Can we ever be wholly free? In this book of breathtaking imaginary leaps that conjure dystopias and magical islands, Margaret Atwood holds a mirror up to our own world. The reflection we are faced ...
Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe?In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the con...
Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stan...
"Utterly compelling' GuardianLife...is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it's dead. Life's dead.So begins a l...
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. ...
When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the...
Ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to Karl Ove Knausgaard, have yourself a nordic noel with the very best Scandinavian Christmas talesHave yourself a truly Scandinavian Christmas... O...
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER SAPIENS Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus shows us where we’re going. War is obsolete. You are more likely to commit suicide than be...
From the author of the No. 1 bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the WorldThe First Crusade is one of the best-known and most written-about events in history but in this new boo...
The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a ReturnThe intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a ...
Now a major film directed by Danny Boyle reuniting the cast of Trainspotting. Years on from Trainspotting, Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as...
Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her so...
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel lik...
At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to work ...
Great art has dreadful manners……The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they ...
A must-read... Fascinating' JO BRAND We need to rethink the conversation around mental health - psychologist Lucy Foulkes explores how and why. How do mental health problems...
Mount Kilimanjaro is the tallest peak in Africa, rising 19,340 feet above the surrounding plains. For hundreds of years it has been called the "shining mountain" by local people. They gav...
'It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge'Offred is a Handmaid. She has only one f...