Penguin Books Ltd

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  • King Zero

    £22.00

    Le Chiffre. Dr No. Goldfinger. James Bond has faced them all. But now the world is changing, and even 007 has no idea what’s coming for him. It starts with a murdered agent in the Saudi desert. Only a traitor could have known enough to bring him down. But even James Bond can’t guess at the secret that was worth killing him to keep. As Bond follows the trail across the globe, he doesn’t realise the countdown has already begun. And hiding in the shadows is a man with more power than he could ever have imagined. Prepare for a villain unlike any before. Prepare for King Zero.

  • The Wax Child

    £9.99

    It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens. Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, ‘The Wax Child’ is a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.

  • A Fabulous Debt

    £25.00

    Long considered the ‘boring’ corner of finance, bonds are anything but. They are bigger than the stock market and rival even the global banking system in influence. But they are also misunderstood – treated as mere debt, when in fact their impact is radically different. From medieval Venice to modern Wall Street, Robin Wigglesworth uncovers the a sweeping, unveiling story of the bond market. With clarity and wit, this is a people’s history of finance: rich in drama, full of colourful characters, and bursting with insights. Bonds have funded everything from the Crusades to climate tech, Netflix series to AI data centres. Pooling capital from citizens and merchants at an unmatched scale, they have been the hidden force behind some of humanity’s highest achievements and greatest calamities. This isn’t just a book about the past. It’s a guide to the future of the finance, and a love letter to the engine that keeps it running.

  • Swan Song

    £28.00

    In September 1997, Charles Spencer stood in Westminster Abbey before a watching world and shared his grief at losing his beloved sister, Diana. Now, nearly thirty years later, he tells the astonishing story of his life with Diana and the tragic week of her death. In childhood, Charles and Diana, the youngest Spencers, were inseparable – secretly calling one another Duch and Carlos. As each other’s closest confidantes, they roamed the family estate, endured extremely challenging boarding schools, survived terrifying nannies and helped each other through the agony of their parents’ divorce. Yet everything changed when Diana married the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and overnight became a global icon. Charles saw his older sister serve the world’s marginalized and relish being mother to her treasured sons. But, pursued by a barbaric press as her royal marriage crumbled, she was left desperately alone.

  • The Strangers

    £20.00

    Over the year following the death of her mother, a woman grapples with the rawness of her new pain and with the older – but no less powerful – grief for the babies she lost in the preceding decades. At the same time, a new kind of animal begins to appear, first in the UK and then gradually across the world. A little like a badger, a little like a cat, but with a long snout that leads to the nickname ‘mimmoth’, it’s a creature both baffling and unsettling, provoking speculation, fear, rage and even devotion in the humans in which it appears to show little interest. For the narrator, the connection she feels to the mimmoths is a solace, but maybe also a kind of madness. As the impact of the creatures begins to be felt in many different (possibly dangerous) ways she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles.

  • On the Equality of All Things

    £20.00

    What can we really know about the world around us? With clarity and lightness, physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the speculative depths of modern physics, unafraid to test their limits, not least because, as he suggests, there may be no final ground to reach. Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are not essentially different in nature from one another. They are ideas that illuminate each other. Reality, he shows, is shaped by this continuous play of reflections. From this emerges Rovelli’s central insight: the equality of all things. Like the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi, Rovelli invites us to see reality anew, recognizing our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular.

  • End Times Fascism

    £25.00

    The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side. In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’.

  • Redwood

    £25.00

    The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America – unknown to the public – would be to use nuclear weapons. ‘Redwood’ is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of British and American governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot and prevented Armageddon.’Redwood’ was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly-trained six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB’s deepest secrets, compelled to swap sides by a shaming secret of his own. Facing exposure, with both the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and his own KGB colleagues closing in, he demanded that MI6 try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape pla

  • Midnight Curfew

    £9.99

    As the middle Jaeger brother, Dallas was often lost in the shuffle growing up. As a man, he’s prideful of his community on the wrong side of the tracks – Sanoa Bay – and aggressively protective of his land and his inner circle. He’s hungry and ready for a fight. Callum Ames has a reputation in St. Carmen, the affluent neighbourhood abutting Sanoa Bay. The hottest. The most popular. Rich. Powerful. Strong. The one all the women want. After four years away, he’s back, but for all his bravado, he’s got one major secret: he only looks at Dallas Jaeger. Summer is storm season on the coast. Heat, wind, rain, lockdown and curfew. As Dallas and Callum engage, out for each other’s blood, they can’t stop the consuming fire between them and the outcome they already see coming. The storm of the century.

  • The Disappearers

    £20.00

    Kingston, Jamaica, 1988: When eight gay men meet for the first time, answering the casting call for an openly queer play, they are already taking a big risk. But that is nothing compared to what rains down on them when a mob descends on one of their rehearsals. By the end of this night, one man is dead, all are injured, and two subsequently disappear. As the survivors heal, each man finds he must confront the bigotry and homophobia that the attack laid bare. Some try to forget; some embrace their rage; and some simply vanish – but all are forever scarred. Epic and intimate, violent and forgiving, ‘The Disappearers’ is an unflinching portrait of the hatred and shame faced by gay men in a society which refuses to accept them, and a deeply human story of acceptance and insight.

  • Cold Sunset

    £20.00

    Cold War Moscow is a place smouldering with secrets. Gabriel Dax has been tasked with delivering a mysterious Blanco drawing to celebrated defector Kit Caldwell. But Caldwell is convinced the KGB suspects him of treachery, and he wants out now. When Gabriel is ordered by his enigmatic handler Faith Green to help, he is pulled into a web of shifting loyalties and dangerous escape plans. As tensions rise and trust fractures, he is forced to confront the fine line between devotion and deception.

  • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

    £12.99

    When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

  • When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…

    £12.99

    As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven Pinker’s fascination is how we think about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or ‘out there’, is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.Common knowledge, Pinker shows, can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretence of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge-to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it.

  • Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings

    £25.00

    We often read history as the biographies of ‘great men’ who shaped the world. But are leaders, whichever field they are in, really that influential? Should CEOs be given large bonuses when a company performs well? Why, when a political leader is assassinated, is their successor as likely to improve as damage a country? When do we know if firing a coach has changed the fortunes of the team? Historian and bestselling author Jared Diamond argues that leaders are neither heroic exceptions nor products of circumstance. Looking at four difference spheres: history, business, sport and religion, Diamond asks under which conditions is a leader most likely to make a difference and why. Drawing on the life and career of iconic leaders, Diamond shows us how leadership effectiveness is determined by a range of complex interrelated factors, from resources to geography, culture to technology.