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
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.
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
From London in the Swinging Sixties to a hippie retreat in the Outer Hebrides: she and her partner travelled - slowly - by horse and wagon. She gave up music, disillusioned with the pop indu... read more
The pitfalls of cultural fantasies of the north: this cultural history, rich with travellers' tales and legends, is entertaining but also disturbing as myth, reality and politics rub uncomfo... 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
100 recipes, 100 photographs: more than a traditional cookbook, this celebrates Lee Miller's polymathic approach to life - surrealist, photographer, model, cook, war correspondent... The aut... read more
Our use of birds is well-known - feathers for hats as well as for nests, birds deified, personified, caged, used for food and for hunting. Less well know is how birds interact with us. (Not ... read more
A riotous memoir of attempting to mount a Bacon exhibition in the last days of the USSR; apparatchiks, honey-traps, the KGB - has the author's liver ever recovered?
King Mansolain is a thousand years old and fading; his devoted attendant Hare ushers in a caravan of storytellers to keep him alive - a rabbit, a donkey, a mouse, a dwarf, a witch - while wa... read more
The rise of Suleyman the Magnificent is told with a clever balance of the close (viziers, lovers, military commanders) and the distant (Venice, popes, emperors, Christendom and its interneci... read more
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.
This recent, fascinating Yale study of the 'lithic imagination' is already out of print in hardback but the paperback is a fine subsitute, and just as well illustrated.
Lucy Atkinson (1817-1893) was an English Atkinson was an English nanny working in Russia. In 1848 she set out with her new husband on a six-year exploration of Siberia and Central Asia, by f... read more
An elegant exploration of how British Prime Ministers, from Eden to Blair and beyond, have engaged in the Middle East under the misconception that they could help solve disputes because they... read more
A powerful coming-of-age story - and its consequences for others - by the French-Mauritian writer who won the Prix Femina des Lyceens for The Tropic of Violence.
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
The life of Violeta, of her family, friends and lovers, told in letters to a beloved grandson. Born in 1920 and in her hundredth year, Violeta's story encompasses Chile's C20th struggles.
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