Scribe UK

  • Thunderhead

    £9.99

    A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free. When Winona Dalloway begins her day – in the peaceful early hours before her children wake up – she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed. On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices – a mind both wild and precise. And meanwhile, a storm is brewing . Darkly funny, astute, timely – Thunderhead’s protagonist insists on being heard, and we as readers feel compelled to listen.

  • Manny and the baby

    £16.99

    London, 1936. Two sisters are ready to take the city and the world by storm. Bath, 2012. Two young Black men are figuring out who they are, and who they want to become. Manny Powell is forthright, intellectual, and determined to make her mark on the London literary scene. Her younger sister, Rita ‘The Baby’, just wants to dance. Chasing their dreams across smoky Soho jazz clubs, they soon find themselves part of the burgeoning Black ambition movement, and must learn how to navigate it as women. As tensions rise, and fascism and war snap at their heels, Rita finds herself drawn to the mysterious mimic and trumpeter, Ezekiel Brown, from Jamaica, and the trio are faced with choices that will alter their lives forever. Itai has fled London to his late father’s flat in Bath. Listening to cassette tapes his father made, he realises there is a lot he doesn’t know about the man’s life – who is Rita?

  • Rebel Island

    £22.00

    The gripping story of Taiwan, from the flood myths of ancient legend to its ‘Asian Tiger’ economic miracle ? and the looming threat of invasion by China. Once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as nothing but a ‘ball of mud’, Taiwan has a modern GDP larger than that of Sweden, in a land area smaller than Indiana. It is the last surviving enclave of the Republic of China, a lost colony of Japan, and claimed by Beijing as a rogue province ? merely the latest chapters in its long history as a refuge for pirates, rebels, settlers, and outcasts. In Rebel Island, Jonathan Clements offers a concise and vivid telling of Taiwan’s complex island story, beginning with the unique conditions of its archaeology before examining its indigenous history and its days as a Dutch and Spanish trading post. He delves into its periods as an independent kingdom, Chinese province, and short-lived republic, and the transformations wrought by 50 years

  • A woman I know

    £25.00

    Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime – a biopic of a little-known aviation legend whose story seemed to embody the hopeful spirit of the dawn of the space age. But after she received a mysterious warning from a government agent, Haverstick began to suspect that all was not as it seemed. What she found as she dug deeper was a darker story – a story of double identities and female spies, a tangle of intrigue that stretched from the fields of the Congo to the shores of Cuba, from the streets of Mexico City to the dark heart of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. As Haverstick attempted to learn the truth directly from her subject in a cat-and-mouse game that stretched across a decade, she plunged deep into the CIA files of the 1950s and 60s. ‘A Woman I Know’ brings vividly to life the duplicities of the Cold War intelligence game.

  • Can’t I go instead

    £14.99

    ‘Can’t I Go Instead’ follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army. Years of hardship, survival, and even happiness follow. In the aftermath of WWII, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they’ve led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities, and find their places in an independent Korea.

  • Survival of the richest

    £10.99

    The tech elite have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind. Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive ‘The Event’: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of ‘The Mindset’, a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making – as long as they have enough money and the right technology. In this book, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse.

  • Ashes 2023

    £18.99

    High hopes were held for the Ashes of 2023. They were exceeded in an instant classic of five Tests between a bold England and a battling Australia, finally drawn two-all. ‘Ashes 2023’ captures all the drama and skill, as well as the controversy over a stumping at Lord’s that followed in the tradition of Bodyline as a clash of cultures and of stereotypes. With a foot in both camps, Gideon Haigh wrote for The Australian in Australia and The Times in the UK. This book mixes his popular match reports with new material to create a priceless memento of an unforgettable series.

  • Jan Morris

    £12.99

    An account of a truly remarkable life. When Jan Morris passed away in 2020, she was considered one of Britain’s best-loved writers. The author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books, her work was known for its observational genius, lyricism, and humour, and had earned her a passionate readership around the world. Morris’s life was no less fascinating than her oeuvre. Born in 1926, she spent her childhood amidst Oxford’s Gothic beauty and later participated in military service in Italy and the Middle East, before embarking on a career as an internationally fêted foreign correspondent.

  • Chaos kings

    £16.99

    A fascinating deep dive into the world of billion-dollar traders and high-stakes crisis predictors who strive to turn extreme events into financial windfalls.

  • The dream builders

    £9.99

    After living in the US for years, Maneka Roy returns home to India to mourn the loss of her mother and finds herself in a new world. The booming city of Hrishipur where her father now lives is nothing like the part of the country where she grew up, and the more she sees of this new, sparkling city, the more she learns that nothing – and no one – here is as it appears. Ultimately, it will take an unexpected tragic event for Maneka and those around her to finally understand just how fragile life is in this city built on aspirations.

  • Mater 2-10

    £16.99

    Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, ‘Mater 2-10’ vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a powerful account that captures a nation’s longing for a rail line to reconnect North and South, a magical-realist novel that manages to reflect the lives of modern industrial workers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career – a masterpiece thirty years in the making.

  • Empress of the Nile

    £25.00

    The riveting story of a true-life female Indiana Jones: an archaeologist who survived the Nazis and then saved Egypt’s ancient temples. In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: fifty countries had contributed nearly a billion dollars to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. It was a project of unimaginable size and complexity that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled, stone by stone, and rebuilt on higher ground. But the massive press coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the gutsy French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples would now be at the bottom of a gigantic reservoir.