Showing 13–24 of 84 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
The four Olivier sisters were emancipated, determined and wild in an age when society punished women for being so. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge at a time when education was still thought to be damaging to ovaries. There they met Rupert Brooke and formed the Neo Pagans, initiating a web of entanglements that would challenge even the sisters’ unbreakable bond. Daphne later became a pioneering educationalist, and set up Britain’s first Steiner school, and Noel joined a tiny minority of female doctors before the First World War.
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£8.99
Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. Twenty years later, Kerry’s life is unrecognisable. She’s a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books. But she often finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught somehow between two worlds. ‘Lowborn’ is Kerry’s exploration of where she came from, revisiting the towns she grew up in to try to discover what being poor really means in Britain today and whether anything has changed.
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£9.99
Are you lost or are you exploring? When Zachary Rawlins stumbles across a strange book hidden in his university library it leads him on a quest unlike any other. Its pages entrance him with their tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities and nameless acolytes, but they also contain something impossible: a recollection from his own childhood. Determined to solve the puzzle of the book, Zachary follows the clues he finds on the cover – a bee, a key and a sword. They guide him to a bibliophile masquerade ball, to a dangerous secret club, and finally through a magical doorway created by the fierce and mysterious Mirabel. This door leads to a subterranean labyrinth filled with stories, hidden far beneath the surface of the earth.
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£16.99
‘The Roasting Tin Around the World’ covers all corners of the globe with brand new recipes. The greatest hits from each region are reworked into quick and easy one-tin meals. The dishes are perfect for weeknight dinners, make-ahead lunchboxes and family favourites.
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£9.99
In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them. It was another 50 years before she even learned of the kidnap. The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. Cumming began investigating with a few criss-crossing lives in this fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out across the globe as she discovered just how many lives were affected by what happened that day on the beach – including her own. ‘On Chapel Sands’ is a book of mystery and memoir.
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£12.99
After visiting Japan in 1902 and 1907 and discovering two magnificent cherry trees in the garden of his family home in Kent in 1919, Collingwood Ingram fell in love with cherry blossoms, and dedicated much of his life to their cultivation and preservation. On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to see the loss of local cherry diversity, driven by modernisation, neglect and a dangerous and creeping ideology. The most striking absence from the Japanese cherry scene, for Ingram, was that of Taihaku, a brilliant ‘great white’ cherry tree. Multiple attempts to send Taihaku scions back to Japan ended in failure. Over decades, Ingram became one of the world’s leading cherry experts and shared the joy of sakura both nationally and internationally. This book presents a portrait of this little-known Englishman.
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£9.99
On a wet afternoon in September 1938, Neville Chamberlain stepped off an aeroplane and announced that his visit to Hitler had averted the greatest crisis in recent memory. It was, he later assured the crowd in Downing Street, ‘peace for our time’. Within a year of the British prime minister’s return from Munich, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. That moment of theatre was the culmination of over five years of drama. Beginning with the advent of Hitler in 1933, Tim Bouverie takes us on a fascinating journey from the early days of the Third Reich to the beaches of Dunkirk. We enter the 10 Downing Street of Stanley Baldwin and Chamberlain, and the backrooms of Parliament where an unusual coalition of MPs – including the indomitable Winston Churchill – were among the few to realise that the only real choice was between ‘war now or war later’.
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£12.99
It is a hard but loving childhood. Yan’s family carve out a modest existence – food is often so scarce they have to find edible bark and clay for sustenance. Reading novels becomes an escape for Yan, and he yearns to become a writer after hearing about a woman who was allowed to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her first book. Working sixteen-hour shifts in a quarry, Yan’s hands become as crooked as twigs, but the satisfaction of hard physical labour and earning money to support his family proves intoxicating. Caught between his obligations as a son and a brother, and his longing for a different life, Yan eventually joins the army. He returns to find his father’s health rapidly deteriorating in the face of his desperate efforts to build a traditional tile-roofed house for each of his sons.
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£12.99
Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. She exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives. Caroline brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are excluded from the very building blocks of the world we live in, and the impact this has on their health and wellbeing.
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£8.99
After her identical twin girls were born ten weeks prematurely, Francesca Segal finds herself sitting vigil in the ‘mother ship’ of neonatal intensive care, all romantic expectations of new parenthood obliterated. Her gripping diary of those months combines the tenderness of a love poem with the compulsive pace of a thriller. As each day brings a fresh challenge for her and her babies, Francesca makes a temporary life among a band of mothers who are vivid, fearless, and inspiring, taking care not only of their children but of one another. ‘Mother Ship’ is an intimate, raucous, sublime, and electrifying memoir. It is a hymn to the sustaining power of women’s friendship, and a loving celebration of the two small girls – and their mother – who defy the odds.
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£8.99
‘Who Killed My Father’ is a fascinating insight into the life of Ãdouard Louis’s father, which urgently and brilliantly engages with issues surrounding masculinity, class, homophobia, shame and social poverty. It explores the key moments and difficulties in their father-son relationship, and reconstructs the man he was and is today. The book unflinchingly takes aim at governments whose policies disadvantage those they seek to exclude – those like Louis’s father who have their expectations, hopes and passions crushed by a society which gives them little thought.
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£9.99
As the First World War shatters families, destroys friendships and kills lovers, a young Palestinian dreamer sets out to find himself. Midhat Kamal picks his way across a fractured world, from the shifting politics of the Middle East to the dinner tables of Montpellier and a newly tumultuous Paris. He discovers that everything is fragile: love turns to loss, friends become enemies and everyone is looking for a place to belong. Isabella Hammad delicately unpicks the tangled politics and personal tragedies of a turbulent era – the Palestinian struggle for independence, the strife of the early 20th century and the looming shadow of the Second World War. An intensely human story amidst a global conflict, ‘The Parisian’ is historical fiction with a remarkable contemporary voice.
