A bravura upending of the clichés of the 'Great American Novel' from the author of Then We Came to the End. Set in early C21st America, Ferris's protagonist is a romantic in the style of Up... read more
A simple cottage that became "a Federal-style manse" complete with bowling alley and tennis pavilion. All beautifully decorated by our Nina. (Perhaps also a dojo upholstered with fabulous fl... read more
A many-layered memoir from the Pulitzer-winning author of The Sympathizer: the American dream, the Vietnam War, the life of the refugee, adoption, violence, identity.
Edie's older sister attempts to understand how her younger sibling progressed from an isolated, privileged Californian childhood to become Warhol's muse.
Johan Jakob Astor left Germany for a flute-making business in London in the late C18th, and then moved to New York where he dealt in pianos, opium, furs and real estate: what glistered was i... read more
Where did refugees from the American and French Revolutions go? This remarkable historical perspective shows how opening doors can be more profitable than closing borders.
A mysterious philanthropist travels up and down a stretch of Canadian coast delivering books to people who live too far from libraries. This novella was first published in 1933.
An epic historical novel about political and moral divides in 19th America, approached through the raucous, ill-starred family of John Wilkes Booth. By the author of We Are All Completely Be... read more
Not just bar-room belles and pioneers wearing thin the soles of their boots on their immense journeys to the west, but Chinese laundresses and displaced native Americans too. Real stories, w... read more
Published last year in the US, this account of the rich in mid-C20th New York, and Capote's multiple betrayals of friendships, is both fascinating and shocking.
If you want to read one book about inequality and its ramifications for all societies, now and in the past, let it be this. By a former Pulitzer winner.
Argues that today's Sino-American rivalry in micro-processing is as important in geopolitical terms as the economics of oil was at the time of the first Gulf War.
By the former UK Ambassador who had the unenviable task of explaining Britain and Brexit to the US president. He resigned, and wrote this book instead.
A 600-page behemoth of a novel, Crossroads is a cross-generational saga set in 1970s suburban Chicago. The paterfamilias is a pastor wondering whether to leave his failing marriage before hi... read more
Executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, a crime of which she was almost certainly innocent. This is a valuable book on 'The American Dreyfus Affair... read more
Bridges was an American painter(1834-1923). Her oddly static pictures of birds and flowers were celebrated during her lifetime and display a startling intensity.
The stunning new installation of the Frick's collection of Old Masters etc in Marcel Breuer's Brutalist bulding a few blocks away from its usual home, now in the process of restoration. Beau... read more
As the ultra-conservative director of the FBI for nearly 50 years, Hoover is arguably more responsible for the emergence of the US far right than anyone else. Who was he? What happened?
A furniture salesman, who tries to keep to the straight and narrow with only the occasional foray into fencing a pilfered gewgaw for a cousin, finds himself drawn into a much bigger heist. A... read more
A re-issue of LB's famous and very funny memoir about working in a New York Hotel. He came to the US in 1914, aged sixteen, and worked at the 'Hotel Splendide' as he called it for the next t... read more
Ellison is reputed to be little short of a genius - for forty years a carpenter, cabinet-maker, industrial designer, sculptor, welder; and capable of realising the three-dimensional processe... read more