The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo

The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist since Newton – and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth century, who may have suffered from autism.

Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed no emotion. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. He is said to have cried only once, when his friend Einstein died.

Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac’s massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and the people around him. Dirac had a traumatic relationship with his family: his brother committed suicide, and he hated his father to the end of his life. His political allegiances were radical. His best friend was the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza, and even at the height of the purges Dirac holidayed in the Soviet Union.

Yet Farmelo also reveals a man who, while seemingly lacking in emotion, could manage to love and father a family. He catches Dirac’s absolute belief in the beauty of mathematics with warmth and sympathy. And Farmelo shows that Dirac’s eccentricities may well have stemmed from undiagnosed autism.

The Strangest Man is a moving human story, and a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.

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.

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the last of a breed of great British explorers who ventured into ‘blank spots’ on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and unwavering sense of purpose. In 1925, one of the few remaining blank spots in the world was in the Amazon. Fawcett believed the impenetrable jungle held a secret to a large, complex civilization like El Dorado, which he christened the ‘City of Z’. When he and his son set out to find it, hoping to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history, they warned that none should follow them in the event that they did not return. They vanished without a trace. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers — shocked that a man many deemed invincible could disappear in a land he knew better than anyone, and drawn by the centuries-old myth of El Dorado — searched for the expedition and the city. Many died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows. Others simply vanished.

In The Lost City of Z, David Grann ventures into the hazardous wild world of the Amazon to retrace the footsteps of the great Colonel Fawcett and his followers, in a bracing attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries. It is an irresistibly readable adventure story, a subtle examination of the strange and often violent encounters between Europeans and Amazonian tribes and a tale of lethal obsession.

A Life Like Other People’s, by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People’s is the core of his collection, Untold Stories. It is a poignant memoir of his parents’ marriage and his own childhood, recalling Christmases with Grandma Peel and the lives, loves and deaths of his unforgettable aunties, Kathleen and Myra. With the sudden descent of his mother into depression and, later, dementia, a long-held family secret is uncovered in this heart-rending and at times irresistibly funny work of autobiography by one of the best-loved English writers.

Clisson and Eugenie, by Napoleon Bonaparte

Their eyes met… and they soon knew that their hearts were made for each other. Triumphant on the field of battle, Clisson turns his back on worldly success. He falls in love and marries and Eugénie, but how long will their love survive? The tragic story of Clisson and Eugénie reveals one of history s great leaders to also be an accomplished writer of fiction. Written in an eloquently Romantic style true to its period, the story offers the reader a fascinating insight into how the young Napoleon viewed love, women and military life.

How We Live and Why We Die, by Lewis Wolpert

How do we move, think and remember? Why do we get ill, age and die? Distinguished biologist Lewis Wolpert explains how cells provide the answers to the fundamental questions about our lives.

Cells are the basis of all life in the universe. Our bodies are made up of billions of them: an incredibly complex society that governs everything, from movement to memory and imagination. When we age, it is because our cells slow down; when we get ill, it is because our cells mutate or stop working.

In How We Live and Why We Die Wolpert provides a clear explanation of the science that underpins our lives. He explains how our bodies function and how we derive from a single cell – the egg. He examines the science behind the topics that are much discussed but rarely understood – stem-cell research, cloning, DNA – and explains how all life evolved from just one cell.

Lively and passionate, How We Live and Why We Die is an accessible guide to understanding the human body and, essentially, life itself.

Little Daughter, by Zoya Phan with Damien Lewis

Zoya Phan was born in the remote jungles of Burma, to the Karen ethnic group. For decades the Karen have been under attack from Burma’s military junta; Zoya’s mother was a guerrilla soldier, her father a freedom activist. She lived in a bamboo hut on stilts by the Moei River; she hunted for edible fungi with her much-loved adopted brother, Say Say. Many Karen are Christian or Buddhist, but Zoya’s parents were animist, venerating the spirits of forest, river and moon. Her early years were blissfully removed from the war. At the age of fourteen, however, Zoya’s childhood was shattered as the Burmese army attacked. With their house in flames, Zoya and her family fled. So began two terrible years of running from guns, as Zoya joined thousands of refugees hiding in the jungle. Her family scattered, Zoya sought sanctuary across the border in a Thai refugee camp. Conditions in the camp were difficult, and Zoya now had to care for her ailing mother. Zoya, a gifted pupil, was eventually able to escape, first to Bangkok and then, with her enemies still pursuing her, in 2004 she fled to the UK and claimed asylum. The following year, at a ‘free Burma’ march, she was plucked from the crowd to appear on the BBC, the first of countless interviews with the world’s media. She became the face of a nation enslaved, rubbing shoulders with presidents and film stars. By turns uplifting, tragic and entirely gripping, this is the extraordinary true story of the girl from the jungle who became an icon of a suffering land.

The Last Englishman, by Roland Chambers

Arthur Ransome was, from 1930 to the early 1960s, what J. K. Rowling is today: the much-loved author of a series of children’s books which shaped the imagination of a generation. Swallows and Amazons and its sequels described a cozy, nostalgic Utopia, in which Ransome’s heroes had blameless fun in the Lake District, sailing boats, pitching camp and playing at pirates. Collectively, they established his reputation as a champion of old-world values in the final days of the British empire.

Long before Swallows and Amazons was published, however, there had been another Arthur Ransome, famous for different reasons. Between 1917 and 1924, as Russian correspondent for the Daily News and Manchester Guardian, he was an uncritical apologist for the Bolshevik regime, with unique access to the revolutionary leaders. As the Red Army engaged with an Allied invasion of Russia, Ransome was conducting a love affair with Evgenia Shelepina, private secretary to Leon Trotsky, then Soviet Commissar for War. As the intimate friend of Karl Radek, the Bolshevik Chief of Propaganda, he denied the Red Terror and compared Lenin to Oliver Cromwell. No English journalist was considered more controversial, or more damaging to British security.

At Whitehall, he was accused of being the paid agent of a hostile power and only narrowly escaped prosecution for treason.

Yet as Ransome’s passion for Evgenia deepened, he was offering his services to the British government, both as unofficial diplomat and spy. Recruited to MI6 in 1918, he submitted reports to the British head of station in eastern Europe, while simultaneously advising the Bolshevik secret police on British foreign policy. Revealing a dizzying ability to adapt himself to the nearest power, he insisted, nevertheless, that he had retained absolute objectivity. When Sir Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch, asked him what his politics were, Ransome answered, ‘Fishing’.

How did this bluff, in many ways conservative Englishman, associated by millions with nothing more threatening than messing about in boats, become such an ardent defender of the Bolshevik experiment? Was Ransome a double agent or, as he liked to insist, an innocent go-between? Roland Chambers, in a masterly narrative, explores Ransome’s career as a struggling writer in Edwardian London, his disastrous first marriage and flight to Russia, and his remarkable high-wire act as British agent and ‘mouthpiece of the Bolsheviki’. Later, as author of Swallows and Amazons, Ransome’s triumph was to erase the entire episode from the public consciousness, just as he erased all uncomfortable episodes, including his relationship with his only daughter. Amongst his many devoted readers, he is still best remembered as ‘Captain Flint’, a batchelor pirate retired to a houseboat in the north country. Few of his former friends within the Soviet Union showed a greater flair for historical revision.

This is an absorbing and often chilling examination of an English icon and his world.

Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker

At a time when the West seems ever more eager to call on military aggression as a means of securing international peace, Nicholson Baker’s provocative narrative exploring the political misjudgements and personal biases that gave birth to the terrifying consequences of the Second World War could not be more pertinent.

With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, Human Smoke re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to war, challenging some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen. Baker reminds us, for instance, not to forget that it was thanks in great part to Churchill and England that Mussolini ascended to power so quickly, and that, before leading the United States against Nazi Germany, a young FDR spent much of his time lobbying for a restriction in the number of Jews admitted to Harvard. Conversely, Human Smoke also reminds us of those who had the foresight to anticipate the coming bloodshed and the courage to oppose the tide of history, as Gandhi demonstrated when he made his symbolic walk to the ocean.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his gifted writing and exquisitely observant eye, Baker offers a combination of sweeping narrative history and a series of finely delineated vignettes of the individuals and moments that shaped history.

William Golding, by John Carey

The first biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding by celebrated writer and critic, John Carey.

In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, writing books in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays. His work had been rejected by every publisher he sent it to – until an editor at Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile. This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in its millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition.

Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding’s intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a ‘monster’, a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.

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