A former soldier reckons with the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as he tries to rebuild his relationship with his daughter. By the author of Pure and Now We Shall Be Entirely Fre... read more
Hugely enjoyable and widely researched, this will be accompanied by the happy sound of gender stereotypes being liberated from their historic chains...
Two sisters try to survive the four nights that were the Belfast Blitz: a powerful novel of love and living in extreme circumstances, by a fine writer.
A strange and magical memoir of growing up in prosaic England with Anglo-Burmese parentage. Teak trees interweave oaks; myth and imagery chase each other through the author's odyssey through... read more
This extraordinary Californian garden was the creation of Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer who bought the estate of Montecito in 1943 while briefly married to her sixth husband. Thereafte... read more
Three stories of family life - especially mothers and sons - from early in Tanizaki's career - 'Longing', 'Sorrows of a Heretic' and 'The Story of an Unhappy Mother'. (It would be interestin... read more
A substantial book on the 1920s' group who turned against modernist abstraction in favour of figurative painting, and were particularly influential oin theatre design, ballet and fashion.
After looking at the bleak trajectory of Erdogan's regime, DB argues that Turkey's democratic instincts and economic ties to Europe will win in the end.
From Byzantium to England, the Normans achieved an extraordinary ascendancy in the C11th. This study draws particular attention to dynastic relations and to the role of women in what has hit... read more
A troubled policeman is sent to investigate a double murder in rural Catalonia. Cercas, renowned as a novelist, turns his hand to crime - this won Spain's foremost literary prize
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more
The author is a US journalist who, in 2016, accompanied an Afghan driver determined to leave his country for the West. It is an extraordinary account of how this ghastly odyssey works from t... read more
The legendary Russian pianist, friend of Pasternak and other greats, who fell from grace to live precariously on the fringes of Soviet society. EW is the author of fine biographies of Shosta... read more
We heard about Molotov's library in Rachel Polonsky's superb Molotov's Magic Lantern (£12.99). Now we have a portrait of Stalin through the books he read - and he was an avid reader all his... read more
Portraits of ER from 1926 to the present, drawn from the huge collection at the National Portrait Gallery - Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibowitz, David Lichfield, Andy Warhol and many others.
Last autumn we had the great Dutch writer's 533: A Book of Days, a sort of diary of the pandemic on Menorca. Now we have this single poem which repeatedly refers back to images of wartime; h... read more
Set in 1742, this is a rollicking reworking of Moonfleet in which a wild, cross-dressing teenage girl joins a bloodthirsty gang of smugglers to avenge her father's murder.