A spin on Huckleberry Finn, this harrowing (and characteristically witty) account of his adventures is narrated by James, a runaway slave. It's a scary reflection on racism today.
A quiet and thoughtful novel about a girl growing up on an island off the Welsh coast before WW2, whose horizons are altered by the arrival of two ethnographers.
Roads not taken, not thought about for twenty years, until bad news turns the protagonist's head for her Irish home. The humane and introspective sequel to Brooklyn.
The Nuremberg Trials had their counterpart in Japan. This is a thorough investigation of that process, and its significance to what happened afterwards in Asia.
A society's way of dealing with death can be very revealing. Here, the distinguished historian of Victorian Britain and the domestic sphere shows how their behaviour around death offers deep... read more
An investigation of Jesus' messianic contemporaries and the reasons for Christianity's success. From the author of the highly regarded The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Cla... read more
1990s' Chicago: two students fall in love. Twenty years on, theirs is a suburban life of detoxes and home improvements. A warm and sardonic novel by the author of The Nix.
A wry memoir of his recovery from a stroke in 2011, during which time his thoughts turned to his father too. Completed shortly before his death earlier this year.
Her life in disarray, La Stibbe returns to London for a sabbatical and lodges with Deborah Moggach. As ever she's funny, but there is pathos and pain here too.
A new collection of short stories by the acclaimed writer who moved to Rome in 2012 and now only writes in Italian. Her many awards include a Pulitzer prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Na... read more
This staggering account of corruption in the art world began when RD was approached in 2003 by Hockney, who had recently had two Warhol pictures denounced as fakes.
Mozart was taken to Italy three times by his father in his early and mid-teens; already astonishingly accomplished as a thirteen-year-old, he drank in Italian opera like a thirsty man findin... read more