A brilliant historical novel whose subtitle 'A Romance' is deliciously deceptive. Sontag follows Sir William Hamilton (rechristened as 'The Cavalier' for the entire book), whose expat exploi... read more
A young French woman leaves Paris after the liberation in 1944 and joins her husband on a farm in Morocco, where she finds herself lonely, alienated, mistrusted and increasingly restless. Th... read more
In this new book Sinclair has abandoned London for Peru, in an attempt to understand his great-grandfather's colonial career. The narrative Sinclair grew up with ends up as self-serving flot... read more
Friends are hard to find for Jon Swift, an aging journalist whose career is on the ropes. A chance encounter with an old friend from Tiananmen Square days leads to power games in China, with... read more
Satisfyingly creepy crime novel from the acclaimed Icelandic author: a doll caught in a fishing net, dead bodies, cold cases... an atmospheric and well-plotted chiller to read in sunlight!
Raised in Nazi Germany, at 18, Wulff Scherchen was Britten's muse and lover. When the composer went to the USA during the war, Wulff was interned as an enemy alien and transported to Canada,... read more
The magnificent Eland publisher considers his ilk through the stories and gossip of 15 generations of farmers, colonels, brewers, naval commanders and horse-lovers, as told to him by a great... read more
Patrick Leigh Fermor held that baroque architecture in Italy could never have existed without pasta in all its multitudinous and beguiling forms... Drawing on a decade and a half of living i... 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
First published in 1930, this is a compendium of old recipes from the American South, rather than Bloomsbury. Fascinating even if some of the ingredients will be hard to come by, at least in... read more
Raven is an American biologist whose cherished solitude in a remote part of Montana is interrupted by a fox, who begins visiting her daily. As an academic, any sense of a meaningful rela... read more
From the author of the excellent 'The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are', an account of the dazzling city that was the hub of the known world in the C16th.
The distinguished archaeologist looks at 15 'scenes' in Britain over the last million years, to understand the changing daily routines of people and their impact on the landscape.
Witty and wandering memoir about the pursuit of happiness - indeed paradise - through all things "fishological", which include travelling about and stillness, people and solitude, childhood ... read more
Petterson has not been kind to his protagonist, removing from him by traumatic means his wife, three daughters, parents and brothers. It is no surprise that he is pole-axed by grief; will Pe... read more