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
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
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
Casey's first novel, recently reissued, is set on an imaginary island off the west coast of Ireland. It traces the conflict between traditional rural values and those of the Swinging Sixtie... read more
Dedicated to her friend Tirzah Garwood, this is a deliciously charming and funny mix of commonplace book and diary from the 1950s, illustrated with woodcuts not by Tirzah as intended (she ha... 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
Refracts an abusive relationship through a range of genre and fairytale tropes. A haunting work that is part-memoir and part-literary theory.
There is also a paperback edition of this boo... read more
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
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
A cultural history of ice and icy places, written between Northern Greenland and the Bodleian Library, in the Alps and at the Kinross Curling Club. NC, a poet, deftly blends memoir, literary... 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
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 toup?e, which functioned as an inst... read more
A stellar second collection: each character and action is precisely observed, each story is shot with humour and pathos. Humane and wistful, these stories - mostly set in Ireland, in County ... 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...
Two men go walking in the Dolomites, but not together; one falls to his death, the other reports the body. Is it coincidence that they knew each other in earlier years, and that one had betr... read more
This eloquent little book offers a moving and erudite justification for the survival of high quality book shops and why they are essential places of discovery, refuge and fulfilment. Laced w... read more
A selection from all stages of the late Polish poet's life and writing career. In clear, often humorous writing, his Eastern European sensibility connects with themes of human experience bot... read more
The author is a medical doctor and a poet: this book is both a meditation on art and life and a collection of snippets about the history of medicine. Written over twenty years, it moves effo... read more
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.
Despite its title, this is not a self-help book but rather a beautiful exploration of a condition that is at the heart of human life - solitude. The book is a memoir of time spent in social ... 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
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