Showing 1–16 of 33 resultsSorted by latest
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£12.99
When Delia Smith first began writing, the industrial revolution, two world wars, food rationing and the removal of cookery lessons from schools interrupted those skills being handed down through generations. Her goal then was to help reinstate the basics of cooking and to remove people’s fear. The response was huge change. Her work was so influential that she had her own entry in the dictionary – ‘doing a Delia’. In this book Delia shares with us what she has learned from a long and eventful life, from navigating London as a teenager to watching pasta being made by the Mediterranean sea. She reflects on what it means to be a human person, how goodness and kindness are eclipsed by oppression and confusion and that true politics can only come from the people. Short, moving and powerful, these nine essays will change the way you think about our future.
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£11.99
In this book, inspired by her phenomenally popular Substack newsletter, India Knight explores the essence of what makes a home, debunking intimidating ideas about ‘taste’ and trends, offering practical and reassuring advice for every room, and above all celebrating the joy and comfort that comes from being surrounded by things you love.
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£16.99
We live in uncertain times. But what does uncertainty mean for our ability to act?
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£20.00
What does it mean to truly see the natural world? ‘The Nature of Seeing’ is a celebration of the art and practice of paying close attention. Whether it is the sight of moonlight across a bedroom floor, or an owl as it hunts, or waxcap fungi that erupt across the fields overnight – Mark Cocker encourages us to reclaim our innate gift for wonder and to see the living world in all its infinite detail and mystery. Through a series of diary entries describing his encounters with the natural world, he interrogates how we see and how it affects us at the most profound levels. In precise and lyrical prose, he shows us that seeing is a creative act that can both transform us and change the world we share. Revelatory and profound, ‘The Nature of Seeing’ is the culmination of a lifetime’s love affair with the simple act of looking and all that it reveals.
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£10.00
Napoleon had an orangutan called Rose, who ate turnips at the dinner table and stood when guests came into the room. She was much adored, but could not survive in Paris. A pig can be taught to differentiate between Bach and a brass band. One was once tried for murder: another saved a human’s life. An owl can turn its head two hundred and seventy degrees. They can learn to come at a whistle, and remember the signal for years, if they wish to. The creatures who share our world are stranger, smarter and more miraculous than you would believe. In this delightful collection, Katherine Rundell celebrates twelve vanishing animals, each one a wonder that she inspires us to treasure and fight for with love – because, as she argues so beguilingly: ‘The time to give up is never’.
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£9.99
Harper Lee remains a landmark figure in the American canon – thanks to Scout, Jem, Atticus, and the other indelible characters in her Pulitzer-winning debut, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, as well as for the darker, late-’50s version of small-town Alabama that emerged in ‘Go Set a Watchman’, her only other novel, published in 2015 after its rediscovery. ‘The Land of Sweet Forever’ combines Lee’s early short fiction and later nonfiction in a volume offering an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice.
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£20.00
‘Black Coffee and Red Lipstick’ is a collection of essays that weave ideas about our domestic and daily life – hence the black coffee – with thoughts on style and the way we present ourselves – hence the red lipstick. It combines anecdotes and observations from Alexandra Shulman’s 25 years spent editing British Vogue and her current life as a freelance writer and commentator. She draws on her experiences as a magazine editor but also a mother, daughter, sibling, girlfriend, housekeeper and lover of shopping. Alexandra left her job at Vogue in 2017 to embark on a different way of life and while this is in no way a book of self-discovery it does touch on the question of things or patterns of behaviour that make us who we are?
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£16.99
In the enveloping darkness of the polar night, journalist Ilona Wisniewska travelled to two of the most remote settlements in northern Greenland. She was welcomed into the homes of the Inughuit people and immersed herself into their lives, culture and history. Intertwining narrative and photography, ‘Glimmer: From the Outskirts of Greenland’ is a love letter to the lives of the Inughuit people, exploring the beauty of polar landscapes, the climate catastrophe and the complex international relationships which threaten the indigenous communities of Greenland.
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£10.99
In recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold. The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment, and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to choose how we wish to pay attention? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines the wide ranging and extractive assault on human attention while asking how we might reclaim it.
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£11.99
Fearless, challenging, playful, moving and always real, this ground-breaking essay collection sees 21 leading writers of colour explore the realities of the immigrant experience in Britain. What it means to grow up and live in a country and still be made to feel like an outsider, no matter how long it’s been your home. When it was first published, the book lit a fire: telling the truth, starting conversations and irrevocably changing how we talk about race. But the work is far from done, and its wisdom is needed now more than ever.
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£14.99
In this world, there are two types of food: ramen and non-ramen. Yoon Ina takes ramen seriously. She makes sure to try new flavours as soon as they come out, always has enough packets stocked in the pantry, has developed her own principles and theories for making good ramen, and even keeps up to date with ramen news. This book is an ode to her obsession. With a contagious enthusiasm, Ina teaches us how to prepare the perfect serving of instant noodles, from choosing the type of ramen, to boiling the water, to deciding whether to add noodles or seasoning first. But bubbling under the surface is a rich narrative of a life-long relationship with ramen. We find warm, generous, humorous stories from the author’s life – narratives about family and friends, about working life, about being a woman in modern society, and about finding a way to live comfortably with who you are.
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£10.99
Mariana Enriquez blends journalistic rigour and her fascination with the macabre as we encounter famous graveyards steeped in history, such as Montparnasse in Paris, Highgate in London, and the Jewish cemetery in Prague, as well as more remote, decrepit, hidden, or secretly beautiful ones. These pages are full of the graves of famous figures – Elvis in Memphis, Karl Marx in London – mournful sculptures, traces of voodoo, catacombs, skeletons and an array of legends and stories. Mariana’s personal journey weaves through haunting narratives, transforming burial grounds into spaces of reflection, obsession, and emotional discovery between the living and the dead. From the haunting statues of Staglieno in Genoa to the eerie silence of Rottnest Island’s hidden Aboriginal cemetery, Enriquez’s narrative shifts effortlessly between travelogue, essay, and memoir.
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£25.00
We live in the age of data. Over the past century, rapidly evolving technologies have transformed every aspect of our society, in troubling and seemingly unstoppable ways. Political campaigns have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, multinational corporations control public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to an end, replaced by the rule of artificial intelligence. Today, power is maintained through mystification: machines, we are told, know what humans cannot. Yet nothing about any of this was, or is, inevitable. In this account of how technology has corroded democracy around the world, prizewinning historian Jill Lepore traces the rise and fall of what she calls the ‘Artificial State’.
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£22.00
Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence. The idealism that once bound them together fissured and fractured under the weight of collective and personal griefs. Through their memories of youthful certainty, the antagonism of their conversation and the embers of their enduring kinship, they navigate the wreckage of our world today – the hope, the anger and the exhaustion. In her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet, Claudia Rankine blends narrative, memory and criticism in a poignant exploration of the beautiful but complicated friendships that we rely on to unsettle us, to make us better – exposing the fiction in the facts of our lives and demanding action in our time of relentless loss.
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£20.00
Here, David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend. He tries on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery, and both succeeds and fails. Throughout these essays – at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound – Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity this fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.
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£12.99
How does an icon become an icon? How did Anna Nicole Smith model herself on Marilyn Monroe? What connects Lindsay Lohan with Elizabeth Taylor? How is self-made beauty Pamela Anderson like trans bond girl Caroline ‘Tula’ Cossey? In a series of interconnected essays about pairs of famous women, essayist and art critic Philippa Snow explores the echoes and connections between a constellation of female stars and lays bare the artful and gruelling demands of femininity – from the golden age of Hollywood to the Instagram era. Full of the fascinating, entertaining and lurid details you might expect from the lives of mega-famous celebrities, dissected with icicle-sharp intelligence and rendered in stylish, flamboyant prose, Philippa Snow’s first full-length non-fiction work is a radically insightful book about the complex meanings and layers of femininity in a male-dominated world.
