Showing 1–12 of 23 resultsSorted by latest
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£8.99
On the night her mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter. Next to the couch on which she’s sleeping, there is a lamp that catches her eye, its shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie sees a dead butterfly floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents – her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact: she is sure these things were real. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories have over her, and with what they say about her place in the world.
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Modern life is full of choices. We’re told that happiness lies within and we can be whoever we want to be. But with endless possibility comes a feeling of restlessness; like we’re somehow failing to live our best life. What does doing it right even look like? And why do so many women feel like they’re getting it wrong? From that Zara dress to millennial burnout, the explosion of wellness to the rise of cancel culture, Pandora Sykes interrogates the stories we’ve been sold and the ones we tell ourselves.
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When Benjamin and Edgar Bowen embark on a Grand Tour of Europe, they are ready to meet People of Quality. They have trunks full of powdered silver wigs and matching suits, a hunger to experience the architectural wonders of Ancient Rome and an ability to quote Voltaire (at length). They will make connections and establish themselves in high society, just as their mother has planned. But it soon becomes apparent that their outfits are not quite the right shade of grey, their smiles are too ready, their appreciation of the arts ridiculous. Class, they learn, is not something that can be studied. Benjamin’s true education begins when he meets Horace Lavelle.
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£16.99
This work follows Britain’s path from the day the fatal shots were fired at Sarajevo in June 1914 to the moment the guns finally fell silent on 11th November, 1918. Simon Heffer examines the increasingly frantic conversations between Whitehall and Britain’s embassies across Europe as civil servants and ministers sought to understand and control the slide towards war. He explains how a government so keen to avoid conflict found itself not only championing it but seeking to transform the country to fight it – and how, in the process, Britain was irrevocably changed. He looks at the high politics and low skulduggery that saw the principled but passive Asquith replaced as Prime Minister by the unscrupulous but energetic Lloyd George, and he assesses the arguments between politicians and generals about how to prosecute the war that persisted until the final offensive on the Western Front.
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1956. A celebrated Russian author is writing a book, Doctor Zhivago, which could spark dissent in the Soviet Union. The Soviets, afraid of its subversive power, ban it. But in the rest of the world it’s fast becoming a sensation. The CIA plans to use the book to tip the Cold War in its favour. Their agents are not the usual spies, however. Two typists – the charming, experienced Sally and the talented novice Irina – are charged with the mission of a lifetime: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago back into Russia by any means necessary. It will not be easy. There are people willing to die for this book – and agents willing to kill for it. But they cannot fail – as this book has the power to change history.
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The second novel in the second of Ellroy’s }L.A. Quartets{, following on from 2014’s }Perfidia{. Dudley Smith is an army captain at this point in the extensive, expansive Ellroy mythology, working as a force for Japanese internment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour. Desire, racial tension and murder play out across an array of characters. ‘The master of American crime fiction’ }The Sunday Times{
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From ‘ER’ and ‘M*A*S*H’ to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and ‘House’, the medical drama endures for good reason: we’re fascinated by the people we must trust when we are most vulnerable. In ‘Also Human’, vocational psychologist Caroline Elton introduces us to some of the distressed physicians who have come to her for help: physicians who face psychological challenges that threaten to destroy their careers and lives, including an obstetrician grappling with his own homosexuality, a high-achieving junior doctor who walks out of her first job within weeks of starting, and an oncology resident who faints when confronted with cancer patients. Entering a doctor’s office can be terrifying, sometimes for the doctor most of all. By examining the inner lives of these professionals, ‘Also Human’ offers readers insight into, and empathy for, the very real struggles of those who hold power over life and death.
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8th December, 1854. England, in alliance with France, has been at war with Russia for months. Florence Nightingale is nursing the diseased British Expeditionary Force in the Crimea. And our hero; our villain РEmmanuel Barth̩lemy Рis visiting a man at 73 Warren Street, in the heart of radical London, for the very last time. Barth̩lemy is not in a good mood. It is a dank, freezing-cold, wet night. He is footsore and weary, and he has plenty on his mind. In his pocket is a ticket for travel to the continent: his plan, to assassinate the Emperor of the French. But half an hour later two innocent men would be dead. And Barth̩lemy would be in the hands of the police. The newspapers of Victorian England were soon in a frenzy: Who was this man, come to its shores from the terrifying revolutions of Paris to brutally slay two upstanding British subjects?
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Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbours began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were ‘thunder’. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries, searching for safety – perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted asylum in the United States, where she embarked on another journey – to excavate her past and, after years of being made to feel less than human, claim her individuality.
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In June 2006, police were called to 9 Downshire Hill in Hampstead to investigate reports of unusual card activity. The owner of the house, Allan Chappelow, was an award-winning photographer and biographer, and a notorious recluse, who had not been seen for several weeks. Inside they found piles of rubbish, trees growing through the floor, and, in what was once the living room, the body of Chappelow, battered to death, and buried under four-feet of page proofs. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam: the grandson of one of Mao’s closest aides, and a key negotiator in the Tiananmen Square protests. His trial was the first in the UK to be held ‘in camera’: behind closed doors, and without access to the press or public. Yam has always protested his innocence – admitting to the card fraud, but claiming no knowledge of the murder.
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Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. She spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating emergency supplies, hoping that when the World of Men failed, her family would continue on, unaffected. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals. According to the state and federal government, she didn’t exist. As she grew older, her father became more radical, and her brother, more violent. At sixteen Tara decided to educate herself. Her struggle for knowledge would take her far from her Idaho mountains, over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d travelled too far.
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Dylan Jones’s engrossing, magisterial biography of David Bowie is unlike any Bowie story ever written. Drawn from over 180 interviews with friends, rivals, lovers, and collaborators, some of whom have never before spoken about their relationship with Bowie, this oral history weaves a hypnotic spell as it unfolds a remarkable rise to stardom and an unparalleled artistic path.
