faculty' (cockney for "there's no more PG Tips"). 
 
Thanks to The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary you can now use familiar, everyday words in total confidence, fully appraised of their latest meanings. Happy wording!

The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

Andrea Wulf

One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds... 
 
Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour. 
 
This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond, The Brother Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

The Brother Gardeners

Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

Zaiba Malik

For Zaiba Malik, growing up in Bradford in the '70s and '80s certainly has its moments - staying up all night during Ramadan with her father; watching mad Mr Aziz searching for his goat during Eid; dancing along to Top of the Pops (so long as no-one's watching). And, of course, there's her mother - whether she's writing another ingratiating letter to the Queen or repeatedly referring to Tom Jones as 'Thumb Jone'. 
 
But Zaiba's story is also one of anxiety and seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Growing up she is constantly torn between two identities: 'British' and 'Muslim'. Alienated at school and confused at home, the racism she encounters as a child mirrors the horrors she experiences at the hands of Bangladeshi interrogators 
as a journalist years later. 
 
We Are A Muslim, Please is a stirring and enchanting memoir. We see, through Zaiba's childhood eyes, the poignancy of growing up in a world whose prejudices, contradictions and ambiguities are at once distressing and utterly captivating.

We Are a Muslim, Please

Marc Mulholland

A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
REVOLUTIONARY. CONSPIRATOR. JAIL-BREAKER. FUGITIVE. DUELLIST. RADICAL. AND KILLER. 
 
ON 8 December 1854, Emmanuel Barthélemy visited 73 Warren Street in the heart of radical London for the very last time. Within half an hour, two men were dead. 
 
The newspapers of Victorian England were soon in a frenzy. Who was this foreigner come to British shores to slay two upstanding subjects? But Barthélemy was no ordinary criminal... 
 
Marc Mulholland reveals the true story of one of nineteenth-century London's most notorious murderers and revolutionaries. Following in Barthélemy’s footsteps, he leads us from the barricades of the French capital to the English fireside of Karl Marx, and the dangling noose of London's Newgate prison, shining a light into a dark underworld of conspiracy, rebellion and fatal idealism. 
 
The Murderer of Warren Street is a thrilling portrait of a troubled man in troubled times - full of resonance for our own terrorised age.

The Murderer of Warren Street

The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary

Rob Cowen

ONE OF BRITAIN'S FAVOURITE NATURE BOOKS AS FEATURED ON BBC's WINTERWATCH 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 
 
'Bold and beautiful.' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic ... leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world' Michael Palin 
 
'Touched by genius' John Lewis-Stempel 
 
'Absolutely mesmerizing, utterly beautiful and engrossing' Joanne Harris 
 
After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, and about to become a father for the first time, Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for open space, he ventures out to a nearby edge-land: a pylon-slung tangle of wood, hedge, field, meadow and river that lies unclaimed and overlooked on the outskirts of town. 
 
Digging deeper into this lost landscape, he begins to uncover its many layers and lives – beast, bird, insect, plant and people – in kaleidoscopic detail. As the seasons change and the birth of his child draws closer, his transformative journey into the blurry space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound. In bringing this edge-land to life, Cowen offers both a both a unique portrait of people and place through time and an unforgettable exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

Common Ground

One of Britain’s Favourite Nature Books as featured on BBC’s Winterwatch

_____________________________________ 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
WINNER OF THE JQ WINGATE PRIZE 2015 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
 
'A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.' JOHN LE CARRÉ 
_____________________________________ 
Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, becoming an investigator of war crimes. 
 
Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and children. 
 
The hunt was on. 
 
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf Höss his most elusive target. 
 
In this book Thomas Harding reveals for the very first time the full account of Höss’ capture. Moving from the Middle-Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s, to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, Hanns and Rudolf tells the story of two German men whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.

Hanns and Rudolf

The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

Simon Heffer

‘A riveting account of the pre-First World War years . . . The Age of Decadence is an enormously impressive and enjoyable read.’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 
 
‘A magnificent account of a less than magnificent epoch.’ Jonathan Meades, Literary Review 
 
The folk-memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful, contented, orderly and thriving country. She commanded a vast empire. She bestrode international commerce. Her citizens were living longer, profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamt of, and enjoying an expanding range of comforts and pastimes. The mood of pride and self-confidence is familiar from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, newsreels of George V’s coronation and the London’s great Edwardian palaces. 
 
Yet things were very different below the surface. In The Age of Decadence Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He explains how, despite the nation’s massive power, a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny. He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century’s gravest constitutional crisis and coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history. He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists’ public protest bordered on terrorism. He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy and scandal. He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car, the sensationalist press and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, but also the Arts and Crafts of William Morris and the nostalgia of A. E. Housman. And he concludes with the crisis that in the summer of 1914 threatened the existence of the United Kingdom – a looming civil war in Ireland. 
 
He lights up the era through vivid pen-portraits of the great men and women of the day – including Gladstone, Parnell, Asquith and Churchill, but also Mrs Pankhurst, Beatrice Webb, Baden-Powell, Wilde and Shaw – creating a richly detailed panorama of a great power that, through both accident and arrogance, was forced to face potentially fatal challenges. 
 
 
‘A devastating critique of prewar Britain . . . disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live.’ Gerard DeGroot, The Times 
 
‘You won’t put it down . . . A really riveting read.’ Rana Mitter, BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking

The Age of Decadence

Britain 1880 to 1914

Neil Powell

Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age. 
 
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London’s creative and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians before re-crossing the Atlantic by ship in the perilous days of 1942. 
 
But the east coast of England was where Britten, as he himself said, belonged: this was where he returned to write his most famous opera, Peter Grimes, and – with Pears and Eric Crozier – to found the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. In the years that followed, his worldwide reputation grew steadily, helped by a busy schedule of international tours and, for many, crowned by the extraordinary success of his War Requiem. Meanwhile, his festival went from strength to strength, its progress symbolised by the opening of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1967. 
 
Britten was a mass of paradoxes: a solitary, introspective thinker who came to ebullient life in the company of young people, for whom he composed some of his most memorable works; a man of the political left who was on the friendliest terms with members of the royal family; a composer inspired by some of the twentieth century’s deepest preoccupations who combined innovation with a profound understanding of musical tradition. Devoted to his friends, protégés and fellow musicians, he was, above all, someone who lived for music. 
 
Neil Powell’s book is the landmark biography for Britten’s centenary year: a subtle and moving portrait of a brilliant, complex and ultimately loveable man.

Benjamin Britten

A Life For Music

Dan Cruickshank

Georgian London evokes images of elegant buildings and fine art, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife, houses of ill repute widespread, and many tens of thousands of people dependent in some way or other on the wages of sin. The sex industry was, in fact, a very powerful force indeed, and in The Secret History of Georgian London, Dan Cruickshank compellingly shows how it came to affect almost every aspect of life and culture in the capital. 
 
Examining the nature of the sex trade, he offers a tantalising insight into the impact of prostitution to give us vivid portraits of some of the women who became involved in its world. And he discusses the very varied attitudes of contemporaries - those who sympathised, those who indulged, and those who condemned. As he powerfully argues, these women, and many thousands like them, not only shaped eighteenth-century London, they also helped determine its future development.

The Secret History of Georgian London

How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital

Tony Fletcher

'I was no longer fitting in at school. I was unsure of my friends, and they were increasingly unsure of me. I wanted to be a rock star. But while all around, voices were starting to break, acne beginning to appear, facial hair sprouting, I remained all flabby flesh and innate scruff, with a high-pitched whine and not a muscle to my name. I was the runt of the class and rarely allowed to forget it. I had no father at home to help me out, and could hardly talk to my mum. So I took solace in The Jam.' 
 
As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history. 
 
Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity. 
 
Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.

Boy About Town

Lara Prescott

________________________ 
'Utterly compelling... I absolutely loved it' Sarah Winman 
'Tantalising' Sunday Times 
'Thoroughly enjoyable' Guardian 
________________________ 
No one looks twice at the women in the typing pool. 
 
No one knows that two of them are trading secrets. 
 
The secret is a book, the size of the one in your hands, and within its pages, a love story that could change the world. 
 
But where there is love there is pain. And where there is deception, formidable danger... 
________________________ 
'Mixing Mad Men and John le Carré ... addictive' i paper 
 
'Irresistibly charged' Mail on Sunday

The Secrets We Kept

The sensational Cold War spy thriller

London Review Of Books

Autobiography has been an essential element of the London Review of Books since its founding in 1979. This volume collects many outstanding pieces of memoir that first appeared in the LRB’s pages. 
 
Here, Lorna Sage remembers growing up with her grandfather during the Second World War, Jenny Diski imagines her own burial, and Hilary Mantel tackles a strongman on her hospital bed. Julian Barnes writes about not getting the Booker Prize. Andrew O’Hagan confesses to his past as a schoolboy bully. A. J. P. Taylor hallucinates. Alan Bennett reports on the lady who lives in his drive. Tariq Ali relates his misadventures in Pyongyang. Anne Enright describes her obsession with Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells grow in petri dishes around the world. Frank Kermode tells his wartime stories. Terry Castle recounts her complicated friendship with Susan Sontag. There are reports from poker tables and coal mines, and stories of double agents, online romance and stigmata. 
 
With a preface by Alan Bennett, Meeting the Devil displays the range of power and delight possible in the study of self-portrait.

Meeting the Devil

A Book of Memoir

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HESSELL-TILTMAN HISTORY PRIZE 2017 
 
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 
 
Religious strife, civil conflict, waves of immigration, the rise and fall of industry, great prosperity and grinding poverty – the handful of streets that constitute modern Spitalfields have witnessed all this and much more. 
 
In Spitalfields, one of Britain's best-loved historians tells the stories of the streets he has lived in for four decades. Starting in Roman times and continuing right up to the present day, Cruickshank explains how Spitalfields' streets evolved, what people have lived there, and what lives they have led. En route, he discovers the tales of the Huguenot weavers who made Spitalfields their own after the Great Fire of London. He recounts the experiences of the first Jewish immigrants. He evokes the slum-ridden courts and alleys of Jack the Ripper's Spitalfields. And he describes the transformation of the Spitalfields he first encountered in the 1970s from a war-damaged collection of semi-derelict houses to the vibrant community it is today. 
 
This is a fascinating evocation of one of London's most distinctive districts. At the same time, it is a history of England in miniature.

Spitalfields

The History of a Nation in a Handful of Streets

Marc Morris

Beginning with their introduction in the eleventh century, and ending with their widespread abandonment in the seventeenth, Marc Morris explores many of the country’s most famous castles, as well as some spectacular lesser-known examples. At times this is an epic tale, driven by characters like William the Conqueror, King John and Edward I, full of sieges and conquest on an awesome scale. But it is also by turns an intimate story of less eminent individuals, whose adventures, struggles and ambitions were reflected in the fortified residences they constructed. Be it ever so grand or ever so humble, a castle was first and foremost a home. 
 
To understand castles – who built them, who lived in them, and why – is to understand the forces that shaped medieval Britain.

Castle

A History of the Buildings that Shaped Medieval Britain

Ruth Whippman

'Essential reading. So funny, so relevant, so fascinating ... I loved it' Marian Keyes 
 
'A whip-sharp British Bill Bryson' Sunday Times 
 
'Ruth Whippman is my new favorite cultural critic, and her book was such a joy to read' Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B (co-authored with Sheryl Sandberg) 
 
When British journalist Ruth Whippman moved to America it seemed that everyone she met was obsessed with one thing: finding happiness. Americans spend more money and energy on becoming happier than anyone on earth, but yet they are some of the least happy people in the developed world. 
 
So Ruth sets off on a journey to work out what’s going wrong, and most importantly, what lessons we can all learn about what truly makes for a happy life. 
 
From nearly falling apart during a controversial self-help course promising total transformation, to investigating a 'happiness city' in the Nevada desert, from spending time with the Mormons in Utah to exploring the darker truths behind the positive psychology movement, Ruth tries it all. Along the way she stumbles upon a more effective, less anxiety inducing path to contentment.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Why are we driving ourselves crazy and how can we stop?

Duncan Hamilton

'Without football, we were strangers under a shared roof. With it, we were father and son.’ 
 
Inspired by his father’s devotion to Newcastle United and the heroes of yesteryear, Duncan Hamilton brings to life a bygone age telling the story of British football from the hardscrabble 1940s and the ‘never-had-it-so-good’ ’50s right through to the dowdy First Division of the ’70s and ’80s, and today’s slick Premiership. Hamilton recalls some of football’s most sublime players, managers and characters, from Bill Shankly and Jackie Milburn to George Best and Lionel Messi. 
 
But at the heart of The Footballer Who could Fly is Hamilton’s relationship with his own father. Here he tells how football became the only real connection between two people who, apart from their love of the beautiful game, were wholly different from one another.

The Footballer Who Could Fly

Andrew Lycett

The definitive biography of Wilkie Collins: the Victorian novelist, playwright, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, who lived a life of sensation. 
 
Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, was the master of the Victorian sensation novel, but he also had a complex private life that could have come straight out of one of his bestselling novels. While his books focused on uncovering family secrets, Wilkie was determined to keep his own unconventional domestic arrangements – living with two women, neither of them his wife – hidden from the outside world. 
 
In this colourful investigative biography, set against the backdrop of Victorian London, Andrew Lycett brings to life one of England’s greatest writers and reveals a brilliant, contrary and sensual man, deeply committed to his work.

Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

Luke Haines

In Post Everything, Luke Haines demonstrates that the only way to survive the tyrannical scourge of Britpop is to become an Outsider. The 'avant-garde Arthur Scargill' calls upon the nation's pop stars to down tools and go on strike. We learn the story of Haines' post-Britpop art house trio Black Box Recorder (Chas and Dave with a chanteuse), we meet a talking cat, two dead rappers (Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur), and a mystical England football manager. Haines even finds time to write a musical for the National Theatre. 
 
Blisteringly funny and searingly scathing, Post Everything may quite possibly be the first and only truly surreal comic rock memoir. It even contains a killer recipe for scrambled eggs.

Post Everything

Outsider Rock and Roll

Jeanette Winterson

'Utterly compulsive' Daily Telegraph 
'A gripping gothic read' Sarah Hall, Guardian 
'So seductive ... I was hooked' Independent 
 
The Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter - alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt. 
 
Good Friday, 1612. Two notorious witches await trial and certain death in Lancaster Castle, whilst a small group gathers in secret protest. Into this group the self-made Alice Nutter stakes her claim and swears to fight against the rule of fear. But what is Alice's connection to these witches? What is magic if not power, and what will happen to the women who possess it?

The Daylight Gate

Becky Cooper

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 
 
'Brilliant and extraordinary' Philippe Sands 
 
'Astonishing ... Cooper is one hell of a detective' Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body 
 
'Seductive ... Haunting' Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply 
 
In 1969, Jane Britton, an ambitious graduate student at Harvard, was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. A whisper network kept Jane's story alive: a rumour of an affair with a professor that ended in tragedy when Britton threatened to expose him. 
 
Forty years later, when curious undergrad Becky Cooper first heard the story, she felt compelled to find out more. We Keep the Dead Close is an account of her complex and fascinating investigation spanning a decade.

We Keep the Dead Close

A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

Anna Quindlen

'The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old.' 
 
For eighteen years Fran Benedetto kept her secret, hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice - she ran for both their lives. 
 
Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. She uses a name that isn't hers, watches over her son, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up with her. Bobby always said he would never let her go, and Fran Benedetto is certain of one thing: it is only a matter of time.

Black And Blue

David Loyn

Afghanistan has been a strategic prize for more than 200 years. Foreign invaders have continually fought across its beautiful and inhospitable terrain, in conflicts variously ruthless, misguided and bloody. A century ago, the common sneer about how British soldiers treated Afghan tribesmen was that they would 'butcher' them, then 'bolt'. 
 
Butcher and Bolt recounts this violent history, beginning with the very first British mission - an encounter that ushered in two centuries of conflict littered with misunderstandings and broken promises, in which the British, the Russians and later the Americans repeatedly underestimated the ability of the Afghans and the power of the Frontier tribes. 
 
In a new final chapter that brings the book right up to date, David Loyn draws on the unique access he has had to Afghanistan over the past two decades to address the emerging threat of the Pakistani Taliban and the challenges that face those now fighting on the most dangerous frontier in the world.

Butcher and Bolt

Helen Rappaport

Shortlisted for the HWA Sharpe Books Non-Fiction Crown Award 
 
A work of investigative history that will completely change the way in which we see the Romanov story. Finally, here is the truth about the secret plans to rescue Russia’s last imperial family. 
 
On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets. 
 
Historian Helen Rappaport sets out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them. It was not, ever, a simple case of one British King’s loss of nerve. In this race against time, many other nations and individuals were facing political and personal challenges of the highest order. 
 
In this incredible detective story, Rappaport draws on an unprecedented range of unseen sources, tracking down missing documents, destroyed papers and covert plots to liberate the family by land, sea and even sky. Through countless twists and turns, this revelatory work unpicks many false claims and conspiracies, revealing the fiercest loyalty, bitter rivalries and devastating betrayals as the Romanovs, imprisoned, awaited their fate. 
 
A remarkable new work of history from Helen Rappaport, author of Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs.

The Race to Save the Romanovs

The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Imperial Family

Chloe Combi

Featured on the Podcast You Don't Know Me hosted by Chloe Combi - an exploration into the lives of global Gen Z 
 
'An important and timely book. These are voices that need to be heard.' - Anthony Horowitz 
 
The world is changing by the day. Today's teenagers are growing up in a world of widening social inequality, political apathy and economic uncertainty. 
 
They join gangs, and are kind. 
They're obese, and they're more health-conscious than any generation before. 
They have underage sex, and they're less likely to get pregnant young. 
They drink, and they go teetotal. 
They watch porn, and they shun it. 
They go to church, and they have no religion. 
They're a menace to society. They are society. 
 
Curious, creative and worried about the future, Generation Z have grown up in a world of unprecedented connection, and ever-increasing division. Chloe Combi has travelled around the UK, talking with teenagers from all kinds of backgrounds about their lives, their fears and their dreams, uncovering some truly surprising stories about a generation often stereotyped and dismissed. 
 
Told in their voices, Generation Z is a shocking, enlightening and funny portrait of how it feels to be young in modern Britain, and what it takes to survive and thrive on the journey to adulthood.

Generation Z

Their Voices, Their Lives

Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind. 
 
Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people – politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers – who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. 
 
It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people – and how our forebears’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

High Minds

The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

Katie Waldegrave

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, were life-long friends. They were also the daughters of best friends: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic Age. 
 
Living in the shadow of their fathers’ extraordinary fame brought Sara and Dora great privilege, but at a terrible cost. In different ways, each father almost destroyed his daughter. Growing up in the shadow of genius, each girl made it her life’s ambition to dedicate herself to her father’s writing and reputation. Anorexia, drug addiction and depression were part of the legacy of fame, but so too were great friendship and love. 
 
Drawing on a host of new sources, Katie Waldegrave tells the never-before-told story of how two young women, born into greatness, shaped their own legacies.

The Poets' Daughters

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge

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