A memoir by the artist who had a decade-long relationship with Lucian Freud; full of insights, sometimes discomfortingly so. CP has a fine, clear voice - Freud's gestures and movements as ... read more
In his memoirs, Gorbachev wrote that the explosion at Chernobyl's power plant was "perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union." Plokhy's diagnosis is meticulous and his minut... read more
Born in 1914 in Czernovitz in what is now Ukraine, the author was successively a citizen of Austro-Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union as the bloody tides of the C20th swept to and fro bef... read more
This slim modernist novel written in 1939 is unforgettable. A young English woman returns to Paris after a long absence to take stock of her life. A study in bleakness, sadness and isolati... 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
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
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
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
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
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
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