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Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in a fresh essay collection by the award-winning essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of the bestselling ‘What I Loved’ and Booker Prize-longlisted ‘The Blazing World’.
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 weather changes as we walk around a tree or turn down a street. There is a secret world of weather – one that we all live in, but very few see. Each day we pass dozens of small weather signs that reveal what the weather is doing all around us – and what is about to happen. The clues are easy to spot when you know how, but remain invisible to most people. In ‘The Secret World of Weather’ you’ll discover the simple rules that explain the weather signs. And you’ll learn rare skills that enhance every minute you spend outdoors, whether you are in a town, on a beach or in a wilder spot.
I felt that Mary was there, pulling at my sleeve, willing me to appreciate the artistry, wanting me to understand the dazzle of the material world that shaped her. At her execution Mary, Queen of Scots wore red. Widely known as the colour of strength and passion, it was in fact worn by Mary as the Catholic symbol of martyrdom. In sixteenth-century Europe women’s voices were suppressed and silenced. Even for a queen like Mary, her prime duty was to bear sons. In an age when textiles expressed power, Mary exploited them to emphasise her female agency. In this eloquent cultural biography, Clare Hunter exquisitely blends history, politics, and memoir to tell the story of a queen in her own voice.
An ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic living quietly in Somerset, Stephen Rose has just begun to form a bond with the daughter he barely knows when he receives a summons – to an inquiry into an incident during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is the return of what Stephen hoped he had outdistanced. Above all, to testify would jeopardise the fragile relationship with his daughter. And if he loses her, he loses everything. Instead, he decides to write her an account of his life; a confession, a defence, a love letter. Also a means of buying time. But time is running out, and the day comes when he must face again what happened in that faraway summer of 1982.
The police came for Peter Fleischmann in the early hours. It reminded the teenager of the Gestapo’s moonlit roundups he had narrowly avoided at home in Berlin. Now, having endured a perilous journey to reach England – hiding from the rampaging Nazi thugs at his orphanage, boarding a Kindertransport to safety – here the aspiring artist was, on a ship bound for the Isle of Man, suspected of being a Nazi spy. What had gone wrong? In May 1940, faced with a country gripped by paranoia, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the internment of all German and Austrian citizens living in Britain. Most, like Peter, were refugees who had come to the country to escape Nazi oppression. They were now imprisoned by the very country in which they had staked their trust.
This is a spy story like no other. Private spies are the invisible force that shapes our modern world. Private spies are influencing our elections, shaping the future of Hollywood, effecting government policies and the fortunes of companies. More deviously, they are also peering into our personal lives as never before, using off-the shelf technology to listen to our phone calls, monitor our emails and decide what we see on social media. ‘Spooked’ takes us on a journey into a secret billion-dollar industry in which information is currency and loyalties are for sale. It reads like the best kind of spy story: a gripping tale packed with twists and turns, uncovering a secret side of our modern world.
When Nadia Owusu was two years old her mother abandoned her and her baby sister and fled from Tanzania back to the US. When she was thirteen her beloved Ghanaian father died of cancer. She and her sister were left alone, with a stepmother they didn’t like, adrift. Nadia Owusu is a woman of many languages, homelands, and identities. She grew up in Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, Addis Ababa, Kumasi, Kampala, and London. And for every new place there was a new language, a new identity and a new home. At times she has felt stateless, motherless, and identity-less. At others, she has had multiple identities at war within her. It’s no wonder she started to feel fault lines in her sense of self. It’s no wonder that those fault lines eventually ruptured. ‘Aftershocks’ is the account of how she hauled herself out of the wreckage.
Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in a fresh essay collection by the award-winning essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of the bestselling ‘What I Loved’ and Booker Prize-longlisted ‘The Blazing World’.
This is a work that contains very few numbers. Instead, it is about meeting people who have opened my eyes. It was facts that helped him explain how the world works. But it was curiosity and commitment that made the late Hans Rosling, author of worldwide bestseller ‘Factfulness,’ the most popular researcher of our time. ‘How I Learned to Understand the World’ is Hans Rosling’s own story of how a young scientist learned became a revolutionary thinker, and takes us from the swelter of an emergency clinic in Mozambique, to the World Economic Forum at Davos. In collaboration with Swedish journalist Fanny Härgestam, Hans Rosling wrote his memoir with the same joy of storytelling that made a whole world listen when he spoke.
We follow Zoe, an American art student who is escaping her troubled past by spending a year in Berlin. With her new best friend Hailey, she is thrilled to rent an apartment from an eccentric crime writer, Beatrice Becks. Soon strange things start happening and the girls are convinced that Beatrice has a way to watch their every move, to give her the plot for her next crime novel. The friends decide to play Beatrice at her own game, constructing their own dramatic narrative of wild parties and secrets. But in the year that the world is scandalised by the story of Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox, their lives spiral out of control into much darker territory.
One ordinary morning, Laurie’s husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn’t she worried? It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie’s account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts. At the time, she couldn’t explain much of her behaviour herself. But as she looks back on the ensuing wreckage – the friendships broken, the wild accusations she made, the one-night stand – she can see more clearly what lay behind it. And if it’s not too late, she can see how she might repair the damage and, most of all, forgive herself.
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