Often hilarious and certainly astonishing, this is the novelist's memoir of growing up in Sheffield in the 1950s. His father, an insecure bully, adopted a toupée, which functioned as an ins... read more
Elizabeth Zott is a gifted chemist who reluctantly becomes America's favourite television chef. Imagine Julia Child in the form of Grace Kelly, wearing a lab coat and goggles... This feel-go... 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
Blaise Pascal famously said that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone".
In 1790 a young French aristocrat living in Turin was confined to a ... read more
How and why does it work on us? This masterful study explores the mystery through the psychology, philosophy, mathematics, neurology and history that underlie as surrund it, in all its remar... read more
It's 1939 and Josef Kavalier has just arrived in New York, smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Prague in the body of a Golem. In Brooklyn he meets his cousin Sammy Clayman and the two dive headlon... 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 first collection by an Afghan poet, born in Kabul in 1990 and now a don at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Highly literate yet drawing on the story-telling traditions of her youth, Fayyaz tells of ... read more
Amongst the plethora of recent books on the threats facing liberal democracy, this one stands out for the author's talent for making complex subjects comprehensible. He sees the danger comin... 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
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 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
Contemporary short fiction from Afghanistan, all written before the Taliban retook power in August 2021. An extraordinary collection brought into being through the efforts of UNTOLD's Write ... 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
So the shortest day came, and the year died: a poem about how humans have responded to midwinter - the fading of the light and its mighty return - for millennia, by a well known children's 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 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 collection of interconnected short stories by a former District Commissioner for Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. Apparently inexorable consequences play out through multiple lives... read more
The Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins descends on seventeen-century Essex, where he finds himself oddly fascinated by a 'peculiar' young woman. A historical novel with real bite, which rec... 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
It's the shortest, coldest day of the year and Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant in a small Irish town, busies himself with the last few deliveries. An elegant and carefully distilled... read more
Garner’s tenth novel is a slim, strange and wonderful creature: mercurial, funny, frightening, enigmatic. It weaves autobiographical threads with folklore, symbol and archaeology – and w... read more