**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024**A story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends'Gorgeous... Ethereal' GUARDIAN'A book with cosmic reach' FINANCIAL TIMES'A romance worthy of Emily Brontë' WALL STREET JOURNAL'A 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, Thomas finds solace studying the night skies. Could astronomy offer as much wonder as divine or earthly love?Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas.In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world, and the sheer miracle of being alive.
A moving and life-affirming memoir about survival and the power of love to heal, from internationally renowned writer Salman Rushdie'A story of hatred defeated by love' Guardian'Absolutely stunning...the ugliest thing turned into the most beautiful' Nigella Lawson'Part thriller, part love story' The Times'A masterpiece... full of Rushdie's wit, his wisdom, his stoicism, his optimism' The TelegraphOn the morning of 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black - black clothes, black mask - rushed down the aisle towards him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it's you. Here you are.What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the world. Now, for the first time, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.Knife is Rushdie writing with urgency, gravity, and unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature's capacity to make sense of the unthinkable.This an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art - and finding the strength to stand up again.
For years - centuries even - our educational system has centred around the twin pillars of literacy and numeracy. But what if a third - and equally vital - pillar has been ignored? Oracy: learning how to talk, learning through talk and learning about talk. In this persuasive and powerful manifesto, Neil Mercer calls for oracy to have an equal footing alongside literacy and numeracy: students should leave school not only as readers and writers, but as accomplished speakers and listeners. With warmth, clarity and insight, he demonstrates how oracy education has nothing to do with "speaking posh", or eliminating style, slang and regional accents, but instead empowers people to find and express their unique voice.This is the first book to bring the most important step change in educational and social thinking in generations to a wider audience, expertly arguing that the impact of oracy doesn't stop at the school gates: we all need oracy skills for our personal relationships, professional networks and social lives.
The Universe In Your Pocket takes the reader on a journey through space and time using ten of the most game-changing and perspective-shifting maps ever created - each representing a major scientific advance and a startling new way of thinking about the universe.From the celestial maps of the ancients to a cutting-edge visualisation of the shape of the entire universe, we journey through its magnetic fields, along the fluctuating rivers of the solar winds to gravitational oases known as Lagrange points and the surface of Mars, through Black Holes and the enigma of Dark Energy, all the way to the very edges of the cosmos. Each chapter describes the theoretical leaps and feats of exploration that went into the creation of each map, the aspect of the universe it lays bare as well as the mysteries it reveals.Written by an astrophysicist at the forefront of this adventure, The Universe In Your Pocket is a small book about human curiosity on the grandest scale. Like the maps themselves, it offers a way to grasp the unimaginable and apprehend the unknown.
A compelling novel about the requirement to be perfect, without completely losing sight of yourself - by the greatest feminist of the twentieth-century, Simone de Beauvoir.Laurence lives what appears to be an ideal existence. Her life features all the trappings of the 1960s Parisian bourgeoisie: money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy whilst she's at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.But Laurence is a woman whose happiness was relegated long ago by the expectation of perfection. Relentlessly torn by the competing needs of her family, it is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence resists.TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN
Celebrate a vital work of feminism with this limited run special edition featuring the original cover created by Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the original text first published by The Hogarth Press.This book is among the greatest contributions to feminist literature of the past century - a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. A Room of One's Own is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women writers. The sequel, Three Guineas, is a passionate polemic which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' Kate Mosse'Achingly relevant' Natasha Walter, GuardianWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE
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.
The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and American Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the early twentieth century and the fifteenth. Others have been forgotten. We don't remember Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library - and the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare's First Folio, and then disappeared from history.The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes you inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows - from 1492 Fleet Street to 2023 New York. It's a story of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. The Book-Makers is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and it shows why the printed book will continual to flourish.
A new collection from one of our most distinguished poets, painting a portrait in verse of two iconic female figures poised between history and legend, and unravelling the millennia of myth men have woven around them to explore the notion of girlhood itself.
Ecstasy is the major new collection from Alex Dimitrov whose poems such as 'The Years' and 'Someone in Paris, France is Thinking of You' in the New Yorker have gone viral.In Ecstasy, Dimitrov explores the sensation of ecstasy in all its forms: romantic, sexual, drug-induced and spiritual. Beginning in Manhattan and finally taking us across America, London and Paris, Ecstasy is a revelatory exploration of sex, God, parties, New York, drug culture, and old school Americana.Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to exact time and place, much in the way that religious imagery in churches tell of universal and placeless experience. These are poems that steal attention from their reader and hold it, with fierce and hypnotic possession.
A dazzlingly eerie and bewitching novel. As the sun starts slowly disappearing, the residents of a remote town in the desert find themselves undergoing shocking transformations.In Five Poems Lake, a small town surrounded by impenetrable deserts, a young woman tends her family's pharmacy of traditional medicine. Ever since the mysterious death of her father twelve years ago, her last living relative is her older sister Dong Ji, who works at a wellness parlour for those who can afford it - which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many.Five Poems Lake fell on hard times long before the sun began to shrink, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the inhabitants of the town realize that there is no way they can survive. But when the Beacons appear - ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns - the residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, Dong Ji and her sister will uncover a photograph offering a clue to the mystery of the Beacons, that may finally help them learn what happened to their father.Sunbirth honours the unique relationship between sisters, their love for each other and their desire to be free. Richly surreal and anchored by searching curiosity and wisdom, it asks how much we can ever know about the deepest mysteries of the world.PRAISE FOR AN YU'A supremely confident and gifted writer' Katie Kitamura'Beautiful' New Statesman'Profound' Guardian'Seductive' Daily Mail'Spellbinding' New York Times'Steeped in atmosphere' Mail on Sunday'Rich and wild... it gets under your skin' Observer
A story of love, life and death - and one man and his dog. A small ad in the local newspaper turns Cédric Sapin-Defour's world upside down: a litter of Bernese Mountain dogs are looking for homes. The idea of curing his loneliness with a new companion appeals to him, and he immediately falls for the puppy with the blue collar. Waiting for little Ubac is unbearable, and all sorts of preparations are made for the new arrival. Even choosing a name is an adventure.As Ubac grows, he takes - in every sense of the word - an ever larger place in Cédric's life. We witness the beginnings of an understanding between man and dog, as they both crave their long walks in the mountains, hate to be apart, and protect each other. This special connection is then extended to new members of the pack: Cédric's wife, Mathilde, and canines Cordée and Frison.Over the course of thirteen years, we're kept in suspense by an unpredictable affection, a joyous life lived too fast, the aching pain of separation and the happy memories that demonstrate an unconditional love.'Not just a tribute to the love humans feel for their pets but also a means of voicing the deep grief that can be felt after a dog's death, when all that is left is a collar and hairs, and the house seems too big without them.' Guardian His Smell After the Rain has been a surprise bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation in France, championed by indie booksellers, selling more than 300,000 copies.Translated by Adriana Hunter.
What would killing him accomplish? Nothing, mostly.Then again, neither would letting him live.It's Hester's fortieth birthday when she's diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she's built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and sets off. She hasn't made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they make along the way dissuade Hester from her final goal?Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, combining tragic intensity and pitch-black humour, Bad Nature is the incendiary debut novel from Ariel Courage. Part road trip, part revenge tale, part a lament of our ongoing ecological crisis, it's ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.
Samantha's mother tongue is dying out. An urgent need to find out more becomes an expansive investigation into how to keep hold of her culture -- and when to let it go The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. A language that's now on the verge of extinction.The realisation that she won't be able to tell her son he's 'living in the days of the aubergines' or 'chopping onions on my heart' opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on the stories of displacement without passing on the trauma? Will her son ever love mango pickle?In her search for answers Samantha encounters demon bowls, the perils of kohl and the unexpected joys of fusion food. Her journey transports us from the clamour of Noah's Ark to the calm of the British Museum, from the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages to the banks of the River Tigris. As Samantha considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves.This is a life-affirming memoir about resilience and repair, and the healing power of dancing to our ancestors' music, cooking up their recipes and sharing their stories.
'Karen Russell is one in a million' New York TimesFrom the Pulitzer shortlisted author, an astounding novel about magic, memory and land set America's Dust Bowl. Uz, Nebraska, 1930s: Visit The Antidote - a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers. But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty - as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger. To the Antidote's surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way. The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting - theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been - and what still could be. 'A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination' The Times
An intimate and illuminating account of queer lives and migration, homemaking and community in the Gulf, from a brilliant new voice in narrative non-fiction'An eye-opening tour de force' ALEX ESPINOZA'Exhilarating' SUSAN ORLEAN'Tender and insightful' MOHAMED TONSEY'I was captivated and carried' ADAM ZMITHUpon moving to the Gulf States - where penalties for queer acts include deportation, imprisonment, torture and death - Gaar Adams wants to understand why LGBTQ+ migrants might choose to live amid such peril. From the UAE to Bahrain and Oman to Saudi Arabia - a region where four out of five residents are noncitizens - he begins riskily gathering interviews outside the tightly controlled state media, leading with what he thinks is a simple question:Isn't it harder for you to make a life here?But as unforgettable residents share a kaleidoscope of stories - from uproarious Filipino salon workers throwing secret drag parties to a courageous Pakistani farmhand helping his compatriots smuggle themselves across borders - cracks emerge in the framing of his enquiry, revealing disquieting assumptions about the motivations, places and identities of others. As Gaar begins his own clandestine queer relationship, fault lines and deeper questions begin to emerge: about what we perpetuate and refuse to examine, and how we balance opportunity, risk, subversion and assimilation. Weaving revealing memoir with unprecedented reportage, Guest Privileges is a decade-long journey of dislocation not just through the Gulf States - one of the most maligned and misunderstood regions in the world - but into the very nature of home, belonging and how we form a life and community.
Immersed in history and myth, Damian Le Bas explores the meaning we find in sunken ruins around the worldThousands of years ago, an island off the Straits of Gibralter went to war with ancient Athens. The battle was lost, and an earthquake cleaved the land in two. Overnight the island sank beneath the waves - or so legend tells. As a young boy, Damian Le Bas was captivated by the lost city of Atlantis. Even as an adult, he dreams about diving amid its ancient ruins, observing with his own eyes the remnants of an era that still reverberates in our own. After the death of his father, torn between his lifelong desire and the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he comes by chance across a dive shop. He can't help but go in. Under the waves he enters a breathtaking world. As he masters the skills of this dangerous sport, diving with seals in the Faroe Islands, exploring submerged Roman ruins in Naples and mapping the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica, he is entranced anew, by wonders both manmade and natural. Atlantis - from its first account by Plato, to the explorers who searched in vain and the discovery that might finally solve its mystery - takes on a new shape in Damian's quest. At once a spellbinding love letter to diving, The Drowned Places is also a profound examination of the power that myth has over us, and what happens when it crosses over into reality.
Two female con artists must pull off the ultimate heist in this fun, fresh and heart-felt crime novel for fans of How to Kill Your Family and Thelma and Louise. 'They called us swindlers, fraudsters, tricksters, cheats. But make no mistake: we never crossed anyone who didn't deserve it'Emma Oxley and Nellie Yarrow have been inseparable their whole lives. Ever since they reinvented themselves, changing their names and wiping clean their digital footprints, they have made a game of following wherever the next adventure leads and challenging themselves to thefts, street cons, and mind games. Adhering to only two rules-they will only swindle men, and only ones who deserve it-Emma and Nellie are secure in their reputation as the most trustworthy swindlers on the European black market. Until suddenly, they must play to save their own lives. Blackmailed into stealing a priceless bracelet from a high-security exhibit, Emma will reexamine everything she believed to be true. This heist takes her far beyond her comfort zone and she and Nellie will need allies among the glitzy bejeweled gathering in London in order to survive. But will they be able to do the right thing before it's too late?A story of female friendship, found family, and how one woman rediscovers her self-confidence. 'Best friends who are also cunning con artists- WHERE DO I SIGN UP? The Confidence Games is everything you need in a novel: fast-paced, feminist, fun-and as satisfying as pulling off the perfect heist - Colleen Oakley, USA Today bestselling author
'A profoundly moving memoir which gripped me' Mark HaddonDiscover Catherine Coldstream's evocative account of life as a nun in the 1990s, and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery.After the shock of her father's death, twenty-four-year-old Catherine was left grieving and alone. A search for meaning led her to Roman Catholicism and the nuns of Akenside Priory.Here she found a tight-knit community of dedicated women and peace in an ancient way of life. But as she surrenders to her final vows, all is not as it seems behind the Priory's closed doors. Power struggles erupt - with far-reaching consequences for those within.Catherine comes to realise that divine authority is mediated through flawed and all-too-human channels. She is faced with a dilemma: should she protect the serenity she has found, or speak out?A love song to a lost community and an honest account of her twelve years in the Order, Cloistered is also a cautionary tale about what can happen when good people cut themselves off from the wider world.'Immersive, beautifully observed' Katherine May'I admired [Cloistered] enormously' Sarah Perry'An intense and often theatrical read' Financial Times**A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**
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