Search results for ""vintage publishing""

''A warm, sweet love story, and a thought-provoking examination of the British slave trade and its legacy'' MARIAN KEYES**A STYLIST UNMISSABLE BOOK FOR 2024**They already share a surname. But will they share a future?When Layla and Andy first meet, they can''t believe they have the same surname. It feels like fate, almost too romantic to be true.But Sera, Layla''s best friend, has her doubts about Andy. As the pair fall deeper and deeper in love, Sera becomes more and more vocal about Layla settling down with a white boy. And then, only a few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a devastating discovery about their shared name.What seemed like a fairy-tale romance is rapidly derailed. In part propelled by Sera''s rising anger, Layla begins to uncover parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined -- or, perhaps, had simply learnt to ignore. And now, she faces an impossible choice, betw

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*ONE OF THE TIMES BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2022*The glorious Sunday Times bestseller from one of our greatest storytellers. French Braid follows one family''s joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and secrets, from the 1950s right up to today.When Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice.All she wants is space and silence. No clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.But it turns out family life is impossible to escape - particularly when it''s in your past. For Mercy it all begins in 1959, with a holiday to a cabin by a lake. It''s the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations''Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch'' MARIAN KEYES''A perfect work of fiction'' MEG MASON''She is and always will be my favourite author'' LIANE MORIARTY''Exquisitely crafted, te

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Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee looks at pioneering experiments in communal living to present a rousing argument for rethinking what we mean by home.A must-read' THOMAS PIKETTYJust wonderful' ANGELA SAINIThroughout history and around the world today, forward-thinking communities have pioneered alternative ways of living together, sharing property and raising children. In Everyday Utopia, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee explores what we can learn from these experiments from the ancient Greek commune founded by Pythagoras to the trail-blazing feminists of the French Revolution, from the cohousing movement in contemporary Denmark to the flourishing ecovillages of Colombia and Portugal. She shows why utopian thinking is essential to making a fairer world and that many of the best ways of getting there begin at home.This warm, intelligent and lucid book takes us on a deep dive into how people have created better systems for living

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A unique combination of memoir and artistic biography, interspersed with original artworks, from the acclaimed artist and author of SELF-PORTRAIT.We are both painters. We can connect to each other through images, in our own unvoiced language. But I will try and reach you with words. Through talking to you I may come alive and begin to speak.Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others.Letters to Gwen John is Paul's imagined correspondence with this groundbreaking painter. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters offer a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art.''Beautiful, tender, and r

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A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023**''By far the best British poet alive'' SPECTATOR''A master of language'' HILARY MANTELIn this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins.Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty first sun streaming through the trees a skylark in the near field, flush with song as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness.Throug

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THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CYCLING IN FIVE VOLUMESVolume One of The Cycling Anthology, a collection of the best writing on cycling by some of the sport's leading writers. Between them, they’ve covered hundreds of Tours de France and written dozens of excellent books and some have even ridden the Tour. Now, their work is showcased together for the first time.Volume One features original and exclusive pieces by leading cycling writers, including:- William Fotheringham disects Bradley Wiggins' transformation from track superstar to becoming the first Briton to win the Tour de France- David Millar discusses retirement and dark secrets as his friends' careers start to fade- Daniel Friebe uncovers the fascinating role statistics has to play in cycling- Jeremy Whittle follows Team Sky to assess the Lance Armstrong's legacy to the sport

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An eye-opening expose of and a heart-breaking lament for professional cyclingPaul Kimmage's boyhood dreams were of cycling glory: wearing the yellow jersey, cycling the Tour de France, becoming a national hero. He knew it wouldn't come easy, but he was prepared to put in the graft. The dedication paid off – he finished sixth in the World Championships as an amateur and in 1986, he turned professional.He soon discovered it wasn't about courage, training hours or how much you wanted to win. It was about gruelling defeats, total exhaustion, and drugs - drugs that would allow you to finish the race and start another day. Kimmage ultimately left the sport to write this book – profoundly honest and ground-breaking, Rough Ride broke the silence surrounding the issue of drugs in sport, and documents one man’s love for, and struggle with, the complex world of professional cycling. ‘A must read for any cyclist’ CyclistWINNER OF WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR

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WITH INTROUCTIONS BY EAVAN BOLAND AND MAUD ELLMANThe serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay, together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is often cited as Virginia Woolf's most popular novel.The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

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'He is in a category of one. You can't believe that a person like this stalks the earth. A complete original and an amazing person' MARINA HYDE'A visionary masterpiece' JOHN GRAY, NEW STATESMANThe long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated author. Told in Werner Herzog's inimitable voice, this is the story of his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has done before.Hauling a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears - Werner Herzog has always been intrigued by extremes of human experience. Here, he illuminates the influences and ideas that have driven his creativity and shaped his unique worldview.Herzog's life matches the drama of his famous films: the boy growing up in poverty in a small village in the Alps after the Second World War; the teenager travelling the world in search of adventure that almost cost him his life; the director trying to calm his leading actor Klaus Kinski in the Amazonian jungle. And along the way, Herzog tells of ordinary people with extraordinary stories: rural labourers, circus acrobats, child soldiers.Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great self-invented lives of our time, and a masterpiece that will enthral fans old and new. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.*A New Statesman Book of the Year 2023*---Praise for Werner Herzog's previous books:'Has the eerie power of the best fairytales. It hits you with the force of dreams' HELEN MACDONALD'Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know ... only Herzog could have written this weird, slender classic' ROBERT MACFARLANE'Herzog's writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films' GUARDIAN

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A story of staggering scope and drama, Revolusi is the masterful and definitive account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonisation of the modern world.'Astounding . . . history at its best' Yuval Harari'Utterly compelling' Financial Times'Superb' GuardianOn a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and on behalf of 68 million compatriots announced the birth of a new nation: Indonesia.Four million civilians had died during the Japanese wartime occupation that ousted its Dutch colonial regime. Another 200,000 people would lose their lives in the astonishingly brutal conflict that ensued - as the Dutch used savage violence to reassert their control, and as Britain and America became embroiled in pacifying Indonesia's guerrilla war of resistance: the 'Revolusi'. It was not until December 1949 that the newly created United Nations finally brought the conflict an end - and with it, 350 years of colonial rule - setting a precedent that would reshape the world.Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eye-witness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative that is alive with human detail at every turn. A landmark publication, Revolusi shows Indonesia's struggle for independence to be one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century.'A magnificent fusion of oral history, sparkling analysis, and historical wisdom. Revolusi has it all: a masterpiece' SEBASTIAN MALLABY'One of the most unlikely and astonishing sagas ... a towering achievement' THOMAS MEANEY'A magisterial but gripping account of events of urgent importance to us now' JASON BURKE'At once vast and intimate, a history in colour' LAKSMI PAMUNTJAK'A masterly display of the historian’s craft' J M COETZEE'A wonderful and important book' PETER FRANKOPAN

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Renowned sociologist and best-selling author Eric Klinenberg turns a year of devastation into a year of revelation in this wise, deeply researched and cathartic account of the pandemic.''A gripping, deeply moving account'' SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, author of The Song of the CellWhat unites us? What divides us? What do we value? Sociologist Eric Klinenberg had been studying what crises reveal about societies for over two decades when his home of New York became the deadliest hot spot of the global pandemic. In this book he tells the deeply reported stories of seven ordinary people trying to survive at the epicentre of the crisis, and combines them with data gathered from around the world to provide unprecedented insights into what societies are made of, why they come together or fall apart, and how they shape our lives.''Compellingly reveals what the pandemic laid bare about our culture, our institutions, and ourselves'' Matthew Desmond, autho

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Rediscover this deep, practical anatomy of the novel from 'the strongest ... literary critic we have' (New York Review of Books) in this new revised 10th anniversary edition.What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? What constitutes a 'telling' detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic? Why do most endings of novels disappoint?In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions. Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.'Should find a place on every novel-lover's shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it' Financial Times

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This is Monica, one ordinary woman’s extraordinary journey through the history of comics – from the creator of Ghost World***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***'Pitch-perfect... Could not put it down'OBSERVER'In Monica, Clowes reaches a new artistic peak'VANITY FAIRA dazzling, spectacular tapestry of interconnected narratives that together tell a life story, Monica is the new graphic novel from one of the most iconic storytellers of all time. This eponymous protagonist is a rag-to-riches character who, after being abandoned by her freewheelin' parents in childhood, succeeds in clawing her way to the top - only to lose it all in a stroke of bad luck. She lives out the rest of her days in search of her parents, encountering a cast of eccentric characters who help to piece together her story.This graphic novel extravaganza is an unforgettable ode to the many genres that have defined the comics form - from war, romance and horror to crime and the supernatural. Mysterious, uncategorisable and quintessentially Clowesian, here is a multi-layered masterpiece born of a lifetime of inspiration. Monica marks the creative apex of Daniel Clowes' distinguished career, one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century.

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Carmel had been alone all her life. The baby knew this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been.'A magnificent novel' SALLY ROONEY, author of Normal PeopleNell - funny, brave and so much loved - is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A multigenerational novel that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter - sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.***A THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023******ONE OF THE BBC’S ’25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023’***'One of our greatest living novelists' THE TIMES'Might just be her best yet' LOUISE KENNEDY, author of Trespasses'Gem-packed language... A must-read' MARGARET ATWOOD (via Twitter)

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A story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friendsGorgeous... Ethereal' GUARDIANA book with cosmic reach'' FINANCIAL TIMESA romance worthy of Emily Brontë' WALL STREET JOURNALA genre-bending novel of ideas' TELEGRAPH''Sarah Perry just gets better and better'' INDEPENDENTThomas and Grace are fellow worshippers at the Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love.Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva, said to haunt a nearby manor. Inspired by Maria, and the dawning realisation James may not reciprocate his feelings, Tho

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A pianist falls grandly, helplessly in love in this elegant new novella from the twice-Booker Prize winnerThe Pole tells the story of Witold Walczykiewicz, a vigorous, white-haired pianist, who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his Barcelona concert.Although Beatriz, who is married, is initially unimpressed by Wittold, she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into his world. As he sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband's summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though only on her terms.As the power struggle between them intensifies -- Is it Beatriz who limits their passion by controlling her emotions? Or is it Witold, trying to force into life his dream of love? Evocative of Joyce's 'The Dead,' The Pole is a haunting work, evoking the 'inexhaustible palette of sensations, from blind love to compassion' (El País) typical of Coetzee's finest novels.Published together with five exceptional stories, this new work from one of our greatest writers is a must for all literary connoisseurs.

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Good dad or good assassin? Can he be both? From the internationally bestselling author of BULLET TRAIN: A seemingly ordinary family man tries to juggle his home life with his job as a hitman.Picture a mantis raising up its blades. It looks fearsome, but it's still just a tiny insect. The mantis actually thinks it can win. Even though it's tiny, it's still ready to fight to the death.Kabuto is an ordinary guy; stressed with work, hassled by his wife and disrespected by his son. No wonder he visits his doctor so often. Except 'the Doctor' is actually his handler, and Kabuto is a hired assassin. The 'prescriptions' the Doctor hands over are his unlucky targets. Because although Kabuto may seem like a small man at home, he's really good at killing people.Kabuto is worn out with the business of murder. He's trying to pay his way out of the Doctor's employment with a few last jobs. But the most lucrative contracts involve taking out other professional assassins and his final assignment puts both him and his family in danger.'Unlike anything you're likely to have read before...white-hot with double-crosses' Financial Times, on Bullet Train

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'I raced through it. Brilliant writing' Harriet Tyce author of Blood OrangeA GUILTY MAN IS ABOUT TO GO FREE.YOU HAVE THE POWER TO PUT HIM AWAY FOR GOOD.ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS MISINTERPRET ONE WORD.NO ONE WOULD KNOW.DO YOU DO IT?EVEN IF IT MEANS RISKING EVERYTHING... INCLUDING YOUR SON?_____________________________________________'An ingenious premise, cleverly executed' Sunday Times bestseller Sabine Durrant'Intriguing' Daily Mail'Compelling and ingenious' Prima'Exciting and original' Heat***Readers love THE INTERPRETER:'I couldn't put it down... gripping''Loved this one! Gripping and exciting''Tense and enjoyable''I was instantly immersed' 'Unique... I was immediately drawn in by the characters''Incredible... had me completely engrossed' 'I loved how different the plot is''A great crime thriller''Completely fresh... it captures you from the start''This book is going to be huge!'

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A fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers.Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote.Ian's childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition to be 'the complete man', and he would strive for the means to achieve this 'completeness' all his life. Only a thriller writer for his last twelve years, his dramatic personal life and impressive career in Naval Intelligence put him at the heart of critical moments in world history, while also providing rich inspiration for his fiction.Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today. His talent for uncovering new material that casts fresh light on his subjects is fully evident in this masterful, definitive biography.‘This is a marvellous book about Ian Fleming, but it’s also one of the most engaging portraits of a particular period of British history that I have read in a long time.’ Antonia Fraser'A book so buoyant and delicious that you feel it will be a friend for life.' Telegraph*A The Times, Financial Times, Economist, Spectator and BBC History Magazine Book of the Year*

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Covering the second half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written.'Munro is still one of our most fearless explorers of the human being'The TimesSpanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of Alice Munro's stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight.Beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, written with emotion and empathy, these stories are nothing short of perfection. A masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the major fiction writers of our time.

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A poignant story of the inability to capture lost youth, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of A Farewell to Arms.'Luck is a feast which doesn't stay in one place'Richard Cantrell is an American colonel living in Venice just after the Second World War. The fighting has left him scarred and embittered, a middle-aged man with a heart condition. It seems that only the love of Renata, a nineteen-year-old countess can save him. But Cantrell is living in the shadow of war, every move he makes dictated by old battle instincts, and it is possible that for him the longed-for peace may have come too late.'The most important author since Shakespeare' New York Times

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**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER****Nigella returns to the BBC for Christmas 2023 in Nigella’s Amsterdam Christmas Special**Let Nigella guide you through the winter with the ultimate in comfort cooking. Featuring all the inspiring, achievable, and delicious recipes from her BBC TV series plus many more.Nigella Lawson is a champion of the home cook, and this book celebrates the food she loves to cook for friends and family. The recipes are warming, comforting, and inspirational, from new riffs on classic dishes - including Chicken Fricassée and Sticky Toffee Pudding - to adventures in a host of new dishes and ingredients, from Aubergine Fatteh to White Miso Hummus.AT MY TABLE includes dishes to inspire all cooks and eaters, from Hake with Bacon, Peas and Cider to Indian-Spiced Chicken and Potato Traybake and Chilli Mint Lamb Cutlets; plus a host of colourful vegetable dishes, like Eastern Mediterranean Chopped Salad and Carrots and Fennel with Harissa.No Nigella cookbook would be complete without sweet treats, and AT MY TABLE is no exception, with Emergency Brownies, White Chocolate Cheesecake and a Victoria Sponge with Cardamom, Marmalade and Crème Fraîche set to become family favourites.As Nigella writes, 'happiness is best shared'.. The perfect gift for food-lovers this festive season, these recipes will be served and savoured at your own kitchen table just as they are at hers.'I'd happily cook from this book every night' Bee Wilson'Bursting with what will be instant Nigella classics' Good Housekeeping

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'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE' - OBSERVERIn May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.‘Stunning’ Sunday Times‘A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power… It is a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding… I don’t think Barnes has written a finer, more truthful or more profound book’ Scotsman‘A tour de force by a master novelist at the top of his game’ Daily Express

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***WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not.In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan’s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.

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Kafka meets The Thick Of It in a bitingly funny new political satire from Ian McEwanThat morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain – and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way: not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy.With trademark intelligence, insight and scabrous humour, Ian McEwan pays tribute to Franz Kafka’s most famous work to engage with a world turned on its head.

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A powerful graphic novel, capturing the heart of day-to-day life in occupied Palestine.In late 1991 and early 1992, at the time of the first Intifada, Joe Sacco spent two months with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, travelling and taking notes.Upon returning to the United States he started writing and drawing Palestine, which combines the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic-book storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighty situation. He captures the heart of the Palestinian experience in image after unforgettable image, with great insight and remarkable humour.The nine-issue comics series won a l996 American Book Award. It is now published for the first time in one volume, befitting its status as one of the great classics of graphic non-fiction.‘The bar is set extremely high when it comes to graphic books and the Middle East: one thinks of Joe Sacco's Palestine' Guy Delise ‘Palestine is utterly compelling, and as affecting as the work of any war photographer or poet’ Varsity

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'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The TimesA young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Many years later she tells her story from a hotel in New York, opening a window into an extraordinary half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation and summoning up a quarter of a century of Japan's dramatic history.'Intimate and brutal, written in cool, lucid prose it is a novel whose psychological empathy and historical truths are outstanding' Mail on Sunday

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On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century. In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

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Rediscover the favourite childhood classic.***With a heartwarming introduction by Sophie Dahl***What little girl can turn a whole household upside down and breathe new life back into a strange, old manor? The wonderfully contrary, strong-willed, angry, misunderstood Mary Lennox.When Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody says she is the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It is true, too. Mary is pale, spoilt and quite contrary. But she is also horribly lonely. Then one day she hears about a garden in the grounds of the Manor that has been kept locked and hidden for years.And when a friendly robin helps Mary find the key, she discovers the most magical place anyone could imagine...'The book is brim full of magic and joy' Sunday Telegraph

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The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The black sign, painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, reads:Opens at NightfalllCloses at DawnAs the sun disappears beyond the horizon, all over the tents small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. When the tents are all aglow, sparkling against the night sky, the sign appears.Le Cirque des RêvesThe Circus of Dreams.Now the circus is open.Now you may enter.The Starless Sea, the magical second novel from the author of the The Night Circus, is available for pre-order now

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Read F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of love, money, revenge and betrayal set in Jazz Age America. Jay Gatsby is a self-made man, famed for his decadent champagne-drenched parties. Despite being surrounded by Long Island's bright and beautiful, he longs only for Daisy Buchanan. In shimmering prose, Fitzgerald shows Gatsby pursue his dream to its tragic conclusion in one of the 20th century’s true contenders for the title of ‘Great American Novel’.

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Lilian and Alice are the bright young twin daughters of the eccentric Mr Talbot, who resides in a huge mansion stuffed full of fossils, inventions, suits of armour, botanical specimens and other specimens of his sprawling collection of curiosities. When Lilian rebels against Victorian standards of morality she is packed off to India as the bride of a dreary missionary, leaving Alice alone and in danger of falling victim to her father's bizarre and hair-raising schemes. This lively and entertaining novel follows the two girls on their very different paths to freedom and is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Indian Mutiny.Shortlisted for the Saltire First Book prize, the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award and the Guildford Literary Festival First Book Award.

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Hemingway's early stories told in his distinctive style. 'When she goes, he though. I'll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is'In these early Hemingway stories, which are partly autobiographical, men and women of passion live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. They range from haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, to brutal America with its deceptive calm, and war-ravaged Europe'An excellent story-teller, intense and skilful in planning and bringing off his effects' Daily Telegraph

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Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh.'Beautifully nimble, solitary feats of imagination' Seamus Heaney'Beguiling' Time

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Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at his mother's funeral. Soon after, she persuades Henry to abandon Southwood, his dahlias and the Major next door to travel her way, through Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay... Accompanying his aunt, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society: mixing with hippies, war criminals, CIA men; smoking pot, breaking all the currency regulations and eventually coming alive after a dull suburban lifetime.

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'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' The Times'Ripley, amoral, hedonistic and charming, is a genuinely original creation' Daily TelegraphTom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over. Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he's willing to kill for it. When his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking. **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

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Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades. ‘Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece’ Sunday TimesIn 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written. WITH A FOREWORD J.G. BALLARD

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Internationally bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger and her husband, graphic artist Eddie Campbell, collaborate on this quirky, irreverent collection that celebrates and satirises love of all kinds. With thirteen different vignettes about love, loss, fairies, misbehaviour, regret, wanton wrongheadedness, cats, supernatural exterminators, spies, ghosts, more cats, more fairies, and a handful of ex-boyfriends, Bizarre Romance runs the gamut when it comes to relationships. It explores the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain weird – with Niffenegger's sharp, imaginative prose and Campbell's diverse comic styles, always with a sense of humour and cosmic justice.

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This beautiful book takes a photographic journey through Queen Elizabeth II's ten decades of colour-blocked style. The photographs, which span the colours of the rainbow and a century of style, are gloriously accessorised with captions and commentary by journalist and broadcaster Sali Hughes.From the dusky pinks the Queen wore in girlhood all the way through to #NeonAt90, by way of that hat she wore on the announcement of Brexit, and not forgetting her trusty Launer handbag ever at her side, this must-have collection celebrates the iconic fashion statements of our beloved, longest-reigning and most vibrant monarch.

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'Spaghetti in aspic, anyone? Revel in astonishing dishes from yesteryear: Stuffed Cocktail Grapes, Savoury Sausage Salad, a spunky Shrimp-Salmon Mould and so much more. Anna Pallai was brought up on 1970s stalwarts of stuffed peppers, meatloaf and platters of slightly greying hardboiled eggs. When she rediscovered her mother's grease-stained 70s cookbooks, she knew she needed to share them with the world, and so the hit Twitter account @70s_Party was born.Harking back to a simpler pre-Instagram, pre-clean-eating era, when the only concern for your dinner party was whether your aspic would set in time, this is a joyful celebration of food that can give you gout just by looking at it. Covering all the essentials, from starters through to desserts, dinner party etiquette (just how does one start to eat a swan fashioned from a hardboiled egg?) and the dreaded 'foreign' food, there's no potato-fashioned-as-a-stone left unturned.

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Ever feel like you are pedalling in the choucroute? Been caught with your beard in the mailbox again? Or maybe you just wish everyone would stop ironing your head?Speaking in Tongues brings the weird, wonderful and surprising nuanced beauty of language to life with over fifty gorgeous watercolour and ink illustrations.Here you will find the perfect romantic expression, such as the Spanish tu eres mi media naranja, or 'you are the love of my life, my soulmate', and the bizarre, including dancing bears and broken pots, feeding donkeys sponge cake, a head full of crickets, and clouds and radishes. All encourage new ways of thinking about the world around us, and breathe magnificent life into the everyday.These phrases from across the world are ageless and endlessly enchanting, passed down through generations. Now they are yours.

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Discover the perfect work companion from viral tik tok and Netflix star Sarah Cooper The book that's missing from offices and Zoom calls around the world: the idiot's guide to conquering the corporate meeting. In it you will learn the essential subtle tricks that pay big dividends by making you look really clever in meetings: · constant nodding · pretend concentration · useless rhetorical questions · how to nail the big presentation by pacing and getting someone else to control your slides Complete with illustrated tips, examples, and scenarios, Sarah Cooper's 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings gives you actionable ways to use words like 'actionable', in order to sound smart.

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Patience is an indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially ‘Clowesian’, and utterly unique in the author’s body of work. This 180-page, full-colour story affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet.The story opens in 2012, when Jack Barlow returns home to find Patience, his pregnant girlfriend, murdered. We meet him next in 2029, still haunted by the murder. He hears of a guy who thinks he’s invented a device that enables time travel. On the next page Jack is in 2006, watching Patience on her dates with boys. Is one of them the killer?

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Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles, beautifully illustrated by Anna Bjerger.I have just finished writing this book for you. What happened that summer nearly three years ago, and its repercussions, are long since over. Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for.Spring follows a father and his newborn daughter through one day in April, from sunrise to sunset. It is a day filled with the small joys of family life, but also its deep struggles. With this striking novel in the Seasons quartet, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects uncompromisingly on life's darkest moments and what can sustain us through them.Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard's famously pensive and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicentre of this singular literary series.

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The notion of identity - personal, religious, ethnic or national - is one that has given rise to heated passions and crimes throughout the history of mankind. What it is that makes each one of us unique and dissimilar to any other individual has been one of the fundamental questions of philosophy from Socrates to Freud.In this important series of reflections, the author, a Lebanese who now lives in France, where he is a well-known writer and commentator, considers how we define ourselves and how identity is understood in the world's different cultures.

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'Suddently, at about one o'clock in the morning, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for Osip', I said'.In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam- friend to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova- wrote a spirited satire denouncing Josef Stalin. It proved to be a sixteen-line death sentence. For his one act of defiance he was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested. He died en route to one of Stalin's labour camps. His wife, Nadezhda (1899-1980) was with him on both occasions when he was arrested, and she loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals, where he wrote his last great poems. Although his mind had been unbalanced by his ordeal in prison, his spirit remained unbroken. Eager to solve 'the Mandelstam problem', the Soviet authorities invited the couple to stay in a rest home near Moscow. Nadezhda saw it as an opportunity for her husband to mend his shattered life, but it was a trap and he was arrested for the last time.'My case will never be closed', Osip once said, and it is mostly through the courageous efforts of Nadezhda that his memory has been preserved. Hope against Hope, her first volume of memoirs, is a vivid and disturbing account of her last four years with her husband, the efforts she made to secure his release, to rescue his manuscripts from oblivion, and later, tragically, to discover the truth about his mysterious death. It is also a harrowing, first-hand account of how Stalin and his henchmen persecuted Russia's literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond.Nadezhda Mandelstam spent most of the Second World War in Tashkent, living with her friend Akhmatova. Only in 1964 was she at last granted permission to return to Moscow. Here she began Hope against Hope, and later Hope Abandoned, the two memoirs of her life.

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'A brilliant work of art that deserves a far wider readership' Ian McEwanFROM THE PUBLISHERS OF STONER AND REVOLUTIONARY ROAD COMES REUNIONReunion is a little-known novel. But it is also a universal story of friendship. It is a book of great power, waiting to be discovered.On a grey afternoon in 1932, a Stuttgart classroom is stirred by the arrival of a newcomer. Middle-class Hans is intrigued by the aristocratic new boy, Konradin, and before long they become best friends. It’s a friendship of the greatest kind, of shared interests and long conversations, of hikes in the German hills and growing up together. But the boys live in a changing Germany. Powerful, delicate and daring, Reunion is a story of the fragility, and strength, of the bonds between friends.'Exquisite' Guardian'I loved Reunion and found it very moving' John BoyneWITH AN AFTERWORD BY RACHEL SEIFFERT

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'I look at all of Carver's work as just one story, for his stories are all occurences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn... In formulating the mosaic of the film Short Cuts, which is based on these nine stories and a poem, 'Lemonade', I've tried to do the same thing- to give the audience one look... But it all began here. I was a reader turning these pages. Trying on these lives' - Robert Altman in his introduction.

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