Category Archives: Travel Guides
Engel`s England: Thirty-Nine Counties, One Capital and One Man
England, says Matthew Engel, is the most complicated place in the world. And, as he travels through each of the historic English counties, he discovers that`s just the start of it. Every county is fascinating, the product of a millennium or more of history: still a unique slice of a nation that has not quite
Tomorrow I`ll Be Twenty
From the winner of the Grand Prix de la Litterature – Mabanckou`s trademark humour and surrealism combine in an autobiographical novel. Michel is ten years old, living in Pointe Noire, Congo, in the 1970s. His mother sells peanuts at the market, his father works at the Victory Palace Hotel, and brings home books left behind
We Need To Talk About Kevin
This is the Orange prize winning, million copy bestseller: now a “Serpent`s Tail” classic. Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who tried to befriend him. Now, two years later, it
The Book of Disquiet
Sitting at his desk, Bernardo Soares imagined himself free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of his boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employees, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. But if he left them all tomorrow and discarded the suit of clothes he wears, what else would he
Black Water Rising
On a dark night, out on the Houston bayou to celebrate his wife`s birthday, Jay Porter hears a scream. Saving a distressed woman from drowning, he opens a Pandora`s Box. Not the lawyer he set out to be, Jay long ago made peace with his radical youth, tucked away his darkest sins and resolved to
Beer in the Snooker Club
Behind the bar at Jameel`s in Cairo hang two mugs engraved with the names of Ram and Font. During their years together in London, they drank many a pint of Bass from these mugs. But there is no Bass in Nasser`s Egypt, so Ram and Font have to make do with a heady mixture of
Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital
Acclaimed writer Lloyd Bradley explores the influence of immigrant cultures on the capital`s music scene. For as long as people have been migrating to London, so has their music. An essential link to home, music also has the power to shape communities in surprising ways. Black music has been part of London`s landscape since the
Black Bazaar
This is a riotous account of a Black dandy trying to cut it in Paris today. Buttocks Man is down on his uppers. His girlfriend, Original Colour, has cleared out of their Paris studio and run off to the Congo with a vertically challenged drummer known as The Mongrel. She`s taken their daughter with her.
Washington Black
FROM THE MAN BOOKER AND ORANGE PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF HALF BLOOD BLUES`A masterpiece` Attica Locke`High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists mark this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars … broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel` Kirkus starred review When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black
Washington Black: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018
Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize 2018When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black – an eleven-year-old field slave – finds himself selected as personal servant to one of them. The eccentric Christopher `Titch` Wilde is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor and abolitionist, whose single-minded pursuit of the
1913: The Year before the Storm
A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate vision of a world that is about to change forever. The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Kafka falls in love; Louis Armstrong learns to play
Man In The Picture
This is the chilling tale of a painting so terrifying, its secrets will haunt those who see it…It is a ghost story by the author of “The Woman in Black”. A mysterious depiction of masked revellers at the Venice carnival hangs in the college rooms of Oliver`s old professor in Cambridge. On this cold winter`s
We are All Completely Beside Ourselves
This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2014. Rosemary`s young, just started college, and she`s decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we`re not going to tell you too much either: you`ll have to find out for yourselves, round about page 77, what it is that makes
Ru
A book of rare beauty: “Ru” is a lullaby of Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow – of tears, blood, and money. Kim Thuy`s “Ru” is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of
The Lights of Pointe-Noire
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he returns home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo`s south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed
A Natural History of the Hedgerow: And Ditches, Dykes and Dry Stone Walls
It is difficult to think of a more quintessential symbol of the British countryside than the British Hedgerow, bursting with blackberries, hazelnuts and sloes, and home to oak and ash, field mice and butterflies. But as much as we might dream about foraging for mushrooms or collecting wayside nettles for soup, most of us are
Saint Mazie
From the bestselling author of The Middlesteins comes comes this unique novel about a forgotten heroine of the 1930s. Meet Mazie Phillips: big-hearted and feisty, she runs The Venice, the famed movie theatre in the rundown Bowery district of New York City. She spends her days taking tickets, chatting with drunks and eccentrics, and chasing
A Week at the Airport – A Heathrow Diary
Alain de Botton’s ‘A Week at the Airport’ is the result of an invitation made to him in the summer of 2009, by the owners of London’s Heathrow, to be their first ever writer-in-residence. Based on the conversations he had during his residence he has produced this meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome matters. Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories – from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia – still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individual still influence our
The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars (1000 BC – 264 BC)
In the late Iron Age, Rome was a small collection of huts arranged over a few hills. By the third century BC, it had become a large and powerful city, with monumental temples, public buildings and grand houses. It had conquered the whole of Italy and was poised to establish an empire. But how did
