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£20.00
The year is 1907 and Maurice Ravel is one of the most admired young composers in France. In Belle Epoque Paris he cuts a charismatic, dandyish figure, whose technically flawless music hides a deep emotional core, and whose unpredictable talent is as hard to pin down as his mysterious personal life. When Ravel’s devoted acolyte Mylo encourages him to take on a new pupil – a rising British composer called Ralph Vaughan Williams – an unlikely cross-channel friendship starts to blossom. The two men could hardly be more different. Ralph is down-to-earth, married, and currently engaged in a long-term project of collecting forgotten British folk songs – a musical form in which Ravel has no interest. All they truly have in common is that in clear but indefinable ways, each of them seems an archetypal representative of his own country. But as the shadow of war approaches, their friendship becomes entwined with Mylo’s own tragic story.
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£25.00
Most of the details of our ancestors’ lives are forgotten, lost in the mists of time. Yet there are many sources – fireflies – that survive to illuminate our understanding of the past. In this case, those fireflies are paintings. In this insightful book, Alice Loxton travels across Britain in search of 21 extraordinary paintings. From the wall art of St Cadoc’s Church near Cardiff and the exquisite detail of daily life portrayed by L.S. Lowry to landmark works including ‘The Rainbow Portrait’ of Elizabeth I and Millais’ ‘Ophelia’, Loxton creates a fresh, transformative history of Britain. Considering each piece from the viewer’s perspective, she explores how it feels standing before them, what they are trying to tell and what their real-life inspiration reveals about the period when they were created.
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£14.99
When Martin Parr was fourteen, his teacher wrote that he was ‘utterly lazy and inattentive’ in a school report. He went on to become one of the most successful and sought-after photographers in the world. Martin has published over one hundred photobooks on many different subjects, from seaside resorts to smoking, over his career. Now, Martin has produced a book about himself, telling his own story, in his own words. This autobiography combines over 150 of Martin’s photographs – from his earliest snapshots to the work he is doing today – with his recollections and reflections on each image.
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£22.00
Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this powerful, often shocking, story follows the intertwined destinies of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons.
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£25.00
We are a nation of villages, from the rural, picturesque hamlets of Castle Combe and Clovelly, to the tight-knit urban communities of Leeds’ terraces and Cricklewood’s backyards. Villages link us with our past and are the stuff of art, poetry, folklore and song – and for many they offer a place of community and sanctuary. And yet Britain today is one of the most centralised political systems in Europe, with decisions on local matters made by national government and local communities feeling increasingly disempowered and disconnected. In ‘The Village in Britain’, Simon Jenkins, author and former chair of the National Trust, delves into the past, present and future of this powerful national symbol, and argues that we need to find a way of embedding the qualities of the village into our modern lives.
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£25.00
A fascinating history of the republican tradition that modern states inherited from ancient Rome. Julius Caesar, Lucretia, Cincinnatus, Augustus, the Gracchi brothers: Roman figures have had an extraordinary influence on modern republics from America to France. Here historian Jamie Gianoutsos traces the Roman republic and its afterlives through the revolutionary birth of modern republics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal how ancient ideas of liberty, virtue, and corruption shaped the political imagination of a new age. Moving from stories of tyranny and collapse in ancient Rome to moments of crisis in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, Gianoutsos uncovers recurring patterns in the rise – and fall – of republics.
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£12.99
Selected from across Capote’s writing life, these sparkling tales convey both the wonder and the chill of Christmas time. They range from nostalgic portraits of childhood to more unsettling works that reveal the darkness beneath the festive glitter. In the Deep South of Capote’s youth, a young boy, Buddy, and his beloved maiden ‘aunt’ Sook forage for pecans and whiskey to bake into fruitcakes, make kites – too broke to buy gifts – and rise before dawn to prepare feasts for a ragged assembly of guests; it is Sook who teaches Buddy the true meaning of good will. In other stories, an unlikely festive miracle, of sorts, occurs at a local drugstore and a lonely woman has a troubling encounter in wintry New York.
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£20.00
Set in the American South, this is the story of a group of people who have little in common. A young girl, a drunk and a black doctor are drawn to a gentle, sympathetic deaf mute, John Singer, whose presence changes their lives.
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£16.99
Set in Camus’ native Algeria, this story centres around Meursault. The young French-Algerian leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life until his involvement in a violent incident calls into question the fundamental values of society.
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£20.00
Agent Al Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation has a horrific murder to solve – and precious few clues. Capote’s reconstruction of the slaughter of an entire family shows a gripping mix of journalistic skills and imaginative power.
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£12.99
A mouse is like a heart: it sleeps in winter; it knows uncertain love. None of us knows what to expect out there. Surely pain is to be a part of it. This collection offers a way of seeing – passing through ageing, through loss, while staying open to the beauties and mysteries of the world and the people in it. Henri Cole, one of America’s finest poets, balances ecstasy with a constant awareness of devastating violence, whether inside our threshold, or glimpsed from afar. These observant lyrics resist easy answers; they gleam with desire and doubt, bracing for uncertain love, for certain pain, for sudden joy, in our ever-strange bodies.
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£12.99
This revelatory history explores the ancient roots of Muslim Europe, tracing their journey through the Mediterranean. Our odyssey begins in the little-known Sufi lodges in Cyprus, where Muslims arrived in 647AD. From there, we travel through the continent – visiting places such as Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain – encountering red-haired European Sultans and Arabic-speaking Christian Kings. We meet forgotten Muslim pioneers, such as Abbas Ibn Firnas who gave us flight and Ibn Sina who gave us modern medicine. We see the Islam-inspired mudejar art of fourteenth-century Christians in Spain, and how such cross fertilisation birthed Europe’s ‘Renaissance’. We discover the long-forgotten tombs of European Muslims who knew the Prophet Muhammad, and the author – award-winning writer Tharik Hussain – becomes the first Muslim in over 900 years to pray inside the remains of a nameless Sicilian Mosque.
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£20.00
The follow-up to Hanif Kureishi’s extraordinary hospital memoir, ‘Shattered’, this is the story of what came next – a year of living at home in London after paralysis, told through scenes of carers, physio, insomnia, sex, money, football, film sets, festivals and family. The song ‘Are You with Me Now?’ was a regular soundtrack to the drives Hanif and partner Isabella would take from Rome to her mother’s house on the Amalfi Coast, both of them singing along as they skirted the Bay of Naples, in the time before the accident which paralysed him. This book takes its title from that music – and it is a question that has now become more urgent and more complex. Beginning with this memory of the past and ending with his marriage to Isabella and his first faltering steps, Hanif Kureishi, with son Carlo, charts how a writer, a couple and a family adapt to disability.
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£14.99
‘Virtue and Rosalind’ is where our wildest dreams come true. That popular, but not very brilliant, author who’s winning all the prizes? Our writer-protagonist will bump her off. Uncle Henri who walked off during a family picnic and never came back? Rather than blame him, she admires his will to radically renounce the past for a woman in a red skirt, revisiting the picnic site like sacred ground. But our heroine has more to accomplish on her present course, which glimmers at every turn with material for new characters, new novels. Central to this are her relationships with other women, who she regards as the finest and most meticulous lacemakers: absorbed in what they’re doing, creating something rather beautiful. They share her love of art – and of keeping an ample distance away from all the rest. After all, our darkest secrets live in the family.
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£22.00
It is 1965, and the Cold War has never been colder. The Circus – the secret centre of British intelligence – has one prize asset left in Moscow: a senior Red Army officer with access to the enemy’s deepest secrets. But when a British agent is shot in Helsinki, George Smiley uncovers a Soviet operation that imperils this irreplaceable source. The trail leads Smiley not to Berlin or Vienna, but Los Angeles – the most foreign place he has ever known. There, in the murky heart of US intelligence, a Communist sleeper agent – a ‘Taper Man’ – is poised to expose Britain’s operative in Moscow. To save him, Smiley must navigate an America riven with political tension, all while his spy in Leningrad, Roy Bland, risks everything in pursuit of a Russian defector who holds the final piece of the puzzle.
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£20.00
Alec Leamas is tired. It’s the 1960s, he’s been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for his British masters. He has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last – but only after one final assignment. He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas’s mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done. In le Carré’s breakthrough work of 1963, the spy story is reborn as a gritty and terrible tale of men who are caught up in politics beyond their imagining.
The Wager 
