Edgar W, teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius - and dead - tells the story of his brief, spectacular life. It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in an abandoned summer house, with just a tape recorder and a battered copy of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther for company.
"A story of epic force and human intensity." - Die Welt
A stupendously ambitious and fascinatingly successful survey of the ways in which madness has been seen, and the 'mad' treated (in both the ameliorative and non-ameliorative (and often abusive) senses). Scull's scope is as long and broad as history itself - is madness the excluded face of civilisation?
>> Scull on madness and meaning.
1 novel. 18 people. 18 lives. Infinite combinations: families and friends, colleagues and patients, lovers and mourners. But sometimes a crowd is the loneliest place to be...
"Excels in exploring the roots of unhappiness. Reza skilfully peels away the veneer of life to reveal the secrets seething within." - Guardian
In this darkly funny work of literary reportage, narrated by an excitable, semi-fictionalized graduate student named Kit, a bookish young woman insinuates herself into the lives of two cage fighters - one a young prodigy, the other an aging journeyman. Kerry Howley follows these men for three years through the bloody world of mixed martial arts as they starve themselves, break bones, fail their families and form new ones in the quest to rise from remote Midwestern fairgrounds to packed Vegas arenas.
"Compulsively readable." - New York Times
"The most fascinating book I've read this year. The precision of Howley's prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace." - Time
Meet two of Victorian London's greatest geniuses: Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron; mathematician, gambler, and proto-programmer, whose writings contained the first ever appearance of general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. And Charles Babbage, eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, an enormous clockwork calculating machine that would have been the first computer, if he had ever finished it. But what if things had been different? What is they did build the Difference Engine? A very amusing graphic novel.
Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home. In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finish.
"As bizarre, hilarious and devastating as the past decade. Simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a war story, and a story of the disaffected millennial generation for whom the war hardly happened at all." - Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
The spying game is changing, but the need for walking, talking sources who gather secret information has never been more acute.
The CD of the publishing phenomenon of the year.
Read it yourself.
>> Here's Chapter One.
Nelson's Waimarama Sanctuary is a replica of an ancient New Zealand landscape. The wealth of species is even richer than it appears - mosses grow nearly everywhere: on soil, rock, bark and leaves, and even in water. Very well observed and illustrated.
Every web has a spider sitting at the centre of it. Pathologist Quirke is back working in the city morgue, watching over Dublin's dead. When a body is found in a burnt-out car, Quirke is called in to verify the apparent suicide of an up-and-coming civil servant. But Quirke can't shake a suspicion of foul play.The only witness has vanished, every trace of her wiped away. Piecing together her disappearance, Quirke finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of Dublin's elite - secret societies and high church politics, corrupt politicians and men with money to lose. John Banville writes as Benjamin Black.
Inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous's 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, Actors Anonymous mixes memoir and invention in an examination of celebrity, acting and the making of fiction. Actor/director Franco turns his 'James Franco' persona inside out while providing a fascinating meditation on his art, along with tales of excess. "Hollywood has always been a private club," he writes. "I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside."
A father tells his sone what it means to be black in America.
"A beautiful, lyrical call for consciousness in the face of racial discrimination in America. Between the World and Me is an exhortation against blindness. Coates wants to push us to see the delusions we’ve been feeding ourselves and insist we struggle through the Dream, that false narrative of America’s history, by reckoning with its ugliness." - Guardian
London just after the war, a city desperately trying to get back on its feet. A young boy, Michael Moorcock, is about to discover a world of magic and wonder. Between his first tentative approaches to adulthood - a job on Fleet Street, the first stirrings of his interest in writing - and a chance encounter with a mysterious Carmelite Friar, we see a version of Moorcock's life that is simultaneously a biography and a story. Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians, this is Moorcock's first full novel in ten years.
The definitive biography of the playwright who, after years of political dissidency, became President of the Czech Republic is now in paperback.
Fascinating - the story of Jim and Nathan Nicholson.
Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the first history of the city in English for almost 80 years.
Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in a series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize.
"This book is a substantial achievement: its combination of scholarship and intelligence is, you may well think, the best monument you could have to all those she has rescued from time's oblivion." - Financial Times
"A remarkable achievement. Common People should become a classic." - Margaret Drabble
Most people only know one London - but what if there were several? Kell is one of the last Travelers - magicians with a rare ability to travel between parallel Londons. There's Grey London, dirty and crowded and without magic, home to the mad king George III. There's Red London, where life and magic are revered. Then, White London, ruled by whoever has murdered their way to the throne. And, once upon a time, there was Black London...
Insight into the impact of civil war on the people of Syria.
Winner of the PEN Pinter Prize.
>> here.
Now in paperback!
"Swedish entomologist Sjoberg has a close affinity with the island on which he lives, most specifically its hoverflies, about which he is an expert. Island life, specialisation, and happiness are all themes of this book. In essence it is an exploration of the art of mastery, containing observations of nature that reflect the writer’s inner self. This is a book with strong imagery and ideas that I mentally keep returning to." - Sarah
By the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway (who epitomised the family characteristics Mariel has struggled to overcome).
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