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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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 witty historical novel that conjures Dryden, Swift, Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and their ilk, by the cunning means of an imagined memoir, written by William Congreve's servant and com... read more
Tabucchi's paean to old Lisbon and to Fernando Pessoa is comic, elegiac, very clever, slightly surreal and hugely enjoyable. One of three new editions of his work.
A new edition of this magnificent, subtle novel of unlikely courage, frailty, love and betrayal in Lisbon, under Salazar's dictatorship. As Diana Athill wrote, reading it is an experience by... read more
The Turkish writer and political commentator, author of 'How to Lose a Country', on how to live now - civic engagement, an acknowledgement of reality, determination and a rejection of compla... read more
Fabulous photographs of the wildflower meadows created up and down the country for the 60th anniversary of ER's coronation. In tandem with various NGOs and charities, this initiative has an ... read more
This remarkable volume was published by the Memorial Human Rights Centre, a Russian civil rights group . It tells the stories of 16 men - mostly members of the intelligentsia, and loyal Sovi... read more
How to keep chickens, make soap, create a kitchen garden, dip candles, tie knots, and a lot more. This might well take the place of the old 'Weekend Books' in an era of lockdowns.
An instructive look at 12 statues: why they were put up, the stories they were supposed to tell, why those stories were challenged; and why the statues were pulled down.
His mistakes as well as his achievements, and a fascinating post- Brexit look at our history since WW2, in which our leaders still vye for Churchill's mythic mantle to legitimize their polit... read more