Two women in their mid-twenties, stifled by marriage and the monotony of Hampstead society, come across an advertisement in The Times: 'To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small m... read more
This extraordinary book is much, much more than a simple analysis of Britain's relationship and future with oil. It is a travel book and social commentary that takes us from Milford Haven to... read more
A lovely hardback reissue of Mabey's book about beech trees, prompted by the great storm of 1987 when so many blew down. It's a wonderful stroll through the history of Fagus sylvatica, inclu... 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
Celebrated particularly for its classical statues (qv the excellent recent The Torlonia Marbles), this Roman villa was the C18th creation of Cardinal Albani. It was preserved with its collec... read more
The product of many years' research, this is an amazing book that reconstructs the eleven 'Strand Palaces' which both gave rise to the distinctly English style that emerged in country houses... read more
Long has spent a large part of his 50-year career hiking across various mountain ranges, valleys and deserts. This book is a chronology of his trips and a testament to his eye for finding co... read more
Blackwell is a remarkable artist who creates astonishing tableaux made of cut-out paper; many of her subjects are taken from fairy tales and she often works with the pages of old books. This... 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
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
Volume 3 of the Cairo Trilogy. Cairo's Old City is itself a protagonist in this magnificent saga of the Al-Jawad family and its fearsome patriarch, from 1917 to late in WW2. the Nobel laurea... read more
Volume 2 of the Cairo Trilogy. Cairo's Old City is itself a protagonist in this magnificent saga of the Al-Jawad family and its fearsome patriarch, from 1917 to late in WW2. the Nobel laurea... read more
Volume 1 of the Cairo Trilogy (which can be read on its own just as well). Cairo's Old City is itself a protagonist in this magnificent saga of the Al-Jawad family and its fearsome patriarch... read more
Cairo's Old City is itself a protagonist in this magnificent saga of the Al-Jawad family and its fearsome patriarch, from 1917 to late in WW2. the Nobel laureate's masterpiece is also availa... read more
The "inner darkness of the commercial age", with its self-confident hypocrisy and inability to "connect", confronts Bloomsbury-esque ideals and characters in this intimate masterpiece from 1... read more
Two sumptuous novellas, set in the mid-1860s and 1870s, weave together experiences of life, love, loss and connection. The first, 'Morpho Eugenia', does so through the earthly plane of insec... read more
The first translation by a woman, using Arabic and French sources, with detailed notes and commentary. Beautifully illustrated with Arab and Persian works of art as well as many drawn from p... read more
Acute and wide-ranging, these disparate glimpses come together (ha!) to make up a picture not only of the 'Fab Four' but of the new and colourful 1960s' world that they helped to usher in. ... read more
Jamie has just been named 'the Makar' - Scotland's poet laureate and you can see why in this essay collection: her quiet sentences are so polished they almost glisten. Whether she's windswep... 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
Jansen's unusual genius makes one think of Quixote and Leonardo: his huge kinetic sculptures that roam the flat beaches of Holland are extraordinary, wondrous beasts - winged, multi-limbed, ... read more
Wildly delicious, deliciously straightforward - a celebration of good ingredients, sluiced with new olive oil and nipped with a pinch of salt...The beautiful farmhouse of Arniano - Amber's f... 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
A New York housewife believes that the grotesque protagonist of her husband's novel is based on her. The ensuing paranoic spiral is gripping enough to satisfy any Hitchcock fan...
Written in 2015 by the chess grandmaster and human rights activist, this passionate indictment of Russian kleptocracy is also a warning against the complacency of Western democracies in the ... 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
The great Russian poet became a master of the English language in his long American exile: these essays evoke his youth in post-WW2 Leningrad with memorable portraits of his parents, in whom... 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
This debut novel, in which a woman returns from a voyage to the deep sea strangely altered, is a slippery marriage of the mundane and the uncanny. Structured around the zones of the ocean - ... 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
This marvellous memoir of her youth in Tottenham ends when her theatrical career takes off: forthright, transparent, dry, funny - there is nothing remotely precious about Dame Eileen's accou... read more