‘This is urgent, compelling but also delightful writing’ Lauren Elkin
In the depths of winter, Xiaolu Guo moves into a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront – a room of her own where she can spend time writing, liberated from her domestic responsibilities in London.
She immerses herself in the English landscape and its past and becomes preoccupied by the violence between Normans and Saxons. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging My Battle of Hastings is a chronicle of Xiaolu’s life in Hastings and a portrait of a dislocated artist seeking to connect with her local environment in the hope of finding a deeper connection to her adoptive nation.
'Magnificent, brutal and poetic' Iain Sinclair
‘There is nobody quite like Xiaolu Guo… With My Battle of Hastings, Guo shows us the effort that it takes to truly put down roots in a culture so different from the one she was born into’ The Times
Len Howard forged extraordinary relationships with the birds in her Sussex garden during the 1950s. This groundbreaking work in bird studies is also a captivating and immersive piece of nature writing.
This bird biography tells the story of one exceptional Great Tit called Star. In opening her home to wild birds, Len Howard gained their trust and made astonishing discoveries about their capabilities. Star’s character and intelligence is revealed, and with patience, consistency and sensitivity Howard even succeeds in teaching Star to count using taps of her beak.
Full of joy and wonder, as well as deep knowledge and fascinating detail, Living with Birds encompasses bird studies of all kinds including the fate of a lame fledgling, the bond between Great Tit parents and their babies and observations of migrant birds. It is also the story of how Howard succeeded in developing such an unusual relationship with the wild birds in her garden.
'Howard seems to have stood on the brink of communication with a wild bird, something till now hardly conceivable...awe-inspiring' Observer
After a grave mistake, Henry Talbot has been forced to take a position as village doctor in remote Wales where he can't speak the language and belief in myth and magic is rife. When Henry discovers his predecessor died in mysterious circumstances, and starts to notice a cryptic symbol appearing in odd places, he sets out to find answers.
The lady of the manor, Linette Tresilian, is vexingly unhelpful at first. She seems to know little about the shelves of occult books Henry notices in her family’s library. But Linette has suspicions of her own about what’s happened in the village and, together, their investigations will bind their destinies in ways neither thought possible.
‘An alluring, immersive Gothic mystery’ Jennifer Saint
'A haunting, transporting mystery…kept me completely enthralled' Elodie Harper
‘I was gripped… the story was so dark and clever’ Stacey Thomas
As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future.
Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba.
Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.
The bullet enters Tia’s thigh close to where her brother will look for the star-shaped mole when asked to identify her body.
The green carpet is moving towards her. Flung onto her side, Tia lands hard on her left arm. Pop pop pop sounds bounce between her ears. Flashbangs. The force of the grenades is knocking artwork to the floor. The heavy frames could be falling onto someone but it’s too dark, or too bright, to see properly, and there’s probably nothing she can do to help them. On the ground, Tia feels her way to the wall, any wall. A palm goes to each thigh: no wound. That was her own thumb which drove into her skin. The firearms team are in the room now, but the bullet was her imagination. She will not bleed out, and these aren’t her final breaths. Relief comes, but it isn’t much, because she has been thinking about dying all day. Death no longer frightens her. Fear requires energy and Tia is too tired for it now. They all must be.
Her hand finally hits something solid. She’s made it to the side of the room. Tia stands and leans against the plaster, making herself as flat as she can. She’s safe here, and now she has some sense of direction: the windows out onto the road are to her right, and the doors to the rest of the museum to her left. That’s where the specialist officers are coming from. Through the smoke in front of her, human shapes start to take form. There are bodies on the carpet. Alive? She cannot just wait here for it to be over and help to collect the dead. Back on all fours, Tia leaves the wall and crawls to the nearest hostage. Broken glass crunches underneath her knees. The noise of the police boots, the guns, the shields, everything, is so intense, her teeth gnaw into her cheeks.
Tia reaches someone – there’s a pulse. They’re shaking but they’re okay. She sees more human shadows. There is no real furniture in here and nowhere to shelter. When the police burst in, everyone dropped in place, and the unlucky were stood near the doors, or in the centre of the room, exposed. The white haze meant to disorient the gunman is stopping Tia from working out who is who. But it’s those hostages in the middle of the room who are most in need. Tia rises to her feet. Keeping as low as possible, she moves quickly. She sees two bodies lying in the path of the entering police. She’ll go to them.
Are they hurt? She won’t drag them out of the danger zone in case it makes their injuries worse. The pop, pops continue. The two hostages are about ten yards apart. She can’t get to them both. Suddenly it’s obvious who they are, and she must choose. Pick one hostage, shield them. The only thing she can give now is herself.
After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.
A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' - Edmund Wilson
An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.
Katalin Karikó began life as a butcher’s daughter in communist Hungary. Raised in a one-room home of clay and straw with no running water, she saw potential everywhere: in the promise of a seed, in the alchemy of soap, in the scarlet of a carcass.
Breaking Through is the extraordinary story of her courageous determination – first to become a scientist, and then to unlock an elusive molecule she believed could revolutionise medicine. Others disagreed, and for decades she endured demotions, discrimination and even threats of deportation. Yet Karikó persevered, ultimately making a world-shifting discovery: the mRNA vaccine technology that saved millions of lives and will transform healthcare forever.
Ever wondered how to make a dessert extra delicious? Look no further.
In this book, Alexina Anatole, MasterChef finalist and author of Bitter, guides you through unlocking the secrets of sweetness.
Journeying through 10 shades of sweetness – including brown sugar, strawberries, peaches, honey, vanilla and bananas – Alexina reveals the tempting results that can be achieved by balancing flavour, texture and temperature.
With twists on the classics and exciting new creations, these 80 recipes offer comfort while also delivering bold, exciting flavours. Whether you love desserts or believe that you’re ‘not a dessert person’, this inspiring cookbook is guaranteed to delight all.
Discover recipes for all occasions and palates, such as:
Pear + ACV Tarte Tatin • Banoffee Coffee Sundae • Milky Bar Basque Cheesecake • Mango, Coconut + Lime Celebration Cake • Matcha Tiramisu • Sticky Figgy Pudding • Pear Sorbet with Frozen Roquefort • The Neo Neapolitan • Peach Melba Galette • Terrazzo Cookies
This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words.
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Hemingway, Cocteau and Picasso admired her; Shirley Bassey adored her. It was said she strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah who wore a diamond collar.
Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance, her celebrity working as her cover. She was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the war she became increasingly interested in civil rights, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl of mixed heritage, born in Missouri to a poor mother and a father she did not know.
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century.
‘The most sensational woman anyone ever saw’ Ernest Hemingway
‘Compelling' Marie Claire
'Immensely enjoyable' Observer
'Fascinating' Red
One week into lockdown, the tenants of a Manhattan apartment building have begun to gather on the rooftop each evening and tell stories in this exciting new twist on the novel.
With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned buckets. Gradually the tenants – some of whom have barely spoken to each other before now – become real neighbours.
With each character secretly written by a different, major literary voice - from Margaret Atwood to John Grisham and Celeste Ng, Fourteen Days is a heart-warming ode to the power of storytelling and human connection.
Includes writing from: Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Doug Preston, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Meg Wolitzer and many more.
‘A valuable reminder that stories can teach, console and perhaps even change their readers’ Financial Times
The major new novel from the once-in-a-generation author of The End of Eddy
The major new novel from the once-in-a-generation author of The End of Eddy
'One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation’ Keiran Goddard, Guardian
‘Change fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself’ Maggie Nelson
‘One of the major writers of our time' Garth Greenwell
‘A mesmeric novel’ Daily Mail
Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination and violence in his working-class hometown - so he sets out to study in Amiens, and, later, at university in Paris. He sheds the provincial 'Eddy' for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike.
Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. Change is at once a personal odyssey, a story of dreams, friendship and the perils of leaving the past behind, and a profound portrait of a society divided by class, inequality and power.
The Soviet Don Quixote, Chevengur is now seen by many Russian writers as Russia's greatest novel of the last century.
'Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the twentieth century' New York Review of Books
The Soviet Don Quixote, Chevengur is now seen by many Russian writers as Russia's greatest novel of the last century. This is the first English version to convey its subtlety and depth.
Zakhar Pavlovich comes from a world of traditional crafts to work as a train mechanic, motivated by his belief in the transformative power of industry. His adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, embraces revolution, which will transform everything: the words we speak and the lives we live, souls and bodies, the soil underfoot and the sun overhead.
Seeking communism, Dvanov joins up with Stepan Kopionkin, a warrior for the cause whose steed is the fearsome cart horse Strength of the Proletariat. Together they cross the steppe, meeting counter-revolutionaries, desperados and visionaries of all kinds. At last they reach the isolated town of Chevengur. There communism is believed to have been achieved because everything that is not communism has been eliminated. And yet even in Chevengur the revolution recedes from sight.
Comic, ironic, grotesque, disturbingly poetic in its use of language and profoundly sorrowful, Chevengur is a revolutionary novel about revolutionary ardour and despair. Unpublished during Andrey Platonov’s life, it is now one of the most celebrated Russian novels, and the most ambitious and moving of Platonov’s recreations of a world undergoing revolutionary transformation.
'It was from the novel Chevengur that I learned to create \"literary worlds\". Platonov is a self-taught literary jeweller, a true believer who built dystopias. His love for his characters is instantly conveyed to readers' Andrey Kurkov
A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the cataclysm of the Second World War
A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War
‘Remarkable and compelling’ Edmund de Waal
‘Thoroughly engaging’ Kamila Shamsie
In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever.
The caption claims that the Punjabi princess Amrit Kaur sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year.
For Livia, this marks the beginning of a compulsive search for the truth as she delves into the history of the British Raj, the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, and the lives of extraordinary figures: bankers, jewellers, explorers and spies.
Life on our planet as you've never seen it before
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
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