Search results for ""Granta Books""

What does it mean to write about a killer? From an award-winning author comes a tale of a notorious double-murder, a political scandal, and a writer who found himself entangled in this strange, true story.

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ADAPTED INTO A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING JIM BROADBENT "A painful, funny, frightening, moving, marvellous book ... everybody should read it" - Nick Hornby And when did you last see your father? Was it when they burnt the coffin? Put the lid on it? When he exhaled his last breath? When he last sat up and said something? When he last recognized me? When he last smiled? Blake Morrison's memoir is a candid, profoundly moving reflection on his relationship with his father, Arthur. Following Arthur's cancer diagnosis, Blake witnesses the slow erosion of the man he once knew. As his father's battle with the disease unfurls, Blake reflects on growing up with Arthur in Yorkshire and their relationship in the years since he left home. From Arthur's penchant for saving money - and the lengths he'd go to do so - to his wayward behavior on family holidays, Blake's fearless account resists an unwavering celebration of his father, showing him to be outlandish and recalcitrant, as well as capturing his humorous and caring qualities. The result is a rich, nuanced portrait of their relationship, capturing the accommodations and resentments that lie cloistered within familial love. And When Did You Last See Your Father? is a classic of the confessional memoir genre; a raw and shimmering interrogation of father-son relationships, masculinity, selfhood and pride. "This luminous tribute to a beloved dad made me laugh until I cried and cry till my nostrils were raw. A masterpiece - one of those books that you treasure forever" - Val Hennessy

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A reissue of this inspiring and heartbreaking memoir about family, empathy and the stories we tell about ourselves and others Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was given three boxes of ripening apricots, fruit from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. In this courageous, heartbreaking memoir, Solnit draws from this unexpected inheritance, weaving her own story into fairy tales and the lives of others. Encompassing the Marquis de Sade and Mary Shelley, explorers and monsters, a library of water in Iceland, and the depths of the Grand Canyon, The Faraway Nearby is a meditation on family, empathy, and the art of storytelling from a writer of limitless talent and imagination.

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An artist's obsession with Géricault's monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa, and an intensely personal reckoning that delves deep inside the making of an artwork. Artist Tom de Freston has long had an obsession with Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa, and the troubling story behind its creation. The monumental canvas, which hangs in the Louvre, depicts a 19th century tragedy in which 150 people were drowned at sea on a raft lost in a stormy sea, when the ship Medusa was wrecked on shallow ground. When de Freston began making an artwork with Ali, a Syrian writer blinded by a bombing, The Raft's depiction of pain and suffering resonated powerfully with him, as did Géricault's awful life story. It spoke not only to Ali's story but to Tom's family history of trauma and anguish, offering him a passage out of the dark waters in which he found himself. In spellbinding, visceral prose, de Freston opens a window onto the magnetic frisson that runs between a past masterpiece and contemporary artistic endeavours. He asks powerful questions about how we might translate violence, fear and trauma into art, how we try to make sense of seemingly unthinkable acts, and the value in facing and depicting the darkest horrors.

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'Austin Duffy's uniquely dry, laconic style adds a subversive and compelling charge to this moving and intense story of the relationship between a father and daughter. A terrific novel' William Boyd Wolf travels to New York with his daughter to scatter the ashes of his recently estranged wife, Miriam. Buffeted by the loss, his fraught relationship with his daughter and the antagonism of Miriam's conservative Jewish family, Wolf is also coming to terms with a burgeoning concern of his own: growing dislocations in his mind, and the hollowing out of his memories. Set across the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Ten Days is a tender, nuanced and beautifully crafted story of a father's reckoning with his daughter and a profound, compelling meditation on family, time and the bonds of marriage. 'An absolutely beautiful book about time and mortality, love and memory, in which heartbreaking sadness and dry humour are held in exquisite tension' Carys Davies

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A man and a woman meet in a park. The man has a story to share, one of a past relationship that contains echoes, similarities to the woman's life too remarkable to be considered just a coincidence. And so the lines of reality begin to blur. Is the man a warning from the future? Is the woman destined to repeat the same mistakes? Who really exists? Is there such thing as fate?

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This is a surprising portrait of the pastel city, a masterly study of Cuban immigration and exile, and a sly account of vile moments in the Cold War. Miami may be the sunniest place in America but this is Didion's darkest book, in which she explores American efforts to overthrow the Castro regime, Miami's civic corruption and racist treatment of its large black community.

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El Salvador, 1982, is at the height of a ghastly civil war. Joan Didion travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, considers the distinctly Salvadorean meaning of the verb 'to disappear' and trains a merciless eye not only on the terror there but also on the depredations and evasions of US foreign policy. Salvador is a restless and unflinching masterclass in the art of reportage by one of the great literary stylists of the twentieth century.

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When Kristin Kimball fell in love with a farmer and left behind her life in Manhattan to start a new farm with him in the Adirondacks, she had to learn a lot about farming - and fast. But, it turns out that starting a farm is not as challenging as sustaining it. Over the next five years, as two children are born and more land is acquired, the farm has its ups and downs, but then the downs keep on coming. Kristin's husband gets injured, the weather turns against them, the financial pressures mount. Suddenly, Kristin is facing not only the daily juggle of planting and milking and putting dinner on the table, but bigger questions about the life she has chosen. Is she still a farmer or is she now a farmer's wife? What does the farm need in order to survive? What does a family need in order to thrive? Beautifully written and refreshingly honest, Good Husbandry is about farmers and food, friends and neighbours, love and marriage, birth and death, and about how to grow and harvest the good things in life.

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In the early spring of 1959, six musicians went into the 30th Street Studio in New York. Nine hours later, they had recorded one of the finest albums of the twentieth century. Kind of Blue traces Miles Davis's development into an artist capable of making such a masterpiece, and explores the careers and struggles of the musicians who shaped him and played alongside him. Using interviews and pictures, studio dialogue and outtakes, the great jazz historian Ashley Kahn follows Miles and his group into the studio, to show precisely how the greatest jazz record of all time was made, how it was introduced to the world, and how it changed music forever.

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In 1940, Helene, young, naive, and recently married, waves goodbye to her husband, who has enlisted in the British army. Her home, Guernsey, is soon invaded by the Germans, leaving her exposed to the hardships of occupation. Forty years later, her daughter, Roz, begins a search for the truth about her father, and stumbles into the secret history of her mother's life. Written with emotional acuity and passionate intensity, Island Song speaks of the moral complexities of war-time allegiances, the psychological toll of living with the enemy and the messy reality of human relationships in a tightly knit community. As Roz discovers, truth is hard to pin down, and so are the rights and wrongs of those struggling to survive in the most difficult of circumstances.

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Warrior tells the story of forgotten man, a man whose bones were found in an Anglo-Saxon graveyard at Bamburgh castle in Northumberland. It is the story of a violent time when Britain was defining itself in waves of religious fervour, scattered tribal expansion and terrible bloodshed; it is the story of the fighting class, men apart, defined in life and death by their experiences on the killing field; it is an intricate and riveting narrative of survival and adaptation set in the stunning political and physical landscapes of medieval England. Warrior is a classic of British history, a landmark of popular archaeology, and a must-read for anyone interested in the story of where we've come from.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2020 'A compelling read. Carys Davies has an amazing gift' Penelope Lively From the prize-winning author of West, a collision between old and new, east and west, in a former British hill station in South India. Fleeing the dark undercurrents of his life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life's simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken Hilary under their wing. As Hilary's friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious and nationalist tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems... 'Brilliantly crafted' Daily Mail 'An absolute triumph' Cynan Jones 'Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy' Sunday Times

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In The Future is History Masha Gessen follows the lives of four Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children or grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths not only against the machinations of the regime that would seek to crush them all (censorship, intimidation, violence) but also against the war it waged on understanding itself, ensuring the unobstructed emergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. The Future is History is a powerful and urgent cautionary tale by contemporary Russia's most fearless inquisitor.

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A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilizational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, it remains one of Eurasia's oldest surviving religious melting pots. With their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time. By exploring the stories of dwellers past and present, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Soon, her journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

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Ireland is flooded, derelict. It never stops raining. The Kid in Yellow has stolen the babba from the Earlie King. Why? Something to do with the King's daughter, and a talking statue, something godawful. And from every wall the King's Eye watches. And yet the city is full of hearts-defiant-sprayed in yellow, the mark of the Kid. It cannot end well. Can it? Follow the Kid, hear the tale. Roll up! Roll up!

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It is 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down. Jonathan Fabrizius, a journalist living in West Germany, is asked to travel to the contested lands of former East Prussia - where the Nazi legacy lives on in buildings and fortifications - to write about the route for a car rally. It's a plum job, but his interest is piqued by a personal connection. Here, among the refugees fleeing the advancing Russians in 1945, he was born. Homeland is a nuanced work from one of the great modern European storytellers, in which an everyday German comes face to face with his painful family history, and devastating questions about ordinary Germans' complicity in the war.

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It is the long, hot summer of 1963 and New York is filled with lovers, dreamers and protestors. Young African-American women grow out their hair and discover the taste of new freedoms. Young men, white and black, travel south to fight against segregation, praying for a society in which love is colour-free. Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s but overlooked in Kathleen Collins's lifetime, these stories mark the debut of a masterful writer whose electrifying voice was almost lost to history.

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'I wake up and I have to make the right choice,' he said. Master-stylist Ben Marcus returns with a wonder-cabinet of brain-rearranging stories. From the horrifyingly strange to the deeply touching, each story is a literary masterclass unlikely to leave the reader unchanged. From parent/child relationships thrown agonisingly off kilter, to intensely moving scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Ben Marcus is the great chronicler of the contemporary uncanny and the peculiar future. Piece by piece, he takes us apart.

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Humans have long believed themselves to be the superior species: we consume other animals for food, experiment on them and slaughter them for sport. But as well as the ethical issues surrounding our treatment of other animals, our attitudes are responsible for massive species loss and extinctions, the extensive destruction of habitats and a growing threat of zoonotic pandemics. Drawing on philosophy and theology, art and history, Between Light and Storm is a penetrating account of our fraught relationship with animals. It is also a timely and necessary plea for a more humane approach to those with whom we share a planet.

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WELCOME TO THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIMENT Mary is out of options. Estranged from her family and beset by phantom pain, she signs up for 'The Girlfriend Experiment' - a mysterious project masterminded by a famous Hollywood actor who hires a collection of women to fulfil the different roles of a relationship. Mary is to play the Emotional Girlfriend, alongside a Maternal Girlfriend, a Mundane Girlfriend, an Angry Girlfriend and, of course, an Intimacy Team. Each woman has her debts and her difficulties, her past loves and her secrets. As Mary and the actor are drawn ever closer together, the nature of the experiment changes, and the Girlfriends find themselves exposed to new perils, foremost among them love.

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Gillian seems to have it all - she is beautiful, successful, and securely married. But one night, after an argument with her husband, their car crashes on a wet road, and everything is lost. When she wakes in the hospital, she is a widow with a ruined face and no way back to the person she thought she was. It is only when she begins to piece together the painful shards of her present existence and revisit a relationship from her past that she is able to glimpse the freedom that might come with her loss. From the master of unadorned storytelling, All Days Are Night is a quietly disquieting exploration of identity, inside and out.

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Ten years after the success of the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue, four judges -- A.S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, bookseller John Mitchinson and Granta editor Bill Buford -- set out to identify twenty more young and promising writers. The list introduced astonishing emerging talents: Alan Hollinghurst, Will Self, Hanif Kureishi, A.L. Kennedy and many more. A widely varied anthology including novel extracts and stories that showcase a generation of writers coming into its own.

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In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok - Hick to friends - a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives. Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick's hidden love, and of Hick's unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

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The first English language biography of the great European writer Joseph Roth, exploring his genius and his tragic life story, lived in the shadow of war. The brilliant, mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the European 20th century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an observer and chronicler of his times. Born and raised in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life's decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic years, he was exiled from Germany, his wife driven into an asylum, and he died an alcoholic on the eve of the World War II. With keen insight, rigor and sensitivity, Keiron Pim delivers a visceral portrait of Roth's internal restlessness and search for belonging, from his childhood in the town of Brody to his Vienna years and his unsettled roaming of Europe. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, and his attitude to his Jewishness, Roth's biography has particular relevance to us now, not only in the growing recognition and revival of his works, but also because his life's trajectory speaks powerfully to us in a time of uncertainty, fear, refugee crises, and rising ethno-nationalism. "A superb biography - fascinating, shrewd, insightful. Finally, Joseph Roth's extraordinary life is recounted for his multitude of English readers in compelling detail... Enthralling" - William Boyd

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We have long attributed man's violent, aggressive, competitive nature to his animal ancestry. But what if we are just as given to cooperation, empathy and morality by virtue of our genes? From a scientist and writer whom E. O. Wilson has called 'the world authority on primate social behavior' comes a lively look at the most provocative aspects of human nature - power, sex, violence, kindness, and morality - through our two closest cousins in the ape family. For nearly twenty years, Frans de Waal has worked with both the famously aggressive chimpanzee and the lesser-known egalitarian, erotic, matriarchal bonobo, two species whose DNA is nearly identical to that of humans. He brings these apes to life on every page, revealing their personalities, relationships and power struggles, creating an engrossing narrative that explores what their behaviour can teach us about ourselves and each other.

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Emphasizing the Romantic heritage and modernist legacy of Karl Marx's writings, Peter Osborne presents Marx's thought as a developing investigation into what it means, concretely, for humans to be practical historical beings. Drawing upon passages from a wide range of Marx's writings, and showing the links between them, Osborne refutes the myth of Marx as a reductively economistic thinker. What Marx meant by 'materialism', 'communism' and the 'critique of political economy' was much richer and more original, philosophically, than is generally recognized. With the renewed globalization of capitalism since 1989, Osborne argues, Marx's analyses of the consequences of commodification are more relevant today than ever before. Extracts are taken from the full breadth of Marx's writings, from his student Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, via the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto to Capital.

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A blackly funny account of everyday life in Ramallah and refreshingly different from most writing on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law describes Suad Amiry's life on the West Bank from the early 1980s to the first decade of the new millennium. Vividly evoking her neighbourhood and her moving family history, Amiry creates a fascinating account of her attempts to live a normal life in an insane situation: from the impossibility of acquiring gas masks during the first Gulf War to her dog acquiring a Jerusalem passport when thousands of Palestinians couldn't. During the Israeli invasion of Ramallah in March 2002, Amiry's feisty ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law came to live with them, and Amiry's diary of this time is at the heart of this wonderful book about the absurdity (and agony) of life in the Occupied Territories.

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Selected essays from America's foremost literary journalist and essayist, featuring ruminations on writers and artists as diverse as Edith Wharton, Diane Arbus and the Bloomsbury Group. This charismatic and penetrating collection includes Malcolm's now iconic essay about the painter David Salle.

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The subjects of this stylish and audacious collection of essays range from an assault in Nicaragua to a Morgellons meeting; from Frida Kahlo's plaster casts to a gangland tour of LA. Jamison is interested in how we tell stories about injury and pain, and the limits that circumstances, bodies and identity put on the act of describing.

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The stories in The Safety of Objects are both bizarre and believable, very funny but also frightening and sad. A girl's blonde Barbie doll seduces her teenage brother in an intense episode of erotic obsession; a couple go off the rails and smoke crack while their children are staying with their grandmother; and a lawyer seeks revenge on his boss by urinating into his potted plant every evening.

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For Claire Roth, an established psychotherapist with an adoring husband and children, her new patient - Jody Goodman, a witty and attractive young filmmaker - is a welcome diversion from her predictable life. Jody, successful, yet uncertain, is disarmed by Claire's interest and approval. Gradually, the boundaries between friendship and family, between love and compulsion, start to blur - especially when one of them starts to believe fanatically that some things simply cannot be coincidences, and that what they share, in fact, is the deepest bond of all. In a Country of Mothers is a transfixing psychological thriller, and with it A.M. Homes forces us to confront our own judgements about sanity, danger and desire.

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In The Torch in My Ear Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner, towering intellectual figure and polymath, gives us his second volume of autobiography. Using as a framework his admiration for his first great mentor, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus, and his passion for his first wife, Veza, Canetti seamlessly incorporates a profoundly perceptive portrait of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. Here are the voices of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. This is autobiography redefining itself.

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Fairytales are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient landscapes. Both evoke a similar sensation in us - we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying. In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of the fairytales made famous by the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at risk and their loss deprives us of our cultural lifeblood. Maitland visits forests through the seasons, from the exquisite green of a beechwood in spring, to the muffled stillness of a snowy pine wood in winter. She camps with her son Adam, whose beautiful photographs are included in the book; she takes a barefoot walk through Epping Forest with Robert Macfarlane; she walks with a mushroom expert through an oak wood, and with a miner through the Forest of Dean. Maitland ends each chapter with a unique, imaginitive re-telling of a fairytale. Written with Maitland's wonderful clarity and conversational grace, Gossip from the Forest is a magical and unique blend of nature writing, history and imaginative fiction.

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In Reading Chekhov Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer and journalist. Her close readings of Chekhov's stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from his life and framed by an account of a recent journey she made to St Petersburg. Malcolm demonstrates how the shadow of death that hovered over most of Chekhov's literary career - he became consumptive in his twenties and died in his forties - is almost everywhere reflected in the work. She writes of his childhood, his relationship with his family, his marriage, his travels, his early success, his exile to Yalta - always with an eye to connecting them to his themes and characters.

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WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Reads like a brilliant miniseries... Has the narrative intensity of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the emotional punch of Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved' Observer Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his taller, smarter, and more successful younger brother George acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in New York City. But Harry also knows his brother has a murderous temper. When George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Suddenly Harry finds himself playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down a rabbit hole of online sex, and dealing with aging parents who move through life like travellers on a fantastic voyage. And he is forced to confront the ways in which our histories can either compel us to repeat our mistakes - or become the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is a darkly funny tale exploring how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. 'An unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing' Salman Rushdie

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Lyrical, dark, comic or iconoclastic, the Irish short story has always punched well above its weight. Anne Enright has brought together a dazzling collection of Irish stories by authors born in the twentieth century - from Mary Lavin and Frank O'Connor to Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry. With a pithy and passionate introduction by Enright, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story traces this great tradition through decades of social change and shows the pleasure Irish writers continue to take in the short-story form. Deft and often devastating, the short story dodges the rolling mythologies of of Irish life to produce truths that are delightful and real. Also includes stories by: Maeve Brennan, Roddy Doyle, Mary Lavin, Colum McCann, William Trevor, John McGahern, Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry.

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In a very near future, a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don't tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world's last diary. Despite his job at an outfit called 'Post-Human Services', which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn't it? Lenny's from a different century. He TOTALLY loves books (or 'printed, bound media artifacts' as they're now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean-American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in 'Images' and a minor in 'Assertiveness'. When riots break out in New York's Central Park, the city's streets are lined with National Guard tanks and patient Chinese creditors look ready to foreclose on the whole mess, Lenny vows to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, there is still value in being a real human being.

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A man is thrown out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless. Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.

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Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. Sarah Thornton's shrewd and entertaining fly-on-the-wall narrative takes us behind the scenes of the art world, from art school to auction house, showing us how it works, and giving us a vivid sense of being there.

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Coda is Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggled to come to terms with terminal lung cancer. Darkly comic depictions of the medical team are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with his beloved wife, Victoria. Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray's Coda is as life-affirming as it is heart-rending. Sadly, Coda was published posthumously: Gray died in August 2008.

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'A brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between place, history and memory... The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book' Deborah Levy, Guardian SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE From the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts comes a book like no other. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. But it is also a book about mourning, and of rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit. It is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life from one of the great literary voices of our time. 'Wonderful. A quietly gripping contemplation on life, death and the existential impact of those who have gone before' Eimear McBride 'The White Book is a profound and precious thing... Han Kang is a genius' Lisa McInerney

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WITH A FOREWORD BY TIM HARFORD See the world anew with this unique and beautifully designed infographic atlas Which nations have North Korean embassies? Which region has the highest number of death metal bands per capita? How many countries have bigger economies than California? Who drives on the 'wrong' side of the road? And where can you find lions in the wild? Revelatory, thought-provoking and fun, Brilliant Maps is a unique atlas of culture, history, politics and miscellanea, compiled by the editor of the iconic Brilliant Maps website. As visually arresting as Information is Beautiful and as full of surprising facts and figures as any encyclopaedia, Brilliant Maps is a stunning piece of cartography that maps our curious and varied planet. For graphic design enthusiasts, compulsive Wikipedia readers and those looking for the sort of gift they buy for someone else and wind up keeping for themselves, this book will change the way you see the world and your place in it. 'Thoughtful, fun and beautifully illustrated guide to our constantly surprising planet... terrifically interesting stuff' Big Issue

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On the morning of Saturday 22nd April 1978, members of an Active Service Unit of the IRA hijacked a car and crossed the countryside to the town of Lisburn. Within an hour, they had killed an off-duty policeman in front of his young son. In Anatomy of a Killing, award-winning journalist Ian Cobain documents the hours leading up to the killing, and the months and years of violence, attrition and rebellion surrounding it. Drawing on interviews with those most closely involved, as well as court files, police notes, military intelligence reports, IRA strategy papers, memoirs and government records, this is a unique perspective on the Troubles, and a revelatory work of investigative journalism.

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'[An] absolute must-read. It has stunned and moved everyone who has read it' Arifa Akbar, Independent This multi-award winning novel is the extraordinary story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman She is a baby who suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps not? Her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone. From a small Galician town at the turn of the twentieth century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin's Moscow to modern-day Berlin, the twists of fate of her lives take us to some of the most vivid moments in European history. But it is our heroine's choices, her struggles and her humanity - as she faces everything from Nazi-occupied Austria, Soviet secret police and the trials of old age - that make this book so profoundly moving, insightful and unforgettable. Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Hans Fallada Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and an English PEN Award. 'The End of Days prises open the troubled box that is 20th-century European history and entrenches [Erpenbeck's] position as the most brilliant European writer of my generation' Neel Mukherjee, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Jenny Erpenbeck makes swift work of the one-life-multiple-outcomes conceit touched on by Kate Atkinson and David Mitchell - and is the best of the bunch' Daily Telegraph Books of the Year

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From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo, here is a story of treasure hoarders, bargain hunters and would-be lovers. Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano's thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and loss - or so it seems to Hitomi, when she takes a job there. And her fellow employees are just as curious as the items they sell. There's the store's owner, Mr Nakano, an enigmatic ladies' man with several ex-wives; Sakiko, his sensuous, unreadable lover; his sister, Masayo, an artist whose free-spirited creations mask hidden sorrows. And finally there's Hitomi's fellow employee, Takeo, whose abrupt and taciturn manner Hitomi finds, to her consternation, increasingly disarming. A beguiling story of love found amid odds and ends, The Nakano Thrift Shop is a heart-warming and utterly charming novel from one of Japan's most celebrated contemporary novelists. 'A charming read' Good Housekeeping 'One for the holiday suitcase' Vogue

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Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, believed that our actions stem from self-interest and the world turns because of financial gain. But every night Adam Smith's mother served him his dinner, not out of self-interest but out of love.Today, economics focuses on self-interest and excludes our other motivations. It disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking and its influence has spread from the market to how we shop, think and date. In this engaging takedown of the economics that has failed us, Katrine Marçal journeys from Adam Smith's dinner table to the recent financial crisis and shows us how different, how much better, things could be.

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Romania, the last months of the dictator's regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara, Adina's friend, works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another day, a hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilation is a sign that she is being tracked - the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine to form a kaleidoscope of reflections, deflections and deceit. Adina and her friends struggle to keep living in a world permeated with fear, where even the eyes of a cat seem complicit with the watchful eye of the state, and where it's hard to tell the victim apart from the perpetrator.

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