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P.G. Wodehouse

Celebrating 120 years of P. G. Wodehouse with his very first novel. 
 
'What a mad thing to go and do. Jolly sporting, though.' 
 
Suspicion abounds at St Austin's School when two silver trophies, or 'pots', are stolen from the cricket pavilion. Jim Thomson, a talented sportsman who due to an unfortunate series of coincidences could be thought to be the burglar, resolves to clear his name. Featuring a man from Scotland Yard, chases through the woods and an exasperated headmaster, Wodehouse's first novel is a paean to his beloved, idyllic late Victorian schooldays, punctuated by bouts of gentlemanly sport and comic escapades. All the hallmarks of what makes Wodehouse the greatest comic writer of all are in evidence here, in a spiffing read for Wodehouse aficionados and the uninitiated alike.

The Pothunters

120th Anniversary edition

Eleanor Doughty

There are fewer than 5000 people who can genuinely claim to be members of the British aristocracy, and yet they loom large in the popular consciousness. We're fascinated by their houses and estates, their lives and loves, their foibles and eccentricities. And we entertain the strong suspicion that, while they may be fellow citizens, they are very far from being People Like Us. 
 
In Heirs and Graces Eleanor Doughty draws on her unparalleled access to a bewildering range of dukes, duchesses, earls and others to create a vivid picture of who they are and how they tick. En route she traces their progress from a post-war era when they and their like were described by one future Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer as 'selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent' to their diverse current roles as guardians of vast ancestral mansions, farmers, financiers and much else beside. She looks at key rites of passage, from cradle, via boarding school to grave. And she tells stories of their ups and downs, and of the doings of the heroes and villains who fill their ranks. 
 
The result is a wonderfully rich, often amusing, always revealing account of the fortunes of the aristocracy over the past century and a series of fascinating glimpses into what it is like to be an aristocrat in Britain today.

Heirs and Graces

A History of the Modern British Aristocracy

Adam Roberts

'Think Bridget Jones if she were in The Bear' SUNDAY TIMES STYLE 
'Slyly satirical and richly comedic' EVENING STANDARD 
'Sharp, witty and funny ... the perfect beach read' INDEPENDENT 
'Literally the most delicious beach read ... The Devil Wears Prada for devoted foodies' PLUM SYKES 
'Part romp, part satire and frequently mouthwatering. Do not read on an empty stomach' HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 
'A delicious debut' PEOPLE 
 
What if Andy Sachs found a job in a test kitchen ... 
 
When twenty-something Isabella Pasternack is fired from her job at a digital food magazine, she accepts a thankless job for the paycheck: ghostwrite the very past-due cookbook for a once-beloved thirty-something actress, Molly Babcock. 
 
Molly, trying to repair her reputation after a serious downward spiral, meets Isabella’s earnest attempts to connect with inconsistency, indifference, and cruelty. But, for the first time in her life, Isabella is determined to dig in her heels, and figure out if there’s anything Molly actually knows how to cook (or even likes to eat). 
 
Isabella’s slice of contemporary New York is filled out by a cast including: Isabella’s acerbic roommate and best friend Owen, her widowed mother whose cooking isn’t only bad, it’s dangerous, and of course a handsome chef love interest. Hilarious and hopeful, at its core, Food Person is about commitment to self-discovery, the beauty of community, and how unapologetically forging your own future can lead to everyone getting the ending they deserve. And of course, very delicious food. 
 
'A fun summer read' DAILY MAIL 
'A boisterous page-turner' WASHINGTON POST 
'Utterly delicious and satisfying to the end' MARY ROACH 
'Hilarious, harrowing, and heartwarming ... if you are not a food person already, it may make one out of you' J. RYAN STRADAL 
'A debut that's about as perfect as they come ... Get ready for a riotous romp' GRANT GINDER 
'A savoury meal of a debut. Charming, witty ... You'll want seconds!' STEVEN ROWLEY

Food Person

Harry Sidebottom

Bestselling author Harry Sidebottom takes readers on a thrilling journey through a day in the life of the most iconic figure of the ancient world: the Roman gladiator 
 
‘Magnificent… Was I not entertained? I absolutely was’ 
Dominic Sandbrook, Times Books of the Year 
 
'Wonderfully panoramic … endlessly informative, rich with unexpected detail but never heavy to read' Literary Review 
 
'Grippingly original' 
Tom Holland 
 
'Blends extensive research with a talent for vivid storytelling to distil 700 years of gladiator history into the 24 hours around match day' 
The Times 
 
*A TIMES AND ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
Dressed in armour and clutching a bloody sword, the Roman gladiator is the most iconic figure of the ancient world. Both fascinating and repulsive to us now, he was in his own time a deeply controversial character, by turns hated and idealized – and always at the heart of Roman culture. But what did he really mean to the Romans? What did they see in the gladiator and the spectacle of the games? And what does he reveal to us today about the Roman way of life? 
 
Brilliantly written and meticulously researched, this book tells the stories of the gladiators and those who observed them – from grand emperors to lowly slaves – illuminating and analysing the all-consuming passion of the Roman Empire for the spectacle of mortal combat. In doing so, it reveals Roman ideas about everything from freedom and servitude to sex and desire, from courage and cowardice to death and the afterlife. 
 
Taking readers on an unforgettable twenty-four-hour adventure – beginning the night before the games and ending the evening after – Those Who Are About To Die gives a blow-by-blow account of what life was really like in the brutally unforgiving arena of the ancient world.

Those Who Are About To Die

Gladiators and the Roman Mind

**With an introduction by Alan Titchmarsh** 
 
'The funniest writer ever to put words to paper' HUGH LAURIE 
 
'Sunlit perfection' STEPHEN FRY 
 
'Paper has rarely been put to better use' CAITLIN MORAN 
 
*** 
 
A collection of wit and wisdom from the world of Wodehouse 
 
Featuring the most iconic quotes from P.G. Wodehouse’s best-loved duo, Jeeves and Wooster, ACCORDING TO JEEVES is the perfect treat for fans old and new! 
 
This collection showcases Jeeves' enlightening views on everything from romance (‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male, sir’) to the best way to avoid an unwanted conversation (‘a trip abroad might prove enjoyable’). The unfaltering valet even offers up his approach to breaking and entering (‘the recognized method in vogue in the burgling industry’). 
 
From family life to travel, sports to fashion, and even philosophy – the ingenious Jeeves has always got the answer. And now readers can benefit from his boundless wit and wisdom in one neat package. 
 
ACCORDING TO JEEVES is the ultimate stocking filler, and a little slice of joy to satisfy even the most learned Wodehouse fan. 
 
***** 
 
'Ingenious. Worth reading again and again' SPECTATOR 
 
'Incomparable and timeless genius' KATE MOSSE

According to Jeeves

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024 
 
‘Sparkling’ NEW YORK TIMES 
‘Magnetic’ IRA GLASS 
‘Fierce’ TIME 
 
'In García Márquez, people in love experienced bouts of vomiting, psychosomatic fevers and real catatonia. I wanted to make boys sick, too. This is how I wanted to be loved.' 
 
When Catalina, a witty, vulnerable and beautiful Ecuadorian student, arrives at Harvard, she feels like one of the chosen. She is a miracle child who has escaped death in Latin America to be raised by undocumented grandparents and now studies at the most prestigious university in the world. She knows she has to play the part, but she also wants to have a good time in the process. And so begins her era of opulent parties, secret societies, desirable internships, flings with rich men and plenty of vodka sodas. 
 
But in her final year, undocumented immigrants become the target of political turmoil and Catalina’s life back in New York begins to unravel. As the clock ticks on the precarious future of her family, what will she sacrifice to save the people she loves the most? 
 
Catalina is a daring, glamorous and sharply observed campus novel about coming into your own and the endless possibilities of freedom, love and power. 
 
'She is a worthy student of Gabriel García Márquez' The Atlantic 
'[A] fresh and unflinching take on the campus novel' PEOPLE 
'Destined to be a contemporary American classic' FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

Catalina

Xenobe Purvis

'Extraordinary . . . clever, strange and beautifully written' THE TIMES 
 
'Prompts thoughts of both THE CRUCIBLE and THE VIRGIN SUICIDES . . . Purvis is an exquisitely accomplished wordsmith.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
'A taut, tense tale, impeccably told' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'Feverish, finely wrought and unforgettable.' DAILY MAIL 
 
'An unflinchingly strange and savage novel – a rare and twisted pleasure, and an unmissable must-read for every girl who has ever been made to feel strange.' LUCY ROSE, Sunday Times bestselling author of THE LAMB 
 
'Haunting and beguiling, this fever dream of a novel draws you in and colours your mind all shades of doubt and suspicion.' STACEY HALLS, Sunday Times bestselling author of THE FAMILIARS 
 
'Melancholy and bittersweet.' OTEGHA UWAGBA, Sunday Times bestselling author of LITTLE BLACK BOOK 
 
'A novel of rare grace and skill, exquisitely wrought and simmering with feral violence.' ROWE IRVIN, author of LIFE CYCLE OF A MOTH 
 
Many stories are told about the five Mansfield sisters. They are haughty, thinking themselves better than their neighbours in the picturesque village of Little Nettlebed. They have taken the death of their grandmother hard. They are liars, troublemakers, untamed and dangerous... Accounts of their behaviour differ, but the villagers all agree that the girls are odd. 
 
One long summer, a heatwave descends. Bloated sea creatures wash up along the parched riverbed, animals grow frenzied, ravens gather on the roofs of those about to die. As the stifling heat grips the village, so does a strange rumour: the Mansfield sisters have been seen transforming into a pack of dogs. 
 
With the witch trials only a recent memory, hysteria sets in. Slowly but surely, the villagers become convinced that something strange is taking root in Little Nettlebed. And when a bark finally leads to a bite, the sisters will be the ones to pay for it. 
 
Visceral and richly atmospheric, The Hounding plunges its reader into 18th century Oxfordshire, where the power of a man’s word is absolute, and it is safer to be a wild animal than an unconventional young woman. 
 
*** 
 
'Utterly bizarre in the best way possible' &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; BOOK REVIEWER 
 
'A glorious shimmering heat mirage of a novel' &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; BOOK REVIEWER 
 
'A visceral and consuming fever dream of a book' &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; BOOK REVIEWER 
 
'Tense, almost claustrophobic' &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; BOOK REVIEWER 
 
'Sharp and extremely enjoyable' &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; &#11088; BOOK REVIEWER

The Hounding

Sebastian Faulks

'A wise and heartfelt piece of writing' THE TIMES 
 
'Witty' INDEPENDENT 
 
'Wry and reflective . . . a soulful look at a life in words' i PAPER 
 
‘A wonderful portrait of an age, and of a writer’ RORY STEWART, author of Politics on the Edge 
 
‘Utterly fascinating’ DAVID KYNASTON, author of A Northern Wind 
 
'Shot through with the kind of depth and detail that can only come from a masterful writer finally turning his pen to his own life. Fresh, wise and finely-wrought' ALICE WINN, author of In Memoriam 
 
‘As charming and funny in schoolboy episodes as he is thought-provoking in the darker environs of mental health, Sebastian Faulks is always resonant, civilised and sane’ MARK KNOPFLER 
 
***In Fires Which Burned Brightly, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists. 
 
There are not one, but two daring escapes from boarding school; the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour; the writing of Birdsong in his brother’s house in 1992; and memorable trips across the channel to France. Politics, psychiatry and frustrated ventures into the world of entertainment are analysed with patience and rueful humour. 
 
The book is driven by a desire ‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ It ends with a tribute to Faulks’s parents and a sense of how his own generation was shaped by the disruptive power of war and its aftermath.Sharply perceptive and alive with a generous wit, Fires Which Burned Brightly is a work of subtle yet profound intelligence and warmth. 
PRAISE FOR SEBASTIAN FAULKS 
 
'Faulks writes with great emotional authority' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'A prodigiously talented writer' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'Faulks is beyond doubt a master' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'The most impressive novelist of his generation' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Fires Which Burned Brightly

A Life in Progress

Andrea Long Chu

This highly anticipated book by the Pulitzer Prize winning critic Andrea Long Chu asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything? 
 
'A rigorous thinker armed with a killer turn of phrase' 
Observer 
 
'Her writing is razor-sharp, personal, and vociferous in its proclamations, but it’s also fun – it’s got bite' 
New Statesman 
 
'Fun reading' 
Guardian 
 
'A galaxy-brain-level thinker' Torrey Peters 
 
'One of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today' Brandon Taylor 
 
'Thrilling... Authority reminds us we haven't yet felt all there is to feel' Kaveh Akbar 
'A pure joy to read' Claire Dederer 
Since her canonical 2017 essay ‘On Liking Women’, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as one of the most provocative, funny, brilliant and stylish critics at work today. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers.Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton’s (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism. 
 
The unifying theme of the book is authority and taste in literature, art, culture and politics: how do we decide what's good, and how do we convince others that our judgement is correct?

Authority

Essays on Being Right

Louise Wallace

Thea lives under a mountain – one that's ready to blow. 
A vet at a mid-sized rural practice, she has been called back during maternity leave and is coping – just – with the juggle of meetings, mealtimes, farm visits, her boss's search for legal loopholes and the constant care of her much-loved children, Eli and Lucy. 
 
But something is shifting in Thea – something is burning. Or is it that she is becoming aware, for the first time, of the bright, hot core at her centre? 
 
An urgent rallying cry to women everywhere, ASH is a story about reckoning with one's rage and finding marvels in the midst of chaos.

Rob Cowen

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025 
 
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 
 
'A dazzlingly inventive work of literature' Robert Macfarlane 
'A wonderful achievement' Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman 
'Beautifully written' Observer 
'A wonderful, epic braiding of history, geography and memoir' James Rebanks 
 
At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. 
 
In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves. 
 
Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway. 
 
'Astonishing... One to relish and revisit' 
Telegraph 
 
'Remarkable' 
Financial Times 
 
'Sweeping, sensitive and enduring' 
Tristan Gooley 
 
'Stunning and utterly unique' 
Benjamin Myers 
 
'A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history' 
Melissa Harrison

The North Road

Ahmed Alnaouq

Pam Bailey

***THE NUMBER 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*** 
 
***THE IRISH BESTSELLER*** 
 
'Meaningful and impactful ... A vital [read] ... Tell all your friends' BRITISH VOGUE 
 
'A powerful collection' SERVICE 95, founded by Dua Lipa 
 
'These brilliant young people have embraced writing as a form of liberation, both for the self and to resist the global invisibilisation of Gaza.' FRANCESCA ALBANESE, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories 
 
'This book is a jailbreak and a miracle' NAOMI KLEIN 
 
'Essential . . . A project that insists on liberation' TA-NEHISI COATES 
 
'You'll carry [it] in your heart for a long time' KAMILA SHAMSIE 
 
'Wondrous, devastating and vibrant' BRYAN WASHINGTON 
 
'Impossible to put down or forget' RIZ AHMED 
 
A teenage girl stares at her roof, hoping it won’t collapse over her head. A young student searches the Internet for photos of libraries around the world, hoping he’ll be able to visit them one day. Another walks around the city, taking notes of all the buildings she dreams of repairing. 
These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognised not as numbers, but as human beings with hopes, dreams and lives worth living. 
 
We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. In this collection, vital, urgent and full of heart, spanning over ten years to the present moment, we gain an unparalleled insight into the past, as well as the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here. 
 
'A vital book . . . a profoundly important literary event' CHINA MIEVILLE'A brilliant collection of voices that lays bare the struggles and suffering of ordinary young Palestinians' MONICA ALI 
 
'We Are Not Numbers is not just a book — it's my life, their life, and our shared story . . . This is Gaza as it truly is, written by those who live it every day' MOTAZ AZIZA 
 
'A rebellion against the singular story. An insightful, multifaceted glimpse into the besieged Gaza Strip, where millions of people continue to confront a genocide waged by an Israeli regime' MOHAMMED EL-KURD

We Are Not Numbers

The Voices of Gaza’s Youth

Tim Benson

'A welcome and important addition to this genre—especially given that it contains more than 300 cartoons, most of which have not been utilised in previously published books . . . With great skill Benson has created a highly readable, entertaining, and politically insightful description for each cartoon . . . Buy and read this delightful book.' INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL SOCIETY 
________________________________________________ 
 
Following an unrivalled political career that spanned a remarkable sixty years and reached both the heights and the depths of political fortune, Sir Winston Churchill undoubtedly became the world's most caricatured politician of all time. From entering Parliament in 1900 through to his retirement in 1964, Winston Churchill in Cartoons will chart Churchill's illustrious and tumultuous political career through the work of leading cartoonists from around the world. 
 
Through these cartoons there developed very contrary views of Churchill; the glorious cigar-chomping wartime leader and the flawed politician. In America he was adored by cartoonists, while in Nazi Germany and in the post-war Soviet Union he was, unsurprisingly, painted as a bumbling buffoon. After his passing in 1965, great contemporary cartoonists including Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Matt and Gerald Scarfe, continued to use him as a benchmark for the world leaders that followed. 
 
Featuring the work of the some of the greatest cartoonists of all time and providing a new perspective of an iconic figure, Winston Churchill in Cartoons will include the very best and wittiest portrayals of Churchill the glorious wartime leader, controversial politician, and emblematic British statesman.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons

Taylor Jenkins Reid

***THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER*** 
 
'Tipped to be this summer's biggest read' SUNDAY TIMES 
'A richly drawn page-turner' OBSERVER 
'Quite possibly our favourite TJR novel yet' COSMOPOLITAN 
'I absolutely adored this' BRYONY GORDON 
'A breathtaking, quietly staggering tale of female empowerment, desire, and our place in the universe' HEAT 
'Unputdownable' GRAZIA 
 
READERS ARE SAYING... 
'So emotional by the end that I could hardly speak' - Reader Review, 5***** 
'Melted my heart by the end' - Reader Review, 5***** 
'Taylor Jenkins Reid is the master of a really great love story' - Reader Review, 5***** 
'Taylor Jenkins Reid's best book yet' - Reader Review, 5***** 
 
An epic novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits. 
 
In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond; mission specialists John Griffin and Lydia Danes; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer. As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined and begins to question everything she believes about her place in the observable universe. 
 
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant. 
 
Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love – this time among the stars. 
 
'Is there a popular fiction writer alive who conveys falling in love better than Taylor Jenkins Reid?' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Packs a hefty emotional punch' MAIL ON SUNDAY 
 
'Thrilling ... heartbreaking ... uplifting. Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere is the fast-paced, emotionally-charged story of one ambitious young woman, finding both her voice and her passion ... I loved it' KRISTIN HANNAH, author of The Women 
 
'NASA? Space missions? The 80s? This is a collection of all the things I love. Great story, excellent research and accuracy, and a thrilling conclusion.' ANDY WEIR, author of Project Hail Mary and The Martian

Atmosphere

Helen Carr

From the bestselling author Helen Carr, a thrilling new history of the fourteenth century – a time of catastrophe and conflict that shaped England for centuries to come. 
 
***THE TOP TEN BESTSELLER AND TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2025 PICK*** 
 
'A sparkling popular history which brings the Middle Ages' most terrible century to life for a new generation' 
Dan Jones 
 
'Tells the story of the 14th-century Plantagenets with verve' 
The Times 
 
'A highly engaging re-evaluation of a tumultuous century' 
Observer 
 
 
The death of Edward I in 1307 marked the beginning of a period of intense turmoil and change in England. The fourteenth century ushered in the beginning of the bloody Hundred Years’ War with France, an epic conflict with Scotland that would last into the sixteenth century, famine in Northern Europe and the largest human catastrophe in known history, the Black Death. 
Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the prolonged spectre of bubonic plague, religious antagonism, revolt and the end of a royal dynasty, this book tells the story of the fourteenth century via the lives of Edward II, Edward III and Richard II – three very different monarchs, each with their own egos and ambitions, each with their own ideas about England and what it meant to wield power. 
 
Alongside the lives of the last Plantagenets, it also uncovers lesser-known voices and untold stories to give a new portrait of a fractured monarchy, the birth of the struggle between Europeanism and nationalism, social rebellion and a global pandemic. 
 
Sceptred Isle is a thrilling narrative account of a century of revolution, shifting power and great change – social, political and cultural – shedding new light on a pivotal period of English history and the people who lived it. 
 
Praise for Sceptred Isle 
'A sweeping look at an era of upheaval, panic and change. Gripping, powerful history' 
Hallie Rubenhold 
 
'A cannily timed new history... [Sceptred Isle] tells the story of the 14th-century Plantagenets with verve' 
The Times 
 
'A highly engaging re-evaluation of a tumultuous century' 
Observer 
 
'Informative, anecdotal and entertaining... So many of the events of that tumultuous century find echoes today' 
Financial Times 
 
'Gripping... Carr is an eloquent guide to the human realities of a century that often has a hallucinatory quality: vivid, desperate and haunting in its glories and its terrors' 
Spectator 
 
'Fast-paced and thrilling... a remarkably evocative account of the high drama, excessive bloodshed and significant societal change during this tumultuous age... hugely enjoyable' 
Country Life 
 
'Excellent' 
Clive Anderson, Loose Ends (BBC Radio4) 
 
'In this vivid, finely researched book, Helen Carr takes us deep into England’s deadly fourteenth century and finds life and human colour. This is a sparkling popular history which brings the Middle Ages' most terrible century to life for a new generation' 
Dan Jones 
 
'Full of colour, with headlong energy, Sceptred Isle brings England’s calamitous fourteenth century to life vividly. While Fortune’s Wheel turns through cycles of famine, plague and war, Helen Carr’s engrossing narrative never loses sight of the complexity, and hope, of human experience' 
Helen Castor

Sceptred Isle

A New History of the Fourteenth Century

Caroline Elton

Meet Lionel, Caroline’s older brother. Born in the late 1940s, when little was known about autism, Lionel was considered a peculiarity. From the beginning, he was a silent child, oblivious to the people around him and intent only on playing with his toy trucks. By the time he turned four, doctors declared him ineducable and advised that he be institutionalised – a shockingly standard practise at the time. 
 
No one could have predicted that Lionel would go onto music college and find his place in the world. With the help of his mother – who refused to send him away – Lionel lived a life that was certainly unusual but never dull. He had perfect pitch, could multiply three-figure numbers in his head, or work out which day of the week you were born on, the instant you told him your birthday. 
 
But when Lionel’s mother dies, and shortly after he is diagnosed with cancer, his two sisters struggle to fill the void – to become Lionel’s caretaker and support him as they had promised their mother. Looking After is both a portrait of one autistic man's remarkable life, and a heart-rending story of how one family learnt to care for each other, to deal with loss and to be by each other’s side at the very end.

Looking After

A Portrait of My Autistic Brother

Dan Cruickshank

This is the story of the superbly elegant early eighteenth-century Pallant House in Chichester. It’s the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitafields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, ultimately a synagogue. It’s also the story of – among others – a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, a block of flats in London’s East End, and what Ideal Home’s magazine described in 1926 as Britain’s ‘first modern house’ – in Northampton. 
 
Together these buildings reveal the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries. At the same time, as Dan Cruickshank shows, they have much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants: their aspirations, their struggles, their place within society and relationship with their local community. The English House brilliantly weaves these two strands together, blending architectural and social history to create a series of brilliantly observed portraits of fascinating buildings.

The English House

A History in Eight Buildings

Michael Palin

In March 2022, Michael Palin travelled the length of the River Tigris through Iraq to get a sense of what life is like in a region of the world that once formed the cradle of civilisation, but that in recent times has witnessed turmoil and appalling bloodshed. In the journal he kept during his trip he describes the war-ravaged city of Mosul and the children he encounters growing up amid its ruins. He contemplates the graffiti-strewn ruins of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, and he notes the constant presence of armed guards. But there are patches of light amid the dark: boisterous New Year celebrations in Akre, the friendliness of generals and colonels at 'Checkpoint Cheerful', and public poetry readings in Baghdad. People getting on with their lives. 
 
At the same time, Michael charts the course of one of the great rivers of the world, showing how the water that gave life to such ancient settlements as Babylon and Ur is now becoming a scarce and hotly contested resource. And he considers the role that Iraq's other great natural resource - oil - plays in both providing wealth and threatening political stability. 
 
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

Into Iraq

Robin Givhan

From Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan comes a groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry transformed our ideas about the connection between who we are and what we wear 
 
In 2018, shockwaves were sent around the fashion industry when Virgil Abloh was appointed the head of menswear for Louis Vuitton. Despite no formal training in pattern-making or tailoring, Abloh had become the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s 164-year history. 
 
Make It Ours tells the story of how that moment came to be and how Abloh came to symbolise and embody the industry’s way forward. Using Abloh’s surprising path to the top of the luxury establishment, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the cloistered, exclusive fashion world faced a revolution from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gate, and how a simple t-shirt came to hold as much cultural power as a haute couture gown. 
 
With unparalleled access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan weaves a spellbinding tale of a young man’s rise amidst a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste. This is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury.

Make It Ours

Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

Charles Handy

Over a span of seven decades, Charles Handy was, variously, a businessman, a writer, a philanthropist and a philosopher. Not even a stroke as he approached the age of 90 dimmed his intellectual curiosity or his immense zest for life. 
 
In this, his final book, written from the vantage point of a contemplative old age and drawing on his articles for The Idler he shares his thoughts on the big questions with which we all grapple: 
 
What things really matter? 
What daily worries should we learn to treat as unimportant? 
How do we become more accepting of ourselves and of those around us? 
How do we discover purpose in our everyday existence? How do we cope with grief and loss? 
 
 
Drawing in part on his own experience, in part on the wisdom of others, he sets out the principles of enjoying a fulfilled and contented life, and gently points the way to the practicalities of achieving it.

The View from Ninety

Reflections on How to Live a Long, Contented Life

Simon Pollock

From stations that wouldn't be out of place in Miami Beach to cinemas converted to megachurches, I Love Suburbia brings to life the joys of living outside Zone 1. Step back in time and revisit simpler days in the suburbs to discover the pioneering interwar architects who brought modernism to Britain, or delight in the elegance of Art Deco buildings given a new lease of life. Filled with stories of the people who live, work and play in the outskirts of London, this full-colour book is an exploration of the capital’s overlooked everyday treasures. Brought together by Simon Pollock, the creator of Instagram’s heartwarming @LondonSuburbia, with over 200 original photos of unusual charm from Chingford to Leatherhead, Beaconsfield to Becontree, this is the suburbs as you've never seen them before.

I Love Suburbia

The Joys of Life on London’s Outskirts

Jonathan Mahler

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt and reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets – and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions were boiling over. 
 
Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events – involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters – would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Larry Kramer. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. The Tompkins Square Riots. Jimmy Breslin. Ivan Boesky. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, Black Monday and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire – the tabloids. 
 
In The Gods of New York, bestselling author Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these outsized characters and of these convulsive, defining years. It’s an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city, drawing in and lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture — a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker — when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems that were intended to protect them? New York was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

The Gods of New York

The Tumultuous Eighties, from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots

Liaquat Ahamed

Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalisation, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fuelling this expansion was an explosion in borrowing through the global bond market, which provided financing for the century’s most costly and transformative innovation: the railroad. The boom predictably swelled into a series of bubbles that burst simultaneously in the early 1870s, cascading from one country to the next across the globe. Through the eyes of a cast that includes Karl Marx, Mark Twain and the Rothschild family, Liaquat Ahamed weaves a compelling narrative of build-up, collapse and world-changing aftermath.

1873

The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World

Turi Munthe

‘Fascinating, incredibly valuable and accessible – a compelling view of why we see the world and each other the way we do’ 
Bobby Duffy, author of The Perils of Perception 
 
Why do our fiercest arguments flare up with the people we love most? Are our views really forged by reason and evidence – or by forces we barely notice? And if the world feels more divided than ever, is that entirely a bad thing? 
 
In Why We Think What We Think, Turi Munthe uncovers the startling origins of our deepest beliefs. Without knowing it, almost all our opinions – whether we believe in God or in ghosts, our views on sex or animal rights or immigration, our basic sense of what’s right – are shaped by a mesmerizing web of hidden factors. We are influenced by everything from the quirks of distant history to the geology of where we grew up. 
 
Taking readers on an unforgettable journey around the world and through the DNA of our opinions, this entertaining book reveals among much else: 
<ul><li>how you can tell someone’s politics from their taste buds</li><li>why anxiety fuels conspiracy thinking</li><li>how our ancestors’ agriculture still affects our ethics</li><li>why climate influences our religious belief</li></ul> 
Packed with surprising stories and counterintuitive insights, Why We Think What We Think will transform the way you see the world and your place within it.

Why We Think What We Think

The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs

In February 2025, Michael Palin travelled to Venezuela to get a sense of what life is like in one of South America's most culturally rich, vibrant but also troubled nations. In the journal he kept during his trip he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited, the landscapes he travelled through, and the people he met. 
 
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

Michael Palin in Venezuela

Dan Hicks

‘An extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource’ Paul Gilroy, founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at UCL 
 
‘Hicks’ must-read book describes how it was possible for a human skull to be made into a drinking cup and used in a genteel Oxford college, well into the 21st century, as if empire were an eternal state of nature . . . Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police’ Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of White Sight 
 
‘Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better’ Alice Roberts, bestselling author of Crypt 
 
‘Dan Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live’ Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture 
 
The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think. 
 
Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator. 
 
Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. 
 
Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Every Monument Will Fall

A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

Simon Weisz

For the first eighteen years of Simon Weisz’s life his parents were at pains to keep their past concealed from him. All he knew for sure was that they had grown up in Hungary and that they had arrived in Britain after the Second World War. It was only as he reached manhood that they started to confide their carefully guarded secrets to him: that they were Jewish, and that his mother had experienced the appalling horrors of Nazi persecution.In conversations over the following decades, Simon’s mother gradually, often reluctantly, revealed more of her past: from the growing oppression her family had had to endure in the late 1930s, to her deportation first to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbrück, to the brutal death march she withstood from the ruins of Berlin in 1945. As he pieced her testimony together, Simon came to realise how the memories she had fought so hard to suppress continued to haunt her in the form of terrifying flashbacks and moments of extreme frustration and anger. And he started to understand how her concealed trauma had, in turn, shaped his own development and the course of his life.Himmler’s Curtains is both a visceral account of a Holocaust survivor’s experiences, and an impressive study of the impact of suffering on two generations of a family. It also movingly reveals the high psychological price exacted by silence.

Himmler’s Curtains

A Memoir of Loss and Concealment

Adam Weymouth

In 2011, a young wolf named Slavc set out from Slovenia. Tracked by GPS, he travelled a thousand miles through the Alps, arriving four months later on the Lessinian plateau, north of Verona. There had been no wolves in northern Italy for a century, but here he crossed paths with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves back in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting. 
 
In Lone Wolf, Weymouth walks Slavc's path, examining the changes facing these wild corners of Europe. Here, the call to rewild meets the urge to preserve culture; nationalism and globalisation pull apart; climate change is radically changing lives; and migrants, too, are on the move. 
 
The result is a multifaceted account of a region caught in a moment of kaleidoscopic flux, from an award-winning writer with a uniquely perceptive eye for detail.

Lone Wolf

Walking the Faultlines of Europe

A Journey Into the Wild Heart of the Alps

Robbie Robertson

The rock legend tells the story of his wild ride with Martin Scorsese – as friends, adventure-seekers, and boundary-pushing collaborators – with all the heart of his New York Times bestselling memoir Testimony 
 
'Intense, exciting, delirious' THE TIMES 
'Thrilling, beautiful, honest' TELEGRAPH 
'A wild ride' ROLLING STONE 
 
--- 
 
For four decades, Robbie Robertson produced music for Martin Scorsese's films, a relationship that began when Robertson convinced Scorsese to direct The Last Waltz, the iconic film of the Band's farewell performance at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving 1976. 
 
The closing of the Band's story with that landmark concert thrust Robertson into a new and uncertain world. With his relationship with his bandmates deteriorating and his marriage collapsing, Robertson arrived on Scorsese’s Beverly Hills doorstep only to find his friend in similar straits. Before the night was out, Scorsese had invited him to move in. Both men, already culture-transforming stars before the age of thirty-five, stood at a creative precipice, searching for the beginning of a new phase of life and work. As their friendship deepened into a career-altering collaboration, their shared journey would take them around the world and down the rabbit hole of American culture in the long hangover of the seventies. Buffeted on either side by temptation and paranoia, veering closer to self-destruction than either wanted to admit, together they had devoted themselves to a partnership defined by equal parts admiration and ambition. 
 
With a cast of characters featuring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Sam Fuller, Liza Minelli, Tuesday Weld, and many more, Insomnia is an intimate portrait of a remarkable creative friendship between two titans of American arts, one that would explore the outer limits of excess and experience before returning to tell the tale.

Insomnia

Peter Jones

What can a twelfth-century monk teach us about burnout, envy, or despair? Far more than we might imagine. In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, historian Peter Jones travels through Europe’s archives and libraries to uncover a lost psychology: a world where confession was therapy, sin was diagnosis, and the Seven Deadly Sins served as a map of the human mind. 
 
From the deserts of Egypt to the Vatican Library, from Dante’s Florence to Catherine of Siena’s cell, Jones introduces the thinkers, mystics and rebels who wrestled with the same questions that preoccupy us now: how to live with our flaws, forgive ourselves, and find meaning amid confusion. 
 
Medieval lives and landscapes come vividly alive: Siberian winters and Parisian manuscripts, lustful saints and anxious scholars, candlelit abbeys and vaults of forgotten books. Wise, surprising, and deeply humane, Self-Help from the Middle Ages reveals that the remedies we seek for our 21st-century anxieties may have been with us all along—written in brown Gothic ink on lambskin seven hundred years ago.

Self-Help From the Middle Ages

A Journey Into the Medieval Mind

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