The world is as divided about cold water swimming as it is about the pronunciation of 'tomato'... One person's heaven is another's miserable hell; the side that is thought mad by the other h... read more
Another in the 'No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' series from the master of 'sofa suspense': you'll find yourself safe in the middle of your seat rather than anywhere uncomfortably near its edg... read more
Seed, leaf, bark, wood, flowers, fruits, symbiosis - and we who depend on them in our fragile and entwined ecosystem. Lavishly photographed and fascinating.
A boy finds an unknown variety of apple while wandering deep in the woods near his home. Lovely watercolours throughout. For children who love pottering about outside and are good at noticin... read more
Tangled, mossy, temperate rainforest still prevails in some valleys and creases of these isles - though it seems hard to imagine after these months of drought... And the author's name is of ... read more
A first collection of essays and journalism from the novelist best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Free speech, identity politics and intellectual imprisonment are all grist to Shrive... 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
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
These tales of cats in a Tokyo suburb weave a beguiling portrait of the local human inhabitants. What is it with cats and the Japanese literary scene? Murakami, Hiraide, Kawamura...
A powerful novel spanning forty years of friendship between two women. Events in Karachi in 1988 look rather different when seen from present day London, when each has power and an altered a... read more
The late lamented drummer of the Rolling Stones, who died just over a year ago. He was also a jazz fiend, playing and recording with several other musicians. His deadpan demeanour set off hi... read more
A new translation of Seneca's 'On The Shortness of Life', with the Latin on facing pages and an introduction. One of three niftily pocket-sized classical guides to life.
A collection of his journalism and essays on literature and writing, getting his typewriter fixed (presumably all modernists use typewriters, the better to make modernist metajokes), etc.
A short biography of Thomas Linley, the Georgian prodigy who was celebrated - with Mozart - by Burney as "the most promising geniusses of the age". But he died very young.
Born in Austrian Galicia in what is now Ukraine, Schulz is one of the great Eastern European writers of the C20th. Sadly - and oddly - he has been out of print for several years; we are ther... 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
The Chagos Archipelago was appropriated from Mauritius by Britain in the 1960s and its inhabitants deported (with one suitcase each) to Mauritius and the UK in 1967-1973 to make way for the ... read more
The poet walks ten landscapes that were significant for the Romantics - Shelley, Barrett Browning, Constable, Wordsworth and others - from Kent to Scotland: a mix of memoir, reverie, and ref... read more
Captivating new novel by the author of Varjak Paw: two children in a dystopian London, from which all goodness has been leached, find a mythical, magical and powerful creature that helps the... read more
Lavish book on this magnificent house, by its owner, now the thirteenth generation of Sackvilles. Knole appears in Woolf's Orlando as her protagonist's vast Elizabethan domain, more like a t... read more
This early C19th disabled artist excelled as a miniaturist, having taught herself how to paint by holding a brush in her teeth. Contracted to a travelling showman at the age of thirteen as a... read more
The work of Lucien Boucher, 37 of whose marvellous lithographs of Parisian shop fronts are reproduced here, along with an extended, illustrated essay by James Russell and Shaun Whiteside's t... read more
A free-spirited imp sets out on an adventure to help her friend the zebra, and ends up liberating a whole menagerie of animals. Very cheerful stuff from a most ingenious author. For ages 5-7... read more