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£12.99
This work is an unimprovable guide to the strange highways and byways of American life, written by Richard Hofstadter, the great American historian and intellectual. How is it that a country with such resources, so much space, with such a premium on education and written culture, can so quickly be reduced to a mere headless chicken by rumours, surreal conspiracy theories and the most brazen of conmen?The only hope offered by Hofstadter is that America has so often been assailed by such gusts of nonsense that we should by now be able to spot the manias, fabrications and the patently absurd rumours. There never has been a golden age of reasonably intelligent discourse. But, unfortunately, perhaps there never will be. In an era where we ourselves feel assailed by endless paranoid public statements it is comforting to read Hofstadter’s incisive refusal to see these as something new.
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£11.99
Cherry blossom, hinoki, ezo spruce. Persimmon, maple, cypress. The trees of Japan are wondrous emblems of beauty that cast a spell on those who venture to its unique landscape. As a child, Aya Koda realized they were more than mere objects of beauty. Gifted a sapling by her father, she discovered that we depend on trees as much as they do on us. Markers of time passing, they clear the air and regenerate our earth – while we are responsible to care for their future. Following her travels around Japan, as she witnesses landslides, lumber and forests of falling ash, Tree is a beautiful series of essays that contemplate the most distinctive and eternal features of our natural world. A modern classic translated for the first time, Koda’s voice echoes down the generations, to remind us that trees hold a mirror to what we cherish on Earth, and what we choose to leave behind.
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£15.99
Musashino, 1959. A young Japanese flight attendant is found strangled on the icy banks of the river. The police suspect foul play – but the deeper they dig, the more they collide with a wall of silence. At the centre of it all stands a foreign priest and the Guglielmo Church, a charitable Christian mission. The dead woman’s connection to the church is undeniable. But what begins as a routine investigation quickly turns into something far more treacherous, entangling together narcotics, post-war relief schemes and the delicate web of international diplomacy. As the story moves from back alleys to diplomatic sanctuaries, following the twists and turns of Detective Fujisawa’s investigation, Seicho Matsumoto masterfully constructs a slow-burning procedural where truth is clear but justice is not permitted.
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£14.99
1969: Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister for Armaments, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, from his involvement in Nazi rallies to the fall of the Third Reich, he becomes ‘the good Nazi’, the poster child of German guilt. Claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution despite his proximity to the Führer, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’. How do you write about a man who made fiction more seductive than truth? Retracing Speer’s life, from his early years as a Nazi to the height of his power, to his post-war rebranding as a best-selling author, and artfully questioning the truthfulness of his stories, Jean-Noël Orengo offers a dizzying portrait of the man who was once described as the Führer’s unrequited love.
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£10.99
The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, and to rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD. That Rome lives more vividly in people’s imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Now award-winning author and translator Tom Holland brings us even closer with this translation. Giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of Rome’s first emperors, and of how they swayed the fates of millions, ‘The Lives of the Caesars’ provides an immersive experience of a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.
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£12.99
This internationally acclaimed masterpiece traces the interwoven destinies of five women – including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher – as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men.T.
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£14.99
Writing in the wake of her father’s death, the narrator of Pirkko Saisio’s autofictional novel transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Pirkko keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her. With wit and style, Saisio captures the heart-wrenching intensity of childhood feeling, merging fever dreams with sensory-laden memories as each formative experience – with the Big Bad Wolf, a bikini-clad circus announcer, and Jesus Christ himself – drives her further and further from her family and others.
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£12.99
This report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in ‘The New Yorker’ in 1963. This edition contains further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript commenting on the controversy that arose over her book.
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£9.99
Frantz Fanon’s seminal text was immediately acclaimed as a classic of black liberationalist writing. Fanon’s descriptions of the feelings of inadequacy and dependence experienced by people of colour in a white world, ‘the crippled colonial mentalities of the oppressed’, are as salient and as compelling as ever.
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£12.99
George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy. The scene which he enters is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, scalp-hunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock. Smiley’s mission is to catch a Moscow Centre mole burrowed thirty years deep into the Circus itself.
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£14.99
Hannah Arendt’s chilling analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is a warning from history about the fragility of freedom, exploring how propaganda, scapegoats, terror and political isolation all aided the slide towards total domination.
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£9.99
Set in Camus’ native Algeria, this story centres around Meursault. The young French-Algerian leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life until his involvment in a violent incident calls into question the fundamental values of society.
