Indian Takeaway, by Hardeep Singh Kohli

As a boy, Hardeep Singh Kohli knew where home was: Glasgow. But everyone else always assumed he was Indian. Because surely he couldn’t be British, with his brown skin and turban? Thirty years later, Hardeep sets out on a journey to discover where he is really from. His story is as hilarious as it is moving.

Checkout, by Anna Sam

Can you scan 800 barcodes an hour? Can you smile and say thanks 500 times a day? Do you never need to go to the toilet? Then working at a supermarket checkout could be just the job for you. Anna Sam spent 8 years as a checkout girl. Checkout – A Life on the Tills is a witty look at what it s really like to work in a supermarket: the relentless grind and less-than-perfect working conditions, along with people-watching and encounters with every kind of customer from the bizarre to the downright rude. Sam s story has won her fans all over Europe, turning Checkout – A Life on the Tills into a huge international bestseller, published in 10 languages.

Read an extract of Checkout

The Third Man Factor, by John Geiger

The Third Man Factor tells the revealing story behind an extraordinary idea: that people at the very edge of death, often adventurers or explorers, experience a benevolent presence beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive. If only a handful of people had ever experienced the Third Man, it might be dismissed as an unusual delusion shared by a few overstressed minds. But the amazing thing is this: over the years, the experience has occurred again and again, to mountaineers, divers, polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, aviators, astronauts and 9/11 survivors. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having experienced the close presence of a helper or guardian. The mysterious force has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention. Recent neurological research suggests something else. In The Third Man Factor John Geiger combines history, scientific analysis and great adventure stories to explain this secret to survival, a Third Man who — in the words of legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner — ‘leads you out of the impossible.’

Read John Geiger’s article ‘To The Limit’ on Bookhugger

Admirals, by Andrew Lambert

Why for centuries was the British Navy the most successful organisation in the world? What does it take to lead such a force? Britain achieved unparalleled global pre-eminence through one critical advantage – her naval power. While other nations looked to armies for their security, Britain looked to the sea and for over three hundred years the Royal Navy dominated the ocean.

Andrew Lambert, described as ‘one of the most eminent naval historians of our age’ by Amanda Foreman, celebrates the rare talents of the men who shaped the most successful fighting force in world history. From the Armada to the Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War, he follows the careers of eleven men who created, refined, and reconfigured the art of the admiral. Through their lives and battles, Admirals charts the evolution of naval command over four centuries, while proving that maritime power is a vital and living element of modern Britain.

The Atlantic Ocean, by Andrew O’Hagan

As he grew up, Andrew O’Hagan witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids. This collection of essays tells the story of that period in our cultural and political life.

Through the reported essays that first made O’Hagan’s name, it’s a book filled both with personal story and the power of documentary witness. Opening with a major personal piece examining the journey of Britain and America since the closing of the Thatcher years, it concludes with a piece of reportage telling the story of a British and an American soldier who died in Iraq on the same day in 2006.

Don’t Rhyme for the Sake of Riddlin’, by Russell Myrie

Public Enemy are one of the greatest hip-hop acts of all time. Exploding out of Long Island, New York in the early 1980s, their firebrand lyrical assault, the Bomb Squad’s innovative production techniques, and their unmistakeable live performances gave them a formidable reputation. They terrified the establishment, and have continued to blaze a trail over a twenty year period up until the present day. Today, they are more autonomous and as determined as ever, still touring and finding more ingenious ways of distributing their music. Russell Myrie has had unprecedented access to the group, conducting extensive interviews with Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Terminator X, Professor Griff, the Shocklee brothers, and many others who form part of their legacy. He tells the stories behind the making of seminal albums such as their debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show, the breakthrough It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, and multi-million selling Fear of a Black Planet. He tackles Professor Griff’s alleged anti-semitic remarks which caused massive controversy in the late eighties, the complexities of the group’s relationship with the Nation of Islam, their huge crossover appeal with the alternative audience in the early nineties, and the strange circumstances of Flavor Flav’s re-emergence as a Reality TV Star since the turn of the millennium.

The Fallen, by Dave Simpson

Ever been held hostage in a dressing room with your parents? Ever been thrown off the bus in the middle of a Swedish forest or abandoned at a foreign airport? Ever been asked to play at one of the UK’s biggest music festivals with musicians you’ve just met who are covered in blood, or taken part in a ‘recording session’ in a speeding Transit? If so you’ve probably been in The Fall. Dave Simpson made it his mission to track down everyone who has ever played in Britain’s most berserk, brilliant group. He uncovers a changing Britain, tales of madness and genius, and wreaks havoc on his personal life.

Stalin’s Nemesis, by Bertrand Patenaude

The story of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political murders: the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, and a brilliant writer and orator. He was also a ruthless and authoritarian figure who could have become Lenin’s successor as ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time of the Second World War, he was a powerless exile in Mexico who had been refused entry to every country in Europe.

Living in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky was protected by naive young American acolytes who saw him as the supreme theoretician of world revolution. The hothouse atmosphere of the villa was heightened by emotional turmoil in the relations between Trotsky and Rivera, a volcanically unstable man, and the sexual tension in his relations with the beautiful Frida Kahlo. Trotsky’s wife was restless and jealous. Exotic visitors like the Surrealist poet André Breton came and went. The puritanical Trotsky drove his young followers hard.

Outside, the wolves were gathering. Mexican communists, led by the celebrated painter David Siqueiros, tried to storm the house and kill the man they regarded as the supreme traitor to their cause. The Trotskys’ younger son, apolitical and harmless, had been liquidated in Russia, and their older son had died under mysterious circumstances in a Paris clinic, apparently poisoned by Stalin’s assassins. In Moscow, Stalin himself ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic, at any cost. By the summer of 1940, after Trotsky had moved to new quarters, Stalin’s agents had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around their enemy in far-away Mexico.

Bertrand Patenaude’s book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and the page-turning qualities of a true-crime classic. It gives us a humane and panoramic view of Trotsky’s life and of Russia in revolution, as well as a story of deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

Read an interview with the author

Between the Monster and the Saint, by Richard Holloway

Being human isn’t easy. We might think that consciousness and free will give us control over our lives but our minds are unpredictable places. We are susceptible to forces we don’t understand. We are capable of inflicting immense cruelty on one another and yet we also have the capacity to be tender, to empathise, to feel. In his thought-provoking new book Richard Holloway holds a mirror up to the human condition. By drawing on a colourful and eclectic selection of writings from history, philosophy, science, poetry, theology and literature, Holloway shows us how we can stand up to the seductive power of the monster and draw closer to the fierce challenge of the saint.

The Secret Life of France, by Lucy Wadham

Lucy Wadham’s first work of non-fiction is a candid and funny account of her long and tumultuous love affair with France, her adoptive land. At the age of eighteen Wadham ran away from English boys – who she found emotionally immature and sexually unconfident – and into the arms of a Frenchman. She soon discovered that romantic relationships in France were fraught with their own set of problems: not only do the French put women on a pedestal, but both sexes are required to act out the sort of seduction games that disappeared from English society centuries ago. Wadham, who dressed in Doc Martens and baggy jumpers, struggled to fit in …

Twenty-five years later, having married in a French Catholic church, put her children through the French education system and divorced in a French court of law, Wadham examines the profound and varied differences between the Anglo-Saxon and French worldviews. Using her own experience, as a wife and mother, and later as an investigative journalist for the BBC, Wadham explores French attitudes towards sex, marriage, adultery, money, work, happiness, war and race, and in so doing reveals much about our own priorities and the nature of our identity.

The Secret Life of France challenges our preconceptions and debunks many of the myths – bleak and rosy – on which our view of France rests. Might we have something to learn from this most infuriating and contrary neighbour?

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