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
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
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
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
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
A history and call-to-action by a dynamic new thinker and campaigner, re-centring the importance of grassroots, structural change. Vital reading for the present (and any) cultural moment.
A story about a young woman in New York, newly married and nervous. Offill has mastered the curious genre of autofiction by shattering her books into deliciously pithy paragraphs: overheard ... read more
A brilliant, perky novella about the foibles of Professor Timofey Pnin, an eccentric Russian teacher at a school in New England. 'Pninian' should really be part of our daily vocabulary; it w... read more
A brilliant, perky novella about the foibles of Professor Timofey Pnin, an eccentric Russian teacher at a school in New England. 'Pninian' should really be part of our daily vocabulary; it w... read more
The story of a young girl growing up just before WW2: the late Morrison's first novel, published in 1970, still outstanding in its fiftieth anniversary year. In telling the 'how', she makes... read more
A gorgeous book, drawing from the V&As enormous collections. It contains over 500 pages of lavish illustrations, each chapter focusing on a different technique - weaving, knitting, dying... read more
Simms and Medd were part of the mass-release of Allied prisoners when Italy surrendered in 1943. Their escape story - and the bravery and kindness of the Italians who helped them on their ... read more