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
Born in 1799, Atkins was the first person to illustrate a book with photographs. Her cyanotypes - of ferns, algae, parrot feathers, seaweed - are exquisite.
Slim but far-reaching memoir of the author's brush with suicide, framed as the consequence of familial trauma and isolation. Superbly written, this bears honourable comparison with William S... read more
A memoir by the Egytian woman who set up an independent book shop with a friend and her sister in 2002 - ten years later it had grown to include ten shops and 150 employees. Full of the nois... 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
Betrayal and loss of innocence: this distinguished debut, already highly praised by Hilary Mantel and others, moves between Guernsey, London & California.
Philby's granddaughter has drawn on unpublished letters for this tense novel about Edith Tudor-Hart, the woman who introduced Philby to his Soviet handler.
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.
A powerful novel set in the closing stages of WW2, in which a 12-year-old girl escapes to the German countryside with her mother and older sister. Translated from the German.
The discovery in 1799 of a mysterious ancient Greek vase sets in motion conspiracies, revelations and romance. Atmospheric historical fiction with a delightful heroine.
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 feminist polemic that looks at women's resistance to male domination, both historically and now, and the consequences of independence, education, knowledge and power.
Kristeva's most recent book, translated from the French, is a (not surprisingly) complex engagement with the work of Dostoyevsky. Enhanced by a thoughtful foreword by Rowan Williams.
The story of three friendships made when the author lived in Herat in the 1970s; after the Communist coup, Russian occupation and civil war, she was able to pick up the threads of those frie... read more
Lovely edition that includes some colour illustrations by Tove as well as the line drawings we are used to - the only colour ones she ever did, in fact, which were commissioned in 1961 for t... 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.
Having escaped the massacre at Katyn, Czapski was interned and lived to write these essays on some of those who were murdered, as well as pieces on Blok, Soutine, and others. He was the mode... 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
A spare and engaging chronicle of the summers spent in a small cabin on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland with her partner, who did the illustrations.
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.
Keenly anticipated first volume of poetry from this wonderful, delicate writer. Many of the poems were written during a period of illness, when Toibin found himself only able to write for a... read more