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
Just 28 when he found Nineveh, Layard later witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade and reported on the Indian Mutiny: his life was action-packed. This new biog argues that he was deeply r... read more
Parini really did travel around Scotland with Borges in an old Morris Minor, his ears flapping, heart opening and mind sharpening all the way. The result is a wonderful work of autofiction -... read more
A rollicking account of the pursuit of love among the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful; abridged from 3 large volumes of memoirs that he left on his death in 2011.
The buildings that are falling into disuse and ruin all around the UK were once essential in their communities. This study - from the Anglo-Saxons to the mid-C16th shows how they worked.
Especially from the mountainous region of Northern Macedonia. Nitsou is Macedonian-Canadian, and grew up cooking with three generations of her family before Cordon Bleu training etc.
An exploration of our shores, the land between the tides, the littoral realm of the shrimp and the anemone... Nicolson is observant, patient, inquisitive, immune to soaking, buoyed by poet... read more
C20th experimental and idealistic collectives, including Santiniketan in Delhi, England's Dartington, Germany's Bruderhof. Their leaders were charismatics too - Tagore, Gurdjieff, et al - ... read more
New edition of these wonderful, open-eyed letters by the wife of the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte; fascinating glimpses of the world of Ottoman women, not least their practice of ... read more
Soon after her husband leaves her, Pru goes to a friend's funeral - but it's the wrong one. She has such fun that she buys a black dress and starts attending strangers' funerals quite delibe... read more
Draws on his own family's experience of emigrating from India to Britain and America to show how the West is being destroyed not by immigrants but by its fear of immigrants.
DA's 'Diary of a Young Naturalist' won last year's Wainright Prize; he is extraordinarily young too - now just 17. Here he invites young readers on a practical exploration of the world aroun... read more
First published in 1901, Mawson's book was hugely influential for decades, both for garden designers and landscape gardeners. Large format, handsomely produced in dark green cloth, many ill... read more