A deeply affecting memoir of coming of age in Albania - the last outpost of Stalinism in Europe. Tracing the transition in 1990 from repression, food shortages and political executions to po... read more
Reframes an unruly passage of Lawrence's life - from Cornwall in 1915, to Italy and Central America - into a neat Dantean triptych: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. Whether you loathe or ado... read more
Reframes an unruly passage of Lawrence's life - from Cornwall in 1915, to Italy and Central America - into a neat Dantean triptych: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. Whether you loathe or ado... read more
A brilliant tale of lexicographers whose lives are influenced in surprising ways by mountweazels. (Mountweazel, noun: a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of referenc... read more
Published in 1954, STW's wonderful last novel depicts an early Victorian merchant family on the Norfolk coast, harried by the good intentions of its flawed paterfamilias. Her coruscating int... read more
In the early 20th century an easily overlooked square in Bloomsbury was the home, at one time or another, of the modernist poet H.D., Dorothy L Sayers, the classicist Jane Harrison, the hist... read more
A slim volume containing two dozen leaves: twelve are photographic studies by the great NM of dead leaves, "at the held, drawn-out stage of their metamorphosis", the moment when they curl in... read more
This collection includes his commentary on the events of September 11th, 2001, and also his brave and penetrating piece on Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
The names have changed and the shamelessness causes the eyes to pop even further, but the threats to the freedoms Vidal loved and fought so hard to defend were already vivid in these excoria... read more
The remarkable story of the author's Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and republished for decades under a fal... read more
"...It was on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs Protheroe's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim...". Every adult and every childs needs to have Thomas's words and image... read more
Tesson practised living in extreme cold on the shores of Lake Baikal a few years ago, memorably and entrancingly recounted in Consolations of the Forest. Here he has renounced both solitude ... read more
A plane inexplicably duplicates when caught in a storm. One plane lands in March; the other in June. As for the duplicated passengers... From this speculative premise comes an engrossing dra... read more
Had Mrs Gaskell lived in Japan and a century later, she might have written this intimate portrait of four sisters of good family living in Osaka in somewhat straitened circumstances. Their e... read more
Had Mrs Gaskell lived in Japan and a century later, she might have written this intimate portrait of four sisters of good family living in Osaka in somewhat straitened circumstances. Their e... read more
A neurotic Italian businessman obsessed by his own hypochondria, Zeno Cosini recounts his early years to his psychoanalyst Dr S. With a cigarette clutched permanently between his fingers, he... read more
Parallel possible worlds spool from a German rocket strike in London in 1944: five children are killed but, in a feat of authorial engineering, are given futures nevertheless. A dazzling cel... read more
Thomas Robins the Elder (1716-1770) recorded the country estates of the Georgian gentry - their orchards, Rococo gardens and potagers - like no other, with both topographical accuracy and de... read more
Insecure but fiercely precocious, the young Sontag devours everything that culture offers up to her. From her early teens through to late twenties, she craves not just the thrill of intellec... read more
A brilliant historical novel whose subtitle 'A Romance' is deliciously deceptive. Sontag follows Sir William Hamilton (rechristened as 'The Cavalier' for the entire book), whose expat exploi... read more
Translated from the German, this is a substantial book on the man who led Europe out of the Napoleonic chaos; the father of realpolitik, according to Kissinger.
A memoir from the former Editor of British Vogue, her trademark white stilettos at the ready. Shulman has been the most significant mind in British fashion for a generation.
Shortlisted for both the Women's Fiction Prize (2022) and the Booker (2021), this stirring novel pulls together the lives of a fictional female aviator in the 1950s aiming to circumnavigate ... read more
Shortlisted for both the Women's Fiction Prize (2022) and the Booker (2021), this stirring novel pulls together the lives of a fictional female aviator in the 1950s aiming to circumnavigate ... read more
With considerable humility, this book is subtitled In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life. Actually it's the brilliant Saunders' own work, distilled from deca... read more
Rutter - a literature graduate who notes the etymological link between 'text' and 'textile' - travelled the British Isles researching the social history of wool and knitting. This charming a... read more
A slim, irresistible coming-of-age story in the tradition of Bonjour Tristesse and Call Me By Your Name, in which the arrival of two American brothers wreaks havoc on an English family over ... read more
A slim, irresistible coming-of-age story in the tradition of Bonjour Tristesse and Call Me By Your Name, in which the arrival of two American brothers wreaks havoc on an English family over ... read more
An incisive post-mortem on the state of the Victorian union, told (with a gossipy thrill) through the lives of five couples - Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, John Ruskin and Effie Gray, Charl... read more
In this magnificently madcap adventure, SR pursues rumours of old pianos into all corners of Siberia: Arctic, Altai, Kamchatka, Princess Volkonsky in Irkutsk... She writes well, has a lovely... read more
A dizzying and quietly surreal novel of South London life narrated through an interlinked series of episodic character studies. Ridgway's neo-Beckettian prose is never less than needle sharp... read more
The 'green fingers' behind JamJar Flowers chronicles the botanical history of flower pressing, from foxgloves to fritillaries, through lampshades, lilies, oshibana, jasmine, and many more de... read more