John Yorke We all love stories. Many of us love to tell them, and even dream of making a living from it too. But what is a story? Hundreds of books about... | Sebastian Faulks Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire. Across the courtyard in... |
J. G. Ballard; Simon Sellars; Dan... A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J.G. Ballard's greatest interviews. | Edna O'Brien Lets us come face to face with literary life of high drama and contemplation. This title provides encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars and literary titans - all of whom... |
Chinua Achebe Gives us a portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its 'middle ground', interrogating both the author's happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and... | Magnus Mills 'He has no literary precedent, and he also appears to have no imitators. He mines a seam that no one else touches on, every sentence in every book having a... |
Kurt Vonnegut Includes the letter the twenty-two-year old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from the German POW camp; wry dispatches from Vonnegut's years as a struggling writer; letters to... | Jan Karski During the first four years of World War II, Jan Karski worked as a messenger for the underground, risking his life in secret missions. He was captured, tortured, rescued, smuggled... |
Oliver Bullough In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union said it was building heaven on earth and the brave, non-conformist dissidents lived like free men in the midst of this enormous prison... | Howard Jacobson WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE |
Simon Schama Cookery is not necessarily a subject one immediately associates with the author - one of Britain's most distinguished historians and commentators. This title presents a selection of his occasional writings... | Ros King Bringing Shakespeare back to life |
Sean Borodale A poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive, from the collection of a small nucleus on the first day to the capture of a swarm two years... | Jorge Luis Borges; Eliot Weinberger;... Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction... |
Andrew Delahunty; Sheila Dignen An absorbing dictionary that clearly explains the meanings of references and allusions that are likely to be encountered in modern English. Drawing on the resources of the Oxford English Corpus... | Alexander McCall Smith; Lesley Mackie Happy with her husband-to-be and beloved son, Isabel Dalhousie has feelings about parenthood that grow more tender daily. So when Jane, a visiting academic adopted and... |