Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth and Power
A TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020`Deirdre Mask`s book was just up my Strasse, alley, avenue and boulevard.` -Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type`Fascinating … intelligent but thoroughly accessible … full of surprises` – Sunday TimesWhen most people think about street addresses they think of parcel deliveries, or visitors finding their way. But who
The Housekeeper`s Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House
Working as a housekeeper was one of the most prestigious jobs a nineteenth and early twentieth century woman could want – and also one of the toughest. A far cry from the Downton Abbey fiction, the real life Mrs Hughes was up against capricious mistresses, low pay, no job security and gruelling physical labour. Until
The Russian Revolution: A New History
At the turn of the century, the Russian economy was growing by about 10% annually and its population had reached 150 million. By 1920 the country was in desperate financial straits and more than 20 million Russians had died. And by 1950, a third of the globe had embraced communism. The triumph of Communism sets
The Word for Woman is Wilderness
Funny, frank and tender, The Word for Woman is Wilderness is an adventure novel with a difference.Erin is 19. She`s never really left England, but she has watched Bear Grylls and wonders why it`s always men who get to go on all the cool wilderness adventures. So Erin sets off on a voyage into the
Murder On Christmas Eve: Classic Mysteries for the Festive Season
Christmas Eve. While the world sleeps, snow falls gently from the sky, presents await under the tree … and murder is afoot. In this collection of ten classic murder mysteries from the best crime writers in history, death and mayhem take many festive forms, from the inventive to the unexpected.From a Santa Claus with a
Summer at Mount Hope
Phoeba Crupp lives with her squabbling parents and younger sister Lilith on a small farm in rural Australia. Her father is an eccentric ex-accountant who moved his family from the city in order to establish a vineyard, a decision her mother bitterly – and loudly – resents. But Phoeba has loved it here since they
Let Us Be True: From the Betty Trask Prize-winning author of Glass
Paris, 1958.Ralf is alone, filling his days with glasses of red wine at Jacques` bar, waiting for life to happen to him. Then, one night, Elsa – bold, enigmatic, unpredictable – whirls into Jacques` bar and into Ralf`s world, knocking him out of his cautious routine and into a life full of spontaneity and excitement.But
The Visiting Privilege
`How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning more than forty years? Especially when I really want to just exclaim, “Oh, Oh, OH!” in a state of steadily mounting rapture` Geoff Dyer, ObserverWilliams` uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers and writers for decades. Here, for the first
Bluebird, Bluebird
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules – a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply conflicted about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas
African Psycho
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He`s planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer
The Durrells of Corfu
The Durrell family are immortalised in Gerald Durrell`s My Family and Other Animals and its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of the real life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu in the first place – and what happened to them after they left?The real story of the Durrells is as surprising and fascinating
Water Ways: A Thousand Miles Along Britain`s Canals
For a hundred and fifty years, between the plod of packhorse trains and the arrival of the railways, canals were the high-tech water machine driving the industrial revolution. Amazing feats of engineering, they carried the rural into the city and the urban into the countryside, and changed the lives of everyone. And then, just when
The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba
Few historical figures are as well-known as Napoleon Bonaparte, and yet the Emperor`s ten-month exile on the small island of Elba is virtually unexplored. Now, for the first time, we have a window into this critical moment when the most powerful man on earth turns defeat into one final challenge.A close character study mixed with
The Last Wolf & Herman
In The Last Wolf, a philosophy professor is mistakenly hired to write the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. His miserable experience is narrated in a single, rolling sentence to a patently bored bartender in a dreary Berlin bar. In Herman, a master trapper is asked to clear
The Diary of a Bookseller
Love, Nina meets Black Books: a wry and hilarious account of life in Scotland`s biggest second-hand bookshop and the band of eccentrics and book-obsessives who work there`Utterly compelling and Bythell has a Bennett-like eye for the amusing eccentricities of ordinary people … I urge you to buy this book and please, even at the risk
Keeping On Keeping On
`I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will it make a jot of difference. I shall still be thought to be kindly, cosy and essentially harmless. I am in the pigeon-hole marked `no threat` and did I stab
The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition
The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa`s life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a
Black Moses
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017It`s 1970, and in the People`s Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, the institution`s
Like a Fading Shadow
On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered by a man named James Earl Ray. Before Ray`s capture and sentencing to 99 years` imprisonment, he evaded the FBI for two months as he crossed the globe under various aliases. At the heart of his story is Lisbon, where he spent ten days attempting to
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
“Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.” Naomi Klein, Author of `No Logo`, `The Shock Doctrine`, `This Changes Everything` and `No is Not Enough`The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful
