Showing 49–60 of 285 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader’s wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written a miraculous novel – the intimate, gripping story of a brilliantly vivid cast of characters and through their lives the very story of America itself.
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Dani has devoted his life to finding missing children. One day, as his girlfriend starts packing her bags to leave him, he gets a phone call from a distraught father asking for help. It’s a strange case, one that Dani wouldn’t usually take on. But, when he hears his girlfriend slam the front door, and his apartment falls into silence, he realises it’s one he can’t turn down. His journey to find the lost boy takes Dani over the seas to the sleepy Italian island of Capri – a place infused with a kind of hazy magic, which begins to conjure up in Dani’s mind long-forgotten memories of his own childhood.
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In his enormously long life (he was born in 1903 and died in 2000), Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. His friendships, curiosities and plottings entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was as happy living in a remote part of the Inner Hebrides as in the heart of Istanbul. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny. ‘Outlandish Knight’ is a dazzling debut by a writer who has prodigious gifts, but who also has had the ability to spot one of the great biographical subjects.
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At the age of 24, Winston Churchill already believed he was destined for greatness. This is the incredible story of how one incredible year in Churchill’s life – an adventure involving war in South Africa, imprisonment, endurance and escape – would be the making of one of the most extraordinary men in history.
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Two girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, ‘Swing Time’ is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them.
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We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives – where we go to school, whether we get a loan, how much we pay for insurance – are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: everyone is judged according to the same rules and bias is eliminated. And yet, as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated and incontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination.
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Do space and time truly exist? What is reality made of? Can we understand its deep texture? Scientist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. In this book, he shows how our understanding of reality has changed throughout centuries, from Democritus to loop quantum gravity. Taking us on a wondrous journey, he invites us to imagine a whole new world where black holes are waiting to explode, spacetime is made up of grains, and infinity does not exist – a vast universe still largely undiscovered.
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£18.99
‘The Pursuit of Power’ draws on a lifetime of thinking about 19th-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic change. It reignites the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes. It was a time where what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, where huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and where, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles.
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Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Shulman kept a diary of British Vogue’s Centenary year. And what a year. She reveals the emotional and logistical minefield of producing the 100th anniversary issue (that Duchess of Cambridge cover surprise), organizing the star-studded Vogue 100 Gala, working with designers from Victoria Beckham to Karl Lagerfeld and contributors from David Bailey to Alexa Chung. All under the continual scrutiny of a television documentary crew. But narrowly-contained domestic chaos hovers – spontaneous combustion in the kitchen, a temperamental boiler and having to send bin day reminders all the way from Milan fashion week. For anyone who wants to know what the life of a fashion magazine editor is really like, or for any woman who loves her job, this is a rich, honest, and sharply observed account of a year lived at the centre of British fashion and culture.
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Two women arrive in a Spanish village, a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean, seeking medical advice and salvation. One suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective, struggling to understand her mother’s illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity.
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J.M.W. Turner is Britain’s most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst.
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Friends and former college bandmates Elizabeth and Andrew and Zoe have watched one another marry, buy property, and start families, all while trying to hold on to the identities of their youth. But nothing ages them like having to suddenly pass the torch to their own teenage offspring. Back in the band’s heyday, Elizabeth put on a snarl over her girl-next-door smile, rich-kid Andrew let his unwashed hair grow past his chin, and beautiful Zoe was the lesbian all the straight women wanted to sleep with. Now nearing 50, they all live within shouting distance in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood and the trappings of the adult world seem to have arrived with ease. But the summer that their children reach maturity, the fabric of the adult lives suddenly begins to unravel, and the secrets and revelations that are finally let loose can never be reclaimed.
