PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Ann Wroe

Few books have captured the atmosphere of daily medieval life as well or as movingly as A Fool and His Money. Rodez, in southern France, was divided for centuries by a feud between two masters. This partitioned town thus acquired two distinct cultures. The story focuses on the strange case of Peyre Marques, a merchant who forgets where he has buried his gold. To read A Fool and His Money is like opening a shutter on to a sunlit medieval street teeming with characters, talk and noise - all coloured with the vibrancy of truth.  --'Wroe is an excellent historian and an engaging writer with a beady eye for detail and an attractive turn of phrase. Best of all, she conveys a true feeling for the recreation of period and persons and place' Daily Telegraph --'History lives best when it is loved, and nobody who reads this book can doubt the author's love of her subject' Sunday Telegraph

A Fool And His Money

Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town

Graham Greene

This play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company has as its chief characters A. J. Raffles, the literary creation some seventy odd years ago of E. W. Hornung. The cool daring of the impeccable Amateur Cracksman, always torn between the rival claims of burglary and cricket, ensured his popularity in Edwardian England. Evading the dogged pursuit of Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, Hornung's character eventually met a hero's death in South Africa in the Boer War. 
 
Graham Greene's The Return of A. J. Raffles begins some months after. Raffles' loyal assistant Bunny still mourns his friend's death in Raffles' chambers in Albany, despite the blandishments of Lord Alfred Douglas. A visitor forces his way in - Raffles has cheated death as he once cheated Inspector Mackenzie - and immediately Lord Alfred sees in the Amateur Cracksman and Bunny heaven-sent instruments to revenge and disgrace of Oscar Wilde on his odious father, the Marquess of Queensberry... 
 
Graham Green never fails to surprise and delight admirers of his comic genius, and the twists and turns of this story of Edwardian high life, when Raffles returns to the scene of his earlier triumphs, provide a richly satisfying entertainment.

The Return Of A. J. Raffles

An Edwardian comedy in three acts based somewhat loosely on E.W. Hornung's characters in The Amateur Cracksman

Adam Foulds

Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history.The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined. 
 
Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'. As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen. 
 
Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice.

The Broken Word

Tom Brokaw

In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation - America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America.  This was a generation united by common values - by duty, honour, courage, service and love of family and country. Here you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown.  You'll hear ex-President George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised.  You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the many women in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war.  And you'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. In the spirit of Band of Brothers, The Greatest Generation tells the stories of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events - individuals united by a common purpose - working, living and dying in the service of their country.

The Greatest Generation

Leslie Garis

Leslie Garis's grandparents, Howard and Lillian Garis, were, from the turn of the century to the 1950s, phenomenally productive (and incredibly popular) authors of books for children. Every American child grew up reading the Uncle Wiggily stories, The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift. House of Happy Endings tells how in a large romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, her parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created. But inside the Dell all was not right. 
 
Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist and magazine writer led him to believe that he was a failure as father, husband and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterised by raging mood swings, drug abuse and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. House of Happy Endings is Leslie Garis's mesmerising, tender and harrowing account of growing up in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

The House of Happy Endings

A. S. Byatt

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

Passions Of The Mind

Selected Writings

Peter Ackroyd

VOL. 3: A MUSE OF FIRE. 
Successful Playwright and Businessman. 
(c. 1595 - Opening of The Globe) 
Peter Ackroyd's insightful new biography positions Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. Walk with Ackroyd through sixteenth century London and Stratford as he uncovers the intimate circumstances of Shakespeare's life. Discover the theatrical world in which Shakespeare had his being - not just Shakespeare the actor but the other actors, playwrights, and managers that surrounded him. And journey to Stratford to meet Shakespeare the family man, whose private life had such an impact on his work that the strongest bond in his plays is always between father and daughter.

Shakespeare - The Biography: Vol III

A Muse of Fire

Michael Rips

A refreshing antidote to the saccharine charms of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the quirky and hilarious memoir of a criminal lawyer who gives up his New York practise to spend a year in the Etruscan town of Sutri, near Rome, where he moves - reluctantly - with his artist wife and baby.  Himself something of an eccentric from a bizarre Nebraskan family, he has spent his adult life living in hotels; and in Sutri, he heads straight for the caf- in the main square.  From there he observes the baroque events of small-town life, conjures up a cast of Italian eccentrics (including Pasquale and his hypersensitive organ of smell), and relishes the weirdness and the wonder of Sutri's history, folklore, architecture and above all its food - particularly the notorious 'fagioli regina' (beans in a tomato and pig skin sauce) and the annual Bean Festival.   Part of the delight of reading this memoir is that it not only evokes the sights and smells of an ancient and little-known town in Southern Italy, and brings its people to extraordinary life, but it also reveals the irresistible foibles and philosophy of a talented and unusual mind. Funny, philosophical and surprisingly moving, this is the story of how a rootless American finds home in the most unexpected places and how Pasquale and his compatriots put life into perspective in the strangest way.

Pasquale's Nose

Lauren Redniss

'21st-century genius' Elle 
 
A howling wind, a thunderstorm, the beating sun – it’s with the elements that nature shows its true force and wonder. 
 
In Thunder and Lightning, Guggenheim fellow and Pulitzer nominee Lauren Redniss draws a new account of the weather. She has travelled from the frozen archipelagos of the Arctic Ocean to the ‘absolute desert’ of Atacoma, Chile, to show us the elements at their most extreme. Along the way, through interviews and research, she has unearthed curious stories of exploration, savagery and coincidence – stories which show us how weather has shaped humanity, intervened in the course of history, and how mankind, in turn, has tried to bend the weather to its ends. 
 
A book of exquisite beauty, with each illustration etched and coloured by hand, Thunder and Lightning informs, charms and transports. A combination of art and cultural history, from an uncategorisable and unique creative spirit, it will leave readers looking at the wind, the sun and the rain with new eyes.

Thunder and Lightning

Weather Past, Present and Future

Stan Hey

Ever wondered what it might be like to own a horse, not just back it with a pony on the nose - own it? Stan Hey did.  A veteran of the windswept racecourses of National Hunt he finally decided to stop betting on other people's horses and join the inner circle.  With the growth of partnerships and syndicates this has become increasingly possible so four horses, two trainers, and a few thousand pounds later Stan Hey had this story to tell.  An Arm and Four Legs is his honest account of the pitfalls of racehorse ownership. Its fierce disappointments, escalating costs, skulduggery and deceit are set alongside the intense pleasure offered by an afternoon spent at the track, drinking, betting and chatting to your trainer while the rest of the world has its feet tucked under a desk.

An Arm And Four Legs

A Journey into Racehorse Ownership

David Lodge

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.

A Local Habitation

Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40

David Boyle

English culture is confused, muddled and often borrowed. The purpose of this book is to give the reader a complete grounding in the idiosyncrasies of the English and to pin down the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best. 
 
Featured in this book are such established English cultural behemoths as the Beatles, Big Ben and the Last Night of the Proms alongside less celebrated quirks such as meat pies and the working man’s haven, the allotment. Here we celebrate the bell-ringers and Morris dancers, bowler hats (‘the symbol of respectable Englishness’) and cardigans (‘symbol of staid middle-class solidarity’). We examine the brutality of Punch and Judy and our historic love of fairies, once so much a part of the English psyche that they were described as ‘the British religion’. 
 
At once fond and irreverent, laudatory and curious, How to Be English might just teach us how to be English once again.

How to Be English

Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen's maternal grandfather was called Ben Eisenstadt. Ben was one of those Jews that, with an anger bred of exclusion, went on to reshape the world. He did so by inventing Sweet 'n Low, a granulated sweetener which, in its tiny pink packet, is still found on every table in every diner in America. This simple invention spawned one of the great American fortunes. This is the story of that fortune, how it was made and how it remade and tore apart everyone who touched it. 
 
In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen - the youngest son of Ben's favourite daughter - takes a journey into his own and his family's past. It is a story of family feuds (his mother was eventually disinherited by her mother), eccentricity verging on madness, gangsters, lawyers, corruption, accountants, ex-wives - a quest for a secret history, a black comedy of the American dream.

Sweet and Low

A Family Story

Nik Cohn

There will always be an England, no doubt, but what sort of England will it be? Cohn takes a long wild ride through a country he calls the Republic - a nation within a nation, populated by the many millions who have either fallen out of the Britannic mainstream, or chosen to jump. He meets the rising stars of a new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has ever existed before. It is a land made up, among others, of outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives, second-generation immigrants, visionaries, born-agains, football fans, fetishists, New Age travellers, anarchists, DJs, street-fighters, graffiti artists, Rastas, Odinists, Elvis impersonators, fire-swallowers and even the Antichrist. Loud and angry, and charged with furious energy, their voices define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. Nik Cohn's republic may not be the only England out there. But it's the most vivid.

Yes We Have No

Fiona Campbell

Kenji Yamada has a critical wife, a hated mother-in-law and what he thinks is a job for life until his fortieth birthday teaches him otherwise. Initially too embarassed to tell his family that he has been fired, Kenji first befriends a travelling salesman with a passion for Elvis before taking up gambling, but his wife's outrage soon brings an end to this and sends him on a roller-coaster of misadventures. 
 
Via a bizarre chain of happenstance - including being struck by lightning while wielding a golf club - Kenji somehow finds himself responsible for a weirdly believable game show... 
 
Fiona Campbell's novel is a sparkling debut with graphic-novel sharpness, humour and poignancy.

Death of a Salaryman

Helen Carr

The Verse Revolutionaries tells the story of the Imagists, a turbulent and colourful group of poets, who came together in London in the years before the First World War. As T. S. Eliot was to say, appropriately re-invoking the Imagist habit of turning anything they admired into French, the imagist movement was modern poetry's point de repère, the landmark venture that inaugurated Anglo-American literary modernism. A disparate, stormy group, who had dispersed before the twenties began, these 'verse revolutionaries' received both abuse and acclaim, but their poetry, fragmented, pared-down, elliptical yet direct, exerted a powerful influence on modernist writers, and contributed vitally to the transformation of American and British cultural life in those crucial years. 
 
Among those involved were the Americans Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, and the British T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence. On the edges of the story are figures such as W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. They came from very different class backgrounds, a heterogeneous mélange then only possible in a great metropolis like London. 
 
The Verse Revolutionaries traces the passionate interactions, love affairs and bitter quarrels of these aspiring poets from 1905 to 1917. Helen Carr unpicks the story of how they came together, what they gained from each other in the heady excitement of those early days, and what were the fissures that eventually broke up the movement and their friendships in the dark days of the Great War. Her compelling account challenges the conventional view of Imagism, and offers an acute analysis of the poetry, of the psychology of the individuals involved, and of the evolution and emergence of a transformative cultural movement.

The Verse Revolutionaries

Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways to the art of Cézanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage.

Portraits In Fiction

Derek Wilson

Derek Wilson examines a set of relationships which illustrate just how dangerous life was in the court of the Tudor lion.  He tells the interlocking stories of six men - all, curiously, called Thomas - whose ambitions and principles brought them face to face with violent death. Thomas Wolsey was an accused traitor on his way to the block when a kinder death intervened.  Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, whose convictions and policies could scarcely have been more different, both perished beneath the headman's axe.  Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, would have met the same end had the king's own death not brought him an eleventh-hour reprieve.  Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, though outliving the monarch, perished as a result of that war of ambitions and ideologies which rumbled on after 1547.  Wriothesley succumbed to poison of either body or mind in the aftermath of a failed coup.  Cranmer went to the stake as a heretic at the insistence of Mary Tudor, who was very much the daughter of the father she hated. In the Lion's Court is an illuminating examination of the careers of the six Thomases, whose lives are described in parallel - their family and social origins, their pathways to the royal Council chamber, their occupancy of the siege perilous, and the tragedies which, one by one, overwhelmed them.  By showing how events shaped and were shaped by relationships and personal destinies, Derek Wilson offers a fresh approach to the political narrative of a tumultuous reign.

In The Lion's Court

Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII

Edward Pearce

The year 1721 has many splendours: great houses built by William Kent, fine pictures and the fruits of commerce. But there are also thirteen public hanging days a year, drunkenness is endemic, organised crime rampages through the streets. And politics are ferocious. Only a generation earlier, The Pretender failed to take the Crown; the new King is cursed as a damned foreigner; James's followers - the Jacobites - conspire and are persecuted; the South Sea Bubble collapses.Robert Walpole, once imprisoned for financial chicanery, assumes political control and becomes 'Prime Minister'. He personally detects a Jacobite plot, is dismissed in 1727 on the death of George I, recruits the new King's clever wife, Caroline, and bounces cheerfully back. Coarse, corrupt and cynical, Walpole dominates King, Parliament and Government until 1742. This is Mr Worldywiseman, keeping England out of war for twenty years and setting up a stable and growing economy. All politics of a kind we can recognise today begin with Robert Walpole. And here, in Edward Pearce's elegant book, he is brought vividly back to life.

The Great Man

Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain's First Prime Minister

In David Lodge's last novel, Thinks... the novelist Henry James was invisibly present in quotation and allusion. In Author, Author he is centre stage, sometimes literally. The story begins in December 1915, with the dying author surrounded by his relatives and servants, most of whom have private anxieties of their own, then loops back to the 1880s, to chart the course of Henry's 'middle years', focusing particularly on his friendship with the genial Punch artist and illustrator, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but chaste relationship with the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. By the end of the decade Henry is seriously worried by the failure of his books to 'sell', and decides to try and achieve fame and fortune as a playwright, at the same time that George Du Maurier, whose sight is failing, diversifies into writing novels. The consequences, for both men, are surprising, ironic, comic and tragic by turns, reaching a climax in the years 1894-5. As Du Maurier's Trilby, to the bewilderment of its author himself, becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the first night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville ... Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, others recovered from obscurity, Author, Author presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England, which in many ways foreshadowed today's cultural mix of art, commerce and publicity. But it is essentially a novel about authorship - about the obsessions, hopes, dreams, triumphs and disappointments, of those who live by the pen - with, at its centre, an exquisite characterisation of one writer, rendered with remarkable empathy.

Author, Author

John Fuller

Jealous curses and hate poems, love lyrics and erotic dances: John Fuller has always written light verse, and Song &amp; Dance is a boisterous and engaging collection, fizzing with intelligence and wit. There are tributes, and there are celebrations. Jokes abound in 'The Spellchecker's Guide to Poetry' and the wine is poured for 'Florio Drinking Song'. Befitting Fuller's musical ear, a host of rhythms beat time. Fans will fall on pleasingly intricate riddles and admire the high-wire gymnastics of unusual verse forms, including the inverted rhopalics of 'The Trans-sexual Circus'. 
 
But behind the fun is some sharp criticism of literary attitudinising, and a climactic injunction, to dance while we can, preferably with each other.

Song & Dance

Caryl Phillips

A New World Order ranges widely across the Atlantic World that Caryl Phillips has charted in his award winning novels and non-fiction during the course of the past twenty years.  He begins this collection by establishing his belief that there is a 'new world order' of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips writes about the moment when St Kitts, the small island of his birth, became independent and talks about the role and responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic. He then turns the spotlight on Britain speculating about his parents' migration in the late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he both of, and not of, Britain.

A New World Order

James Bradley

Ron Powers

In this remarkably powerful book, James Bradley takes as his starting point one of the most famous photographs of all time. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima and into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire from 22,000 Japanese. After climbing through a hellish landscape and on to the island's highest peak, six men were photographed raising the stars and stripes. One of those soldiers was the author's father, John Bradley. He never spoke to his family about the photograph or about the war, but after his death in 1994, they discovered closed boxes of letters and photos which James Bradley draws on to retrace the lives of his father and his five companions. 
 
Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island - an island riddled with sixteen miles of tunnels and defended by Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the death. In the thirty-six days of fighting, almost fifty-thousand men lost their lives. 
 
Above all a human - and personal - story, few books have captured so brilliantly or so movingly the complexity of war and its aftermath and the true meaning of heroism.

Flags Of Our Fathers

Virginia Woolf

Fiction was the core of Virginia Woolf's work. But she took her essay writing very seriously, spending a great deal of time on each essay and finding they provided a refreshing diversion from fiction. Her essays informed her fiction, and vice versa; this volume shows her thinking about the possibility of poeticising the novel (The Waves was the result) and in some of these pieces ('Women and Fiction', 'Women and Leisure') she considers the relationship between women, writing and society - the preoccupation that would become such a large part of her legacy. 
 
The Common Reader: Second Series comprises a significant part of this volume - it was first published in 1932 to excellent reviews. ('They are wholly delightful. They are sensitive, acute, picturesque, humorous, and yet severe.' Vita Sackville-West; 'Is there anybody writing anywhere in the world at this moment who could surpass the essay...so beautifully moulded into a form appropriate to its content that what is an authentic critical masterpiece seems as light on the mind as a song?' Rebecca West) This collection shows Woolf's genius as a critic and essayist: as well as displaying her perceptive understanding of writers and their work, it also offers us an important insight into her creative mind. 
 
Continuing the work of former editor Andrew McNeillie, Stuart N. Clarke brings fresh light to Woolf's essays and enriches them with variations. This penultimate volume forms part of an indispensable, unique collection from one of our greatest writers.

The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5

1929 - 1932

Joseph O'Connor

The Irish Male at Home and Abroad is the hilarious sequel to Joe O'Connor's bestseller The Secret World of the Irish Male. From flirting lessons in downtown Manhattan to being offered a good ride in Disneyland by the now legendary Wanda, it was a long, strange and hilarious trip. Now, in The Irish Male at Home and Abroad, O'Connor returns faster, funnier and filthier than ever before. 
 
Impersonating Santa Claus in a busy Dublin store on Christmas Eve, spending a penny in Lord Jeffrey Archer's penthouse loo, traipsing the local-radio publicity circuit in 100-degree Australian heat, on the run in revolutionary Nicaragua, contemplating the Shroud of Turin, or making a deposit in a grotty sperm bank - here are tall tales and short stories: absurd, anarchic and unforgettably side-splitting adventures from home and abroad. 
 
Laugh-out-loud funny, yet always affectionate and sometimes poignant, O'Connor roams through an Ireland of wife-swapping sodomites and late-night sodalities, when not getting lost in the restless new Europe of beach holidays, terrible beauties and Baywatch lookalikes. It's going to be another weird and uproarious trip. But like Wanda once said: Hitch a ride, sweetheart, and hang on real tight!

Irish Male At Home And Abroad

Ferdinand Mount

The man who rode Ampersand was in fact, an amateur jockey named Harry Cotton. Harry is a compulsive gambler. The resulting decline in his fortunes takes him through three decades of adventures, melancholy, heroic, and comic by turn, which cut a broad swathe of disorder through provincial race meetings, 'one -night cheap hotels' and three luxurious redoubts of the fabulously rich. The inhabitants and frequenters of these places are every bit as bizarre as their surroundings.

The Man Who Rode Ampersand

Alan Jenkins

The poems in this, Alan Jenkin's third collection, speak of the harm done and suffered - most frequently in the name of love - in the course of lives gone adrift among lost causes, chance meetings and missed chances. A new directness and simplicity, and throughout, a raw urgency of personal feeling, inform a voice that is as resourceful as in Jenkin's earlier volumes, and continues to salvage a 'fugitive lyricism' (as one reviewer put it) from harsh and dissonant realities. 'By turns jocular, disquieting, sexy and inventive'-PETER READING, SUNDAY TIMES 'Jenkins' poetry is exhilarating. . . It is charged with erotic energy, rage, sorrow and confusion'-TLS 'Stylish, Savage, unforgiving'-HUGO WILLIAMS, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Jenkins has a restless mind: following his poetry gives his readers a rocky ride, but also a rewarding one. '-PETER PORTER, OBSERVER.

Harm

Laura Beatty

Mrs Langtry - born a provincial in 1853, died rich and lonely in 1929 - was surrounded by scandal, luxary and gossip; but this new book goes beyond these outward trappings to lift the masks that Oscar Wilde, her friend and mentor, taught her to wear. It is not so much a life as a series of lives - each one distinct from the next - as Lillie reinvented herself. At its centre are the love letters written by Lillie to Arthur Jones, her childhood friend and secret lover, at the time of her fall from Society, her near-bankruptcy, and the birth of her illegitimate daughter at a hidden address in Paris. Laura Beatty captures exactly the spirit of the age, and reveals a passionate woman for whom the charge of opportunism was by no means the whole story.

Lillie Langtry

Manners, Masks and Morals

VOL. 2: THE UPSTART CROW. 
Ambitious Actor and Poet. 
(c. 1590 - Midsummer Night's Dream) 
Peter Ackroyd's insightful new biography positions Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. Walk with Ackroyd through sixteenth century London and Stratford as he uncovers the intimate circumstances of Shakespeare's life. Discover the theatrical world in which Shakespeare had his being - not just Shakespeare the actor but the other actors, playwrights, and managers that surrounded him. And journey to Stratford to meet Shakespeare the family man, whose private life had such an impact on his work that the strongest bond in his plays is always between father and daughter.

Shakespeare - The Biography: Vol II

The Upstart Crow

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Penguin Shop: 15% off with code PENGUINXMAS2025

White Nights

Little Black Classics Box Set

Penguin Modern Box Set

Frankenstein

An illustration from the book There's An Elf in Your Book and The Christmasaurus

Children's quizzes

Are you on Santa's naughty or nice list?

There's An Alien in You Book by Tom Fletcher

Extracts

There’s an Alien in Your Book by Tom Fletcher

The Creakers by Tom Fletcher

Reading lists

The best books to gift your grandchildren

An image of several space books for kids on a dark purple background with rocket, planet and star doodles around them

Children's reading lists

11 out-of-this-world space books for kids

75 Christmas books for kids

An image of a selection of spooky children's books on a dark purple background with an orange shape which features a zig-zag pattern

32 spooky books to read this Halloween

A photo of the book The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher on a wooden background next to  some presents and a candy cane

The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

A picture of a several different books by Tom Fletcher on a light blue and red background

Where to start with Tom Fletcher’s books

An image of a selection of funny books for under 5s on a purple background with white dotted lines

14 books that will make under 5s giggle

Space Band by Tom Fletcher

The best dystopian books of all time

A photo of a copy of The Christmasaurus and the Winter Witch by Tom Fletcher on a light blue background alongside white paper snowflakes

The Christmasaurus and the Winter Witch by Tom Fletcher

85 books to read before you're 12

Christmas gifts for 2025: Books for under 5s

An image of a selection of books for under 5s on an orange background with a large splodge and cloud print

24 must-read books for under 5s

An image of a selection of books for 9-12s on a blue background with a large splodge and striped print

24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

A photo of a selection of children's crime books on a red background with a magnifying glass hovering over the book The London Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

Showing results for: ‘tom fletcher there's a in your book’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter