After a dark sorcerer curses her sister, Zaira must find a way to save her only living relative before they die. In order for that to happen, she has to enter a deadly temple no man has ever survived to reach the Prosperity Stone.As a mere mortal in Thelanor living amongst magic wielders and beasts who blend in with their society, it seems there’s no way she can survive such a mission.That is until she stumbles across Thane Valkor, a mysterious, brooding man of few words. One...
Onizuka Kumako is a fierce woman: tall, beautiful, and not afraid to speak her mind. In Tokyo bars, she seduces customers and commits petty crime, using her connections to the local yakuza to get by. When she meets Shirakawa Fukutaro, a rich widower desperate for companionship and unaware of her shady past, the two hit it off and are soon married. But their newly-wed bliss is suddenly cut short: one rainy July evening, their car veers off course, plunges into the harbour and ...
Aya has gone missing after Kakos’ brutal attack on Dunmeaden. Will is desperately searching for her, joined by Aidon, who’s on the run after revealing his forbidden power. But what no one knows is that Aya has been abducted by the vindictive first saint, Evie, who plans to join Kakos and help destroy the gods who killed her 500 years ago. Aya must decide her true fate. Can she fulfil the prophecy and save the realm from the destruction Evie will inevitably bring in her searc...
It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone. Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten pr...
Our solar system is an extraordinary place where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our own fragile blue planet.In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking humanity to the rest of the solar system. He reveals how the shifting sands of other planets have shaped geopolitics, spurred scientific and cu...
‘Engaging, insightful, panoramic’ Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI & Cofounder of DeepMind Stunning advances in digital technology have introduced a new wave of human-like AI systems. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are already reshaping economies, challenge democracies, and reshaping society in unpredictable ways. And soon, these AI systems could make autonomous decisions on their users' behalf, transforming everything we do. Understanding how they work is cru...
Ancient Rome, AD 50The boy Nero lives. His mother Agrippina has married her way to power, tangling the Emperor Claudius in her skirts.The emperor may have a son and heir of his own, but Agrippina sees no obstacles to her ambition. Rome is a path through a marsh, lit by torches.Those who walk it are always one step from disaster – and the road itself is treacherous, slippery with blood.Claudius may have the world at his feet, but he has Agrippina in his bed....
Nothing like Boeing's 747 had ever been seen before. The biggest, heaviest, most powerful and ambitious airliner ever to take to the air would go on to become an icon, described by Bill Gates as “the world’s first world wide web.” Since that landmark first flight in 1968, the 747 has served Presidents as Air Force One, explored the origins of the universe for NASA, fired airborne lasers, launched space rockets, performed dramatic rescues, bombed forest fires and survived extr...
The first rule of handling PR for a hockey team? Never hook up with a player.That shouldn’t be a problem since the last man on earth I want to give an image makeover to is our goalie. He’s infuriatingly hot, famously grumpy and lives to spar with me after every game. Shining up his rough edges is my path to landing the promotion I need, so I grit my teeth and do my job, no matter how hard he makes it. As I get to know the man behind the broody iceman exterior, he becomes impo...
My new neighbour is a hot, grumpy hockey player who works out shirtless on his porch every morning. But it’s not technically spying if I just happen to be on my patio at the same time…right? Imagine my surprise when the sexy grouch turns out to be my newest interior design client—a pro hockey player redecorating his mom’s house. He’s sworn off distractions in his final season, and I definitely don’t date clients.But between stolen glances, a scorching backyard kiss, and one f...
My plan when I win a date in Vegas with my brother’s hockey star best friend? Poker and go to sleep early. Instead, I wake up with a ring on my finger and the sexy athlete naked in my bed. Asher’s my best friend too so we’ll get this annulled and laugh about this secret for years.Trouble is our wedding pics went viral overnight. And for the sake of our careers we need to look like we meant to tie the knot.We’ll claim we’ve been secretly in love, while staying in separate room...
Just what every bride dreams of—running straight from her cheating fiancé into the arms of a hot hockey star… and then getting hired as his kids’ nanny.Tyler Falcon is protective, flirtatious…and frustratingly responsible. We almost did something reckless when he found me alone in my wedding dress, and I blurted out all the things I’d never truly experienced.Now, the sexy single dad is saving me again with a nannying job I desperately need—and a promise to never mention The N...
A forbidden romance with my brother’s hockey teammate wasn’t on my to-do list when I moved across the country…Neither was getting locked out of a friend’s place wearing next to nothing. Or spending the night with the sexy stranger who rescues me. In the morning, I learn the filthy-mouthed man with the talented hands is not only the hotshot new hockey player on my brother’s team: he’s also – wait for it – my brand new roommate.A Friends-only rule seems like a good idea, but it...
In my defence, I had no idea the tattooed, glasses-wearing, soulful hottie I spent one perfect day—and one unforgettable night—with was a hockey star on my father’s team. And Miles didn’t know I was the coach’s daughter.That’s the point of a “no-work-talk” date.But now? He's as forbidden to me as I am to him.When I land a new gig as the team photographer, we vow to keep it professional. Too much is at stake—I can’t risk my heart or my father’s team.But when I end up living at...
When Neil Dawson's father commits suicide, he is devastated by the loss. But even through his grief, Neil knows something isn't right. Among his father's possessions, he finds a copy of an old novel, The Black Flower.Opening it will take Neil into an investigation full of danger, pain and subterfuge.Detective Hannah Price is also mourning her father, having followed his footsteps into the police force.When she gets assigned to Neil's father's case, it will lead her on a journ...
Harlow is a 29-year-old wizarding school dropout who is blackmailed into returning to Neverthorn Academy to help defend against the dark wizard Nocta. So now she's stuck retaking all the classes she didn't pass the first time and being mentored by the annoyingly sexy Professor Typhon. But Typhon and the other professors are hiding a secret and Harlow needs to figure out what it is and fast. Because Nocta is coming for Neverthorn and Harlow might be the only one who can stop h...
In nineteenth-century France, the first fascist was born. Decades before Mussolini, the Marquis de Mores became the first populist and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he tore France apart with his inflammatory media rhetoric and violent stunts. Who was this man, who both anticipated and propelled the fascist politics that erupted in the twentieth century?Drawing on a wealth of original sources, award-winning historian Se...
Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas. Their mothers had once been teenage waitresses and best friends until their paths diverged. Now Dan’s mother spends her days locked in her room, her dreams squandered and all her hopes pinned on getting her precociously clever son out of town and away to university.Tamma’s mother holds no such ambition for her mouthy,...
'Dear reader, I love you. And I hope you love yourself enough to leave anyone who breaks your heart. Your heart was meant to be worshipped, not turned into a war zone.'A tender exploration of love, loss, heartbreak and healing. I Don’t Love You Anymore is a deeply personal collection of poems and reflections navigating the emotional terrain of modern relationships by award-winning poet and author Rithvik Singh. For anyone who feels deeply, who cares intensely or who has ever ...
‘The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.’This landmark work of reportage exposed how a handful of fast-food giants came to dominate America and remake the world in their image: eroding wages, damaging consumers’ health and wrecking the environment. From talking to workers at meatpacking plants with shocking safety...
The only thing Lyra has understood about her magic is that she must keep it secret.But when she’s forced to reveal her abilities to save her family she is found to possess the rarest magic and is claimed by the crown as their Bone Melder.To be the Bone Melder is a death sentence and Lyra is determined to free herself and take revenge for the persecution of her people. Starting with the silent, brooding guard—Roark Ashwood.The more she plots, the closer she is drawn to Roark a...
Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up ...
The land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of ‘spreading democracy’ – except wreak havoc across the globe and establish a reckless foreign policy that serves the interest of few and has endangered all too many?In this timely book, Noam Chomsky writing with Nathan J. Robinson, vividly traces America’s pursuit of global domination – from Washington’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – offerin...
We used to go to work to learn to do the job. Now learning IS the job.Whatever your career, staying relevant and adaptable is essential to your success. And your unexpected role model for learning at work? A lobster.In Learn Like a Lobster, Sunday Times bestselling authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis explore the unexpected parallels between lobsters and lifelong learning:Lobsters never stop growing - and neither should youLobsters grow through hard moments - use your challen...
As an evolutionary anthropologist conducting ground-breaking research with human populations around the globe, Herman Pontzer has come to see much more clearly how our genes and environments combine to shape our bodies and our health: for better or worse. In this book, he takes us on a tour of the human body and the surprising ways it can change in response to its environment: from the Andean groups who have developed increased lung capacity to the Sama divers who have larger...
Everyone is programmed a bit differently. Source Code tells the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today. Taking us back to his beginnings, Gates describes with candour his childhood in Seattle, the centrality of family – his close relationship with his card-playing grandmother and his demanding but caring parents – his struggles to fit in, his rebelliousness, his first deep friendships and the impact of losing his closest friend.We follow his extraordin...
In the overwhelming chaos across Asia at the end of the Second World War, one relatively minor issue was the future of the Japanese colony of Taiwan, a large island some one hundred miles off the coast of Fujian. Handed to the Kuomintang-ruled Republic of China, in 1949 it suddenly became the focus of global attention as a random cross-section of defeated Nationalists, including President Chiang Kai-shek, fled there from Mao's triumphant Communist forces.The Struggle for Taiw...
The disappearance of the Hohenzollern family from the history of Germany in November 1918 as the Kaiser fled into Dutch exile is one of the most startling, rapid instances of a once all-powerful royal family becoming almost overnight irrelevant and marginal. Except this is not exactly what happened.Stephan Malinowski’s German bestseller is an extraordinary work of recovery. It suited both the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to view the Hohenzollerns with contempt, an...
Sunday evenings wouldn't be the same without Mark Smith on Antiques Roadshow.Seeing beyond military memorabilia to the human stories at their heart has made him a national treasure. Mark’s fascination was fostered by his WWII veteran father, who shared stories of flying special operations for the RAF. But Smith Snr was also haunted by the loss of his best friend, Harry, on a secret mission over the Indian Ocean.From the pages of his father’s unpublished wartime memoir, to a p...
Close, close beneath the land I had once rooted myself in and loved, lay a land filled with violence, injustice and hatredOn 22 April 1962 what remains of Göran Rosenberg’s family embark from his native Sweden to make Israel their new home. Transplanted into a nation born only a few months before him, he is first enchanted by its vitality, imprinted by its ideals. It marks the beginning of a lifetime’s journey across the promised land and into its past, a reckoning with the u...
Why do you immediately click with some people while others inexplicably turn you off? Do people emit vibes – good or bad? Is it possible to read a room? Are bad habits contagious?The hidden science of why people click, and how this powerful phenomenon shapes our lives.In Why We Click, bestselling author Kate Murphy explores the science behind the seemingly magical yet science-backed phenomenon that makes us fall into rhythm and find resonance with one another. Murphy reveals ...
In Ancient Greece, the Gods demand the ultimate tribute – food, treasure, even human sacrifice.There are some mortals who cling to a desperate prophecy –one will come and set them free. But few believe it.Until Danae eats a mysterious golden apple and her life unravels with a dangerous path unfolding before her.Chased from her home Danae will walk the winding roads of heroes. There, she encounters the mighty demi-god, Heracles and they will seek out monsters to battle.But Dan...
Emily Brontë's classic novel with cover artwork from Emerald Fennell’s major new film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi‘Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’Emily Brontë's novel of impossible desires, violence and transgression is a masterpiece of intense, unsettling power. It begins in a snowstorm, when Lock...
The stories in The Vanishing Point are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications. With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaimin...
Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? Why do drug dealers still live with their mums? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist.Freakonomics is the groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and award-winning journalist Stephen J. Dubner, that turns the conventional wisdom of economics on is head. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at r...
'Compulsive and wrenching ... Bhattacharya has written the epic text for the South Asian queer community that the characters in this book long to find' Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark'There is an epic confidence to Bhattacharya’s writing' Samira Ahmed'It’s magnificent: funny, melancholic, sharply true. The force of it crept up on me in a brilliantly subtle way' James Cahill, author of Tiepolo BlueFROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF ONE SMALL VOICE: a bold, electrif...
From its birth in seventh-century Arabia, Islam has been a faith on the move. In Worlds of Islam, James McDougall explores its origins and transformations from Late Antiquity to the digital age.Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to nations where...
In What’s Stopping You?, Timo Armoo reveals the secrets behind his meteoric rise from a council estate on Old Kent Road to collaborating with global giants like Nike and the British Government, culminating in a highly publicized eight-figure exit before turning 30. Sharing his actionable cheatcodes to success, Timo imparts the hard-earned lessons he learned so you don’t have to. He guides readers on how to:Manage their internal scorecardUnderstand why ego is the enemyRecogniz...
In her one-of-a-kind voice, Diane Keaton shares the wisdom she’s accumulated through the years as a mother, daughter, actress, artist, and international style icon. From a mortifying encounter with a makeup artist to an awkward excursion to Victoria’s Secret with her teenage daughter, Keaton reveals candid moments from her life in and out of the public eye. She recounts her experiences with the many men in her life—including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino—shows ...
A vampire hunter goes undercover at a mysterious university only to find herself falling in love with an alluring vampire, in this seductive sapphic fantasyAn elite vampire university in Scotland has opened it's doors to humans for the first time. But there is one pupil very different from the rest. . . Rebecca Charity. Vampire hunter. She is searching for the Book of Blood and Roses, a compendium of ways to kill vampires.But when Rebecca arrives, she finds someone unexpected...
Murder, mystery and a disappearing crime writer all come together in the new Golden Age crime novel from Sunday Times bestseller Ragnar JónassonOne winter evening, bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing.There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective, Helgi, to crack the case before it's leaked to the press.As he interviews the people closest to her – a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge – he realises that Elín’s life wasn’t wh...
A student lies about her father’s death: a fresh take on the campus novel and a story of deceit, denial, grief and reinvention, from an outstanding new voice in literary fictionIf I ever woke up with an ungodly dread — that I could change it all now, turn around, and confess — I ignored it. I had never been good, and there was no point in trying now.On a small liberal arts campus in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year with a lie. Her father died over the summer,...
A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions, a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church, and a séance brings forth the reproachful spirits of the military dead.In Voices of the Fallen Heroes, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror, and the tenderness of first love cedes to obsession, heartbreak and deathly beauty. In one tale, Mishima recounts the true story of the time a deranged fan broke into his home at dawn. Elsewhere, a beautiful y...
Jane Austen returns to solve another devilish mystery, in the compelling follow-up to Miss Austen InvestigatesWelcome to Godmersham Park, 1797.Jane Austen is spending the summer with her estranged brother, Neddy. As heir to wealthy widow Mrs Knight’s fortune, it is imperative that Neddy stays in his benefactor’s good graces.But upon arrival in Kent, Jane realises Neddy is in dire need of her help. For a mysterious young woman currently resides with Mrs Knight – a stranger nam...
High school paranormal romance meets Norse mythology for fans of The Vampire Diaries and Atlas Six from TikTok sensation Emma NoyesAfter Charlie Hudson’s classmate goes missing in the forest she is determined to find out what happened and starts to suspect the mysterious newcomer, Elias Everhart.With his piercing eyes and sharp wit, Charlie knows he has a secret. More than one. What she doesn’t know is that those secrets will lead her to a place she never imagined: a world ma...
A selection of the best classic crime stories featuring the much-loved rogue, Raffles‘Why should I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger, and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course, it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists’Dashing man about town, first-class cricketer and master burglar: Raffles is the ultimate gentleman thief. Here we find the debonair rogue cracking a jeweller’...
Anxiety is a normal and sometimes healthy process, but in a world that feels increasingly unsafe and unpredictable, many of us find ourselves in its grip far more than is comfortable or truly necessary. If you subconsciously believe that worrying or investing in your anxiety will keep you safe, it is easy to get unwittingly hooked on it. To break free of anxiety, you must break free from the underlying beliefs that you cling to and the cyclical thoughts that perpetuate it. Ad...
Augustus is one of the great what-ifs of the 18th century. He could have turned the accident of ruling two major realms into the basis for a powerful European state – a bulwark against the Russians and a block on Prussian expansion. Alas, there was no opportunity Augustus did not waste and no decision he did not get wrong. By the time of his death Poland was fatally damaged and would subsequently disappear as an independent state until the 20th century.Tim Blanning’s wonderfu...
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accoun...
Imagine the world if the Allies had lost the Second World War... Philip K Dick trips the switches of our minds with his vision of the world as it might have been: the African continent virtually wiped out, the Mediterranean drained to make farmland, the United States divided between the Japanese and the Nazis...In the neutral zone that divides the rival superpowers in America lives the author of an underground best-seller. His book - a rallying cry for all those who dream of ...
A FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020'How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document, written with urgency, intelligence and understanding, is her answer' Timothy SnyderIn the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. Yet over the following decades the euph...
Is BER-66 a human or a machine? As he navigates the corridors and locked rooms of a strange bunker, he must solve the mysteries of murderous doppelgangers, a slow-motion city on the verge of destruction, and ultimately, the all-powerful Mechanism itself...Considered to be one of the most important and original Polish science fiction novels of all time but never before translated into English, Adam Wisniewski-Snerg's debut novel is a haunting and mind-bending masterpiece of ph...
The Second World War. Poland. Our narrator has no intention of being a hero. He plans to survive this war, whatever it takes.Meticulously he recounts his experiences: the slow unravelling of national events as well as uncomfortable personal encounters on the street, in the café, at the office, in his love affairs. He is intimate but reserved; conversational but careful; reflective but determined. As he becomes increasingly and chillingly alienated from other people, the reade...
At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the use of science and technology to improve, extend and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends. In Sybille Steinbacher's terse, powerful new book, the reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to any European in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the world war. How Auschwi...
There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.'The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the best of intentions towards the humans' 'brothers in intelligence'. But something on the planet has gone terribly wrong......
'On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms' Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stori...
For a thousand years, the geography of Europe's borderlands had dictated their destiny. East of Poland, west of Russia, the region had always been defined by colliding empires. In 1991, however, when a young Anne Applebaum travelled the region as it emerged from long years of Soviet rule, the identity of individual nations was beginning to take shape.Travelling through Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, from Kalingrad on the Baltic to Odessa on the Black Sea, Applebaum discovere...
After The Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz was exiled for many years from his home country of Poland. In Native Realm, he evokes that homeland and his years away from it; how it nurtured him and how its divisions and destruction shaped a generation. Exploring such diverse memories as a Soviet officer drinking tea with his little finger sticking out, or two Chinese girls passing, laughing, by a New York subway station, Milosz uses these to both 'bring Europe closer to the Euro...
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system. Anne Applebaum's landmark history of this brutal time shows how societies were ruthlessly eviscerated by Communist regimes, how opposition was destroyed and what life was like for ordinary people who had to ...
By almost every measure the fate of the inhabitants of Poland was the most terrible of any group in the Second World War. Following the destruction of its armed forces in the autumn of 1939, the Republic of Poland was partitioned between Nazi and Soviet forces and officially ceased to exist. As the war progressed millions of Poles were killed, with each phase unleashing a further round, from the industrialised genocide of Treblinka to the crushing of the Warsaw Rising. Polish...
In these essays, one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century writes about communism and socialism, the problem of evil, Erasmus and the reform of the Church, reason and truth, and whether God is happy. Accessible and absorbing, the essays in Is God Happy? deal with some of the eternal problems of philosophy and the most vital questions of our age.
Can nature make us happy? How can we know anything? What is justice? Why is there evil in the world? What is the source of truth? Is it possible for God not to exist? Can we really believe what we see? There are questions that have intrigued the world's great thinkers over the ages, which still touch a cord in all of us today. They are questions that can teach us about the way we live, work, relate to each other and see the world. Here, one of the world's greatest living phil...
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 celebrates seven decades of Czeslaw Milosz's exceptional career. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name."
Miss Clare Hartill, teacher at a girls’ boarding school, has a bewitching ability to get her own way, whether it is among the staff or the pupils who’ll do anything to please her. When nineteen-year-old Alwynne Durand is hired, Clare takes this innocent and enthusiastic but undisciplined young teacher under her wing. Soon, the pair are spending every moment together, with Alwynne growing as dependent on Clare as she is drawn to her beguiling wit and charm. But when tragedy t...
The government is a vast, complex system that citizens pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.Michael Lewis invited his favourite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. The stories they found ar...
The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, and to rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD.That Rome lives more vividly in people's imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Now award-winning author and ...
In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of ar...
‘Free Speech!’ is a clarion call all over the world, yet what it means today is more contested than ever. Many cultures regard it as dangerous: in China, India, and across the Islamic world, unorthodox views about politics, sex, and religion are repressed and people are often punished for expressing them. Even in the west, where it is held up as a core value, there is widespread discord and disagreement about what freedom of expression means. Amidst perennial imbalances of po...
I’m not supposed to feel this way…To my family, I’m only useful for one thing: my surname. I’m Briar Lane. My father’s chess piece. A pawn to be traded.But all it took was a dirty secret stuffed in a jacket pocket to unravel my world and send me running to the one place I knew they would never find me: Crimson Ridge.I thought I’d be starting over alone. I never expected to find my father’s adopted brother, the ex-pro bull rider who consumes my space, and now, my every thought...
We can move the dial on painEvery one of us will experience pain, be it back pain, the pain of childbirth, or living in an ageing body. Not a single one of us will escape. But what if everything you thought you knew about pain was wrong?We’ve been told that pain is purely physical, something to do just with bones and body parts. The truth is that pain is constructed by the brain – influenced not just by injuries, but also by emotions, expectations and environment. This means ...
Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age.It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you co...
