Literature: history & criticism

  • Bookish

    £18.99

    As a child, Lucy Mangan was reading all the time, using books to navigate the challenges and complexities of this world and many others. As an adult, she uses her new relationship with literature to seize upon the most important question: (how) do books prepare us for life? ‘Bookish’ picks up where ‘Bookworm’ left off: at the cusp of teenage, when everything – including the way we read – undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation. Revisiting the books of all genres, that ferried her through each important stage of life, ‘Bookish’ is a coming-of-age in books. It’s an ode to our favourite bookish spaces – from the smallest secondhand bookstalls to libraries, glorious big bookshops and our very own book rooms – and a love story to how books not only shelter our souls through hard times and help us find ourselves when we feel lost, but also help us connect with the people we love through shared stories.

  • Reading lessons

    £10.99

    How can a Victorian poem help teenagers understand YouTube misogyny? Can Jane Eyre encourage us to speak out? What can Lady Macbeth teach us about empathy? Should our expectations for our future be any greater than Pip’s? And why is it so important to make space for these conversations in the first place? In a career spanning almost three decades, English teacher Carol Atherton has taught generations of students texts that will be familiar to many of us from our own schooldays. But while the staples of exam syllabuses and reading lists remain largely unchanged, their significance – and their relevance – evolves with each class, as it encounters them for the first time. Each chapter of ‘Reading Lessons’ invites us to take a fresh look at these novels, plays and poems, revealing how they have shaped our beliefs, our values, and how we interact as a society.

  • Jane Austen at home

    £26.00

    This telling of the story of Jane’s life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison.

  • The Jane Austen Game

    £25.00

    Step into the elegant Regency era of Jane Austen, as you dance from ball to ball collecting ardent admirers! Will you marry a dashing suitor (in possession of a good fortune) or stay single to become a Woman of Independent Mind? Write your own story while you play as the heroine of one of Austen’s six beloved novels in this immersive game.AUSTEN FANS UNITE! – Whether you’re a fan of Austen’s novels or partial to an on-screen adaptation, the Regency detail and immersive elements in this game will entertain and delightSTEP INTO THE STORIES – Build your dream deck of friends and suitors from Austen’s most memorable characters as you go from ball to ball in search of the ultimate matchGET MARRIED OR GO IT ALONE – Choose whether to settle down with Darcy or remain unattached to become a Woman of Independent Mind, like Austen herselfPUBLISHED BY LAURENCE KING – Laurence King has been capturing imaginations and inspiring creativity in new and

  • My good bright wolf

    £18.99

    From bestselling author Sarah Moss, a boundary-breaking memoir about the battleground of the female body, and about how reading and thinking can save you.

  • Question 7

    £18.99

    Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, ‘Question 7’ is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

  • Call me by my true names

    £16.99

    “Thich Nhat Hanh’s work has proven to be the antidote to our modern pain and sorrows.” -Ocean Vuong. The definitive poetry collection by the world renowned Zen master, peace activist, and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness.

  • Life lessons from literature

    £12.99

    Life Lessons from Literature is a must for all bibliophiles, providing a concise and highly accessible bucket list of must-read books that teaches us so many fundamental truths and broadens our minds.

  • The dictionary people

    £22.00

    What do three murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’. The ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn’t just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars, and vegetarians. Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of the OED.

  • Goodbye Eastern Europe

    £22.00

    A farewell to Eastern Europe and its vanishing culture.

  • 100 books from the libraries of the National Trust

    £10.00

    Spanning the 8th to the 21st centuries, ‘100 Books from the Libraries of the National Trust’ includes illuminated medieval manuscripts; the Trust’s oldest atlas, with maps of the ancient world; a volume from Henry VIII’s library; a book inscribed in blood; an Arabic manuscript on horsemanship; a very early book on swimming; the largest volume of botanical drawings ever produced; sonatas by Joseph Haydn; a library of miniature children’s books; the first book in English by an Indian author; Dame Ellen Terry’s annotated working copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; the first book ever printed in Antarctica; George Bernard Shaw’s Nobel Prize in Literature; Virginia Woolf’s handwritten manuscript for her novel Orlando; and John Lennon’s treasured childhood copy of Richmal Crompton’s William the Gangster.

  • Eve Bites Back

    £20.00

    The lives and achievements of eight women writers – a startling and unconventional history of literature