Jonathan Cape

  • Mother’s Boy

    £18.99

    In ‘Mother’s Boy,’ Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish.Jacobson was 40 when his first novel was published. In ‘Mother’s Boy’ he traces the life that brought him there. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician.Grappling always with his family’s history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus.

  • Ephemeron

    £12.00

    The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory – whether it’s the brief, urgent lives of the first section, ‘Insect Love Songs’, the abrupt, anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school, as remembered in ‘Boarding-School Tales’, or parenting’s day-by-day shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in ‘Daughter Mother’. The long central section, ‘Translations from the Pasiphaë’, gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child’s mother – the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power.

  • Free Love

    £16.99

    London, 1967: while the capital comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability. Homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother.

  • Sapiens. Volume 2

    Sapiens. Volume 2

    £18.99

    Twelve thousand years ago, we humans fell into a trap. This volume tells the story of how wheat took over the world; how an unlikely marriage between a god and a bureaucrat created the first empires; and how war, famine, disease, and inequality became a part of the human condition.

  • Noble Ambitions

    £30.00

    As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation’s stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants’ balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, ‘Noble Ambitions’ takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power, as a rakish, raffish, aristocratic Swinging London collided with traditional rural values.

  • Life Without Children

    £14.99

    Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone. In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times.

  • Eating to Extinction

    £25.00

    A captivating and unexpected journey through the history of humankind’s relationship with food, with an urgent message for our times. We live in an age of mass extinction. The earth’s biodiversity is decreasing at a faster rate than ever. Industrial agriculture and the standardization of taste are not only wiping out many edible plants, but also the food cultures, histories and livelihoods that go with them. Inspired by a global project to collect and preserve foods that are at risk of extinction, Dan Saladino sets out to encounter these endangered foods.

  • Stanley’s Library

    £6.99

    It’s another busy day at Stanley’s Library! Stanley loads his van with books and sets off to the village green. Who will visit today and which books will they choose? Later, Stanley arrives back at the library just in time for a special event.

  • Greek Myths

    £20.00

    Charlotte Higgins reinterprets some of the most enduring stories of all time. Here are myths of the creation, of Heracles and Theseus and Perseus, the Trojan war and its origins and aftermaths, tales of Thebes and Argos and Athens. There are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures, resourceful witches and the origins of birds and animals. This is a world of extremes, and one that resonates deeply with our own.

  • On Freedom

    On Freedom

    £20.00

    So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? ‘On Freedom’ examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.

  • The Turning Point

    The Turning Point

    £25.00

    The year is 1851. It’s a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It’s also a turbulent time in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens’s career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people’s lives, and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming. ‘The Turning Point’ transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens’s London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him, and forever alter Britain’s relationship with the world.

  • More Than I Love My Life

    £18.99

    On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili is celebrating the ninetieth birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. But festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera’s care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. Nina’s return to the family after years of silence precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives.