Family history, tracing ancestors

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  • Indignity

    £12.99

    When Lea Ypi discovers that a photo of her grandmother, Leman honeymooning in the Italian Alps in 1941 has been posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with deeply unsettling questions. Growing up, she had been told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed ‘when the police came and took everything’ in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II was raging in the background. What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy in Salonica, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans, through secret police archives and muddied memories. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi?

  • Last Night I Dreamt

    £25.00

    Born into a famous artistic dynasty, Daphne grew up in an atmosphere of carefree privilege. At a time when girls of her class were not expected to have a career, she defied convention and moved to Cornwall to pursue her ambition to become a writer. There, over six decades, she dreamt up the stories that have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and still haunt our cultural imagination, including Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and ‘The Birds’. ‘Last Night I Dreamt’ explores how the turbulence and contradictions of Daphne’s own life – spanning war, affairs, a marriage to a renowned but damaged general, and unrequited love – inspired her writing.

  • On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love

    £20.00

    In her first memoir, novelist Louise Doughty tells the story of losing her parents and the unexpected discovery she made whilst clearing out the family home. Inside a black suitcase, the last item left in their bungalow before the sale of the house was completed, she stumbled upon a treasure trove of letters that revealed the origins of her parents’ love affair. These letters offered a fascinating glimpse into the daily lives of working-class people in the 1950s and the tight social conventions that almost prevented her parents from staying together and building a life. ‘On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love’ is a portrait of grief and loss and family, but most of all, it’s a love story. With peerless clarity, tenderness and wit, Louise Doughty introduces us to two ardent, eloquent, hopeful young people full of spirit and determination, and brings to light the hidden depths of the people she had simply known as mum and dad.

  • A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

    £12.99

    This is a story about you. It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is to each of the 100 billion modern humans who have ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species – births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration and a lot of sex. In this captivating journey through the expanding landscape of genetics, Adam Rutherford reveals what our genes now tell us about human history, and what history can now tell us about our genes. From Neanderthals to murder, from redheads to race, dead kings to plague, evolution to epigenetics, this is a demystifying and illuminating new portrait of who we are and how we came to be.

  • Hare With Amber Eyes

    £12.99

    264 wood and ivory carvings of animals, plants and people, none of them larger than a matchbox; apprentice potter Edmund de Waal was entranced by the collection when he first encountered it in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. When he inherited them, he discovered that they unlocked a story larger than he could have imagined.