Rural communities

  • Our island stories

    £25.00

    The countryside is cherished by many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. Where the countryside is celebrated, histories of empire are forgotten. Historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks, roaming the island with varied companions, she combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. Empire transformed rural lives for better and for worse: whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, it offered both opportunity and exploitation.

  • The angel makers

    £10.99

    A Financial Times Best Summer Book 2023

    A Waterstones Best True Crime Book

    Nagyrev, Hungary, 1929. Over 160 mysterious deaths. A group of local wives conspiring together, and one woman at the centre of it all?

  • Rural hours

    £25.00

    1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. ‘Rural Hours’ tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

  • Noble ambitions

    £12.99

    As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation’s stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants’ balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, ‘Noble Ambitions’ takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power, as a rakish, raffish, aristocratic Swinging London collided with traditional rural values.

  • Amy and Lan

    £9.99

    Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood, growing up on a West Country farm – three families, a couple of lodgers, goats, dogs and an orphaned calf called Gabriella Christmas. The parents are best friends too. Originally from the city, they’re learning about farming: growing their own vegetables, milking the goats, slaughtering chickens and scything the hay -‘Mind your eyes! Don’t break your neck! Careful!’ The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on Amy and Lan, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to – adult things, like betrayal – that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down.

  • The forgotten girls

    £20.00

    Talented and ambitious, Monica Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both determined to make something of themselves. How did their lives turn out so different?

  • Amy and Lan

    £16.99

    Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood, growing up on a West Country farm – three families, a couple of lodgers, goats, dogs and an orphaned calf called Gabriella Christmas. The parents are best friends too. Originally from the city, they’re learning about farming: growing their own vegetables, milking the goats, slaughtering chickens and scything the hay -‘Mind your eyes! Don’t break your neck! Careful!’ The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on Amy and Lan, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to – adult things, like betrayal – that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down.

  • A Fortunate Woman

    £16.99

    A moving, evocative account of a rural GP in a remote rural location.

  • Back in the Day

    £25.00

    Melvyn Bragg’s first ever memoir – an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from his early childhood during the war to the moment he had to decide between staying on or spreading his wings. This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at fifteen yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe breakdown when he was thirteen, he developed a passion for reading and study – though that didn’t stop him playing in a skiffle band or falling in love. It is equally the tale of the people and place that formed him.

  • The Dinner Lady Detectives

    £8.99

    Margery and Clementine are enjoying a peaceful middle-age together in the small, idyllic town of Dewstow, and eagerly awaiting retirement from their work on the front line serving meals to the students at Summerview Secondary School. Their calm life is shattered when their kitchen manager is found dead in the school’s walk-in freezer. The police are adamant that it’s an open-and-shut case of accidental death. Margery and Clementine are convinced there’s something far more nefarious going on, and they take it upon themselves to investigate. As they inch closer to the truth, it becomes clear that someone will stop at nothing to keep the pair quiet. Will the perpetrator get their just-desserts before their time runs out?

  • Noble Ambitions

    £30.00

    As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation’s stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants’ balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, ‘Noble Ambitions’ takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power, as a rakish, raffish, aristocratic Swinging London collided with traditional rural values.

  • England's Villages

    England’s Villages

    £25.00

    Villages have existed in a similar form for millennia: but where did village halls come from, and why do they matter? What defines a modern village, and when does a village become a town? Take a charming, unexpected journey through the quirks of English villages through the ages in the excellent company of Dr Ben Robinson. Discover why no village could ever truly claim to be Roman; why churches sometimes appear far outside of village boundaries and what happens when a village moves, and why that matters. ‘England’s Villages’ is a compelling mix of archaeology, anthropology and architecture.