Stranger to History

As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity. Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam’s once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father’s home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish’s own divided family over the past fifty years.

Learning to Live, by Luc Ferry

From the ordered universe of the ancient Greeks to the shadows of Nietzsche’s nineteenth century, Learning to Live shakes the dust from the history of philosophy and takes us on a fascinating journey through more than two millennia of humanity’s search for understanding — of the world around us and of each other. Both a sparkling and accessible history of Western thought, and a courageous dissection of how religion and philosophy have converged and clashed through the ages, Luc Ferry’s blueprint for a new humanism challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves, and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?

• Read an extract

Ship of Fools, by Fintan O’Toole

Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world’s largest exporter of software and manufactured the world’s supply of Viagra.

The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous – progressive social change, solidarity, major State investment in education, and the critical role of the EU – were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger.

This is, as Fintan O’Toole writes, ‘a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess’. It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history.

Franklin, by Andrew Lambert

From ‘the outstanding naval historian of his generation’ (David Cannadine), a gripping story of the Arctic, propelled by the need to recover the truth about one man’s fatal mission.

In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led a large, well equipped expedition to complete the conquest of the Canadian Arctic: to find the fabled North West Passage connecting the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Yet Franklin, his ships and men were fated never to return. The cause of their loss remains a mystery.

Shocked by the loss of all 129 officers and men, and sickened by reports of cannibalism, the Victorians re-created Franklin as a brave Christian hero who laid down his life, and those of his men. Later generations have been more sceptical about Franklin and his supposed selfless devotion to duty. But does either view really explain why this outstanding scientific navigator found his ships trapped in pack ice seventy miles from the magnetic north?

Andrew Lambert re-examines the life and the evidence with his customary brilliance and authority. He discovers a new Franklin: a character far more complex, and more truly heroic, than previous histories have allowed.

• Read an interview with the author, Andrew Lambert here on Bookhugger

The Blue Moment, by Richard Williams

There have been many books about Miles Davis, one of the twentieth century’s most protean musical figures, but The Blue Moment is unlike any other work on the subject.

Richard Williams takes as his starting point the making of Kind of Blue, Davis’s most celebrated album, and shows how movements in art, philosophy and music fed into this meditative, melancholy masterpiece, first released in 1959. The haunting palettes of Picasso, Matisse and Yves Klein influenced the mood of a culture that valued the colour blue so highly; and the blues, mediated by jazz and other kinds of music, had become the sound that signified ‘coolness’.

Williams tells the story of album’s creation in miraculously few hours in a converted Manhattan church and elegantly sketches the roles of the other five musicians who played on the recording. This is then the foundation for an ambitious exploration of Kind of Blue’s influence on the whole course of late-twentieth-century music, which moves in surprising directions through the labyrinth of sound.

Davis’s album was profoundly influential on his bandmate John Coltrane, and they both haunted the avant-garde composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Lamonte Young, who in turn were responsible for transmitting that influence into rock music, touching artists as diverse as John Cale and the Velvet Underground, The Who, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and early Roxy Music, and Talking Heads and U2. The Allman Brothers reworked passages from Kind of Blue in their long improvised jams; and the Grateful Dead’s extended concert performances owed much to that strain of jazz. James Brown’s most copied riff, from ‘Cold Sweat’, was a reworking of ‘So What’.

Richard Williams traces the echoes of Davis’s creation in the enduring success of the German ECM label, whose reverberant, brooding sound has defined the work of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Jan Garbarek, and in the static, minimalist music of bands such as Supersilent and The Necks.

This is a beautifully crafted journey through some of the most important music of our time.

• Read a Q&A with author Richard Williams

Why Mahler?, by Norman Lebrecht

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions. Many believe it has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. Long, loud and seldom easy, his symphonies are used to accompany acts of mourning and Hollywood melodramas. Sometimes dismissed as death-obsessed, Mahler is more alive in the twenty-first century than ever before.

Why Mahler? Why does a Jewish musician from a land without a name capture the yearnings and anxieties of post-industrial society? Is it the music, is it the man, or is it the affinity we feel with his productive peak – a decade when Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Joyce and Mahler reconfigured the ways we understand life on earth?

In this highly original account of Mahler’s life and work, Norman Lebrecht – renowned writer, critic and cultural commentator – explores the Mahler Effect, a phenomenon that reaches deep into unsuspecting lives, altering the self-perceptions of world leaders, finance chiefs and working musicians. Part biography, part travelogue, part hitchhiker’s guide, Why Mahler? is a multilayered exploration of the role that his music plays as the soundtrack to our lives.

• More information on Mahler can be found on Faber’s blog, The Thought Fox

When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts

When a Billion Chinese Jump tells the story of China’s – and the world’s – greatest crisis. With filthy water, choking emissions and an unsustainable appetite for resources, China’s development has taken our planet to the environmental edge. Now it faces a stark choice that will affect us all: accept catastrophe or make radical change.

To explore the response, award-winning correspondent Jonathan Watts travels from mountain paradise to blasted desert, through eco-cities, coal mines and industrial wastelands, examining the challenges facing those at the top of society and the problems and hopes of those below.

His travelogue will interest anyone concerned with economic development, energy security, globalisation or climate activism. At heart, it is not a call for panic, but an expression of hope that – despite political constraints – individual choices can make a difference.

Consistently attentive to human detail, Watts vividly portrays the diversity of a country too often viewed as a faceless machine. No reader of his book – no consumer in the world – can be unaffected by what he presents.

Thank You For the Days, by Mark Radcliffe

Approaching 50, Mark Radcliffe decided to write about his life, most importantly, his time in music. But crucially, he only wanted to write about the most interesting days and not the dull ones in between. With predictable good taste, Mark takes his title from the Kinks’ song and has written an entertaining, funny book worthy of such a pedigree.

Mark’s family life is covered by ‘The Day My Mother Hit Me With a Golf Club’ , his school life by ‘The Day I Ruined a Perfectly Good Suit’ and ‘The Day I Got My First Guitar’; through his epiphany of the power of music in ‘The Day I Met the Band Who Changed My Life’ and his star struck meeting with childhood hero, David Bowie. Many other stars are covered too, for example in ‘The Day I Went to Kate Bush’s House for Cheese Flan’, and ‘The Day Mick Jagger Was Taller Than Me’. He’s very funny when recounting his days working at the BBC in ’80s and ’90s (how, when bored, he and colleagues invented a fictional department), winning Stars in Their Eyes as Shane MacGowan and so on. Yet, among the laughter are more sober days, such as the one when he learned John Peel had died.

A cracking read and a potted history of both one man’s life and his love affair with music, Thank You For The Days is a uniquely entertaining memoir that will appeal not just to music fans but to connoisseurs of British popular culture.

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann

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.

Daughter of Dust, by Wendy Wallace

Leila understands from early on that she is not part of normal Sudanese society. Her parents are unable to care for her, so she is banished to a strict orphanage, along with children born outside marriage. At school, Leila and her best friend Amal are called ‘daughters of sin’. Her pretty sister, Zulima, is married off to a much older man, while the nannies say an abandoned girl is lucky to get an offer of marriage at all. At the age of ten, both Leila and Amal endure female circumcision. Suffering appalling prejudice, and thought to bring the ‘evil eye’, Leila remains outgoing and brave and manages to get an education. She goes on to marry, have four children, and divorce, yet even grown up she continues to know the stigma of being abandoned.

Undaunted, Leila founds her own charity to help those shunned as outcasts and she continues to work tirelessly to dispel prejudice. This beautifully written, graceful memoir perfectly evokes the heat and colour of the North African desert and tells of the true friendships that are born out of adversity.

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, by Tony Schwartz

Through his years of intensive work consulting to companies including Procter & Gamble, Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, Ford and Ernst & Young, with his firm The Energy Project, Schwartz has developed a powerful program for changing the way we are working that greatly boosts our engagement and our satisfication with our work and increases our performance. In this book he marshalls a wide range of powerful evidence from business research and psychology that shows that the current model of work — in which people are treated essentially as machines that should be able to perform at top speed for extraordinarily long hours, be able to multi-task, be always accessible and online, withstand often harsh and emotionally punishing treatment, and be primarily driven by the need to make profits – is not only not optimal, it is specfically counter-productive because it saps us of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy.

In order for us to perform at our best, we must make a set of key changes in our work lives — and in order to develop the full potential of their work force, our managers and companies must institute changes that will provide us with the regular physical renewal, emotional reward, mental focus and stimulation; and sense of purpose and significance that we need.

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Summoned to the trailer of a Hollywood star who’s receiving death threats, former stuntman-turned-private investigator, David Spandau, assumes this will be another routine case. It turns out to be anything but. A-list actor Bobby Dye has become entangled with B-list gangster Richie Stella, who just wants to make a movie – and you can’t make a movie without a star. But as Richie and his cohorts are about to find out, the movie business makes the cocaine and heroin racket look like child’s play. Meanwhile, Spandau finds himself drawn ever deeper into the crazy world of Bobby Dye, one of the handsomest, most idolized men on the planet – and also one of the loneliest. All Bobby wants is someone to talk honestly to him – but can he really cope with the blunt and bitter truth?

• Read an extract at Bookdagger

The Executioner, by Chris Carter

Inside a Los Angeles church, on the altar steps, lies the blood-soaked, decapitated body of a priest. Carefully positioned, legs stretched out, arms crossed over the chest, the most horrifying thing of all is that the priest’s head has been replaced by that of a dog. Later, the forensic team discover that, on the victim’s chest, the figure 3 has been scrawled in blood.

At first, Detective Robert Hunter believes that this is a ritualistic killing. But as more bodies surface, he is forced to reassess. All the victims died in the way they feared the most. Their worst nightmares have literally come true. But how could the killer have known? And what links these apparently random victims.

Hunter finds himself on the trail of an elusive and sadistic killer, somone who apparently has the power to read his victims’ minds. Someone who can sense what scares his victims the most. Someone who will stop at nothing to achieve his twisted aim.

• Read more about author Chris Carter’s writing at Bookdagger

The Sacred Stone, by The Medieval Murderers

1067. In the desolate wastes of Greenland, a group of hunters discover a strangely-shaped meteor which has fallen from the sky. At first, the mysterious ‘sky-stone’ seems to bring them good luck, healing a lame boy and guaranteeing a good catch of furs. But violence and murder soon follow in fortune’s wake, as the villagers fight and struggle amongst themselves to get control of the precious stone.

Over the next six hundred years, the Sky-Stone falls into the hands of crusading knights, the wicked Sheriff of Devon, a group of radical young kabalists, the dying King Henry III and a band of travelling players. Each time, the stone brings treachery, discord and violent death to those who seek to possess it.

The Oath, by  Michael Jecks

1326. In an England riven with conflict, knight and peasant alike find their lives turned upside down by the warring factions of Edward II, with his hated favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and Edward’s estranged queen Isabella and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Yet even in such times the brutal slaughter of an entire family, right down to a babe in arms, still has the power to shock. Three further murders follow, and bailiff Simon Puttock is drawn into a web of intrigue, vengeance, power and greed as Roger Mortimer charges him to investigate the killings.

Michael Jecks brilliantly evokes the turmoil of fourteenth-century England, as his well-loved characters Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin de Furnshill strive to maintain the principles of loyalty and truth.

Two for Sorrow, by Nicola Upson

London, 1903. Two women are hanged in Holloway Prison for killing babies. More than thirty years later, their crimes resurface with shocking consequences… When Josephine Tey sets out to write a novel about Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, the notorious Finchley baby farmers, she can have little idea that the research for her book will be needed to help solve a modern-day killing – the sadistic murder of a young seamstress, found dead in the Motley sisters’ studio, amid preparations for a star-studded charity gala. The girl’s death seems to be the result of a long-standing domestic feud, but Josephine’s friend, Inspector Archie Penrose, is unconvinced; and when a second young woman is involved in an horrific accident soon afterwards, the search begins for a vicious killer who will stop at nothing to keep the past where it belongs. Moving between the decadence and glamour of a private women’s club, the bleak surroundings of Holloway prison, and the deprivation of London’s slums, Two for Sorrow is a dark and unsettling exploration of the way in which the crimes of the past destroy those left behind – long after justice is done.

Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James

So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?

Following a horrific tragedy that leaves her once-perfect family devastated, Katherine Patterson moves to a new city, starts at a new school, and begins a new life of quiet anonymity.

But when Katherine meets the gregarious and beautiful Alice Parrie her plan to live a solitary life becomes difficult. Katherine is unable to resist the flattering attention that Alice pays her and is so charmed by her contagious enthusiasm that the two girls soon become firm friends.

But being friends with Alice is complicated – and as Katherine gets to know her better she discovers that although Alice can be charming, she can also be selfish. Sometimes, even, Alice is cruel.

Eye of the Red Tsar, by Sam Eastland

It is the time of the Great Terror.

Inspector Pekkala – known as the Emerald Eye – was once the most famous detective in all Russia, the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted.

Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission – to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar’s treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with the woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure – death.

Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction.

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The Nobodies Album

Octavia Frost is no stranger to life’s twists of fate.

She has mourned a husband and a daughter. She has watched her son become a rock star, following his progress through gossip magazines: they have not spoken in four years.

And in her own, less spectacular way, she has built a name for herself as a writer.

But the news she receives today will make her rethink everything. And though the situation seems bleak, it could give her a chance to redeem the mistakes she’s made in the past. She may still have time to bring her own story to a different ending.

True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies

This is the story of a woman brave enough to risk it all. She understands better than most the things that we keep hidden. She comes to learn how the heart is usually stronger than the head. And she cannot help, despite her better instincts, being drawn into a sexually charged and highly volatile relationship. True Things About Me is a brilliantly written novel of survival that reveals simultaneously the strength and vulnerability of one ordinary woman.

With great honesty and unexpected humour, Deborah Kay Davies takes us deep into the mind of her unforgettable protagonist, and in doing so asks us to consider seriously what we might sacrifice for our desires.

The Radleys, by Matt Haig

Meet the Radleys. Peter, Helen and their teenage children, Clara and Rowan, live in an English town. They are an everyday family, averagely dysfunctional, averagely content. But as their children have yet to find out, the Radleys have a devastating secret. From one of Britain’s finest young novelists comes a razor-sharp unpicking of adulthood and family life. In this moving, thrilling and extraordinary portrait of one unusual family, The Radleys asks what we grow into when we grow up, and explores what we gain – and lose – when we deny our appetites.

The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber

Step into Victorian London and meet our heroine, Sugar – a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can – and the host of unforgettable characters that make up her world.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer

Jeff Atman, a journalist, is in Venice to cover the opening of the Biennale. He’s expecting to see a load of art, go to a lot of parties and drink too many bellinis. He’s not expecting to meet the spellbinding Laura, who will completely transform his few days in the city. So begins a story of erotic love and spiritual learning that will reach its conclusion amidst the ghats of Varanasi.

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Serena, by Ron Rash

George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the wilds of the North Carolina mountains to build a life together. Unlike any woman the timber empire has ever seen, Serena oversees crews, hunts rattlesnakes and even saves her husband’s life in the wilderness. But when Serena learns she will never bear a child, it sets in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in the community.

Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James

So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?

Following a horrific tragedy that leaves her once-perfect family devastated, Katherine Patterson moves to a new city, starts at a new school, and begins a new life of quiet anonymity.

But when Katherine meets the gregarious and beautiful Alice Parrie her plan to live a solitary life becomes difficult. Katherine is unable to resist the flattering attention that Alice pays her and is so charmed by her contagious enthusiasm that the two girls soon become firm friends.

But being friends with Alice is complicated – and as Katherine gets to know her better she discovers that although Alice can be charming, she can also be selfish. Sometimes, even, Alice is cruel.

Invisible, by Paul Auster

New York City, Spring 1967: Twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Falling into a passionate affair with Margot, Walker soon finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible is told by three different narrators as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island, in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice.

With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.

Pilgrims, by Garrison Keillor

The good folk of Wobegon head to Italy – love, laughter and chaos ensue.

Margie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her – he’s been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussy Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Coliseum. So it’s decided they will go to clean Gussy’s final resting place.

But Margie is unprepared for the enthusiastic response – fifty people want to go with her, including her nemesis, the mayor of Lake Wobegon, Carl’s bossy sister, Eloise, Mr Berge the town drunk, and her treacherous mother-in-law. Margie fends off some of the would-be travellers, but ten applicants remain, though Carl is not sure he wants to go after all. At this, a heartbroken Margie gets the motley crew to the airport and aboard the plane, and then discovers one of the secret pleasures of travel – as they enter alien territory, safely away from Lake Wobegon, they tell each other stories of astonishing frankness and self-revelation.

Bad Day in Blackrock, by Kevin Power

On a late August night a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, are the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers – three of them are charged with manslaughter – and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

Secrets of Eden, by Chris Bohjalian

‘There’ says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, when she come up out of the water after her baptism. Just a few short hours later, Alice is dead, shot by her abusive husband who turned the gun on himself soon after.

Tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, Reverend Drew feels his faith in God slipping away as he tries to unearth the truth behind Alice’s death. Only new arrival Heather Laurent — the enigmatic author of wildly successful books about angels — seems able to save him from slipping into the depths of despair.

Heather has her own story. She survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents’ murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen. But then the state’s attorney begins to suspect that Alice’s husband may not have killed himself . . . and finds out that Alice had secrets only her minister knew.

Related through the eyes of four different narrators, Secrets of Eden is both a haunting literary thriller and a deeply evocative testament to the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. Once again, Chris Bohjalian has given us a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems.

The Company of Shadows, by Ruth Newman

Flicking through her friends’ holiday snaps, Kate Benson receives a sudden shock. For there in the background is her husband, Charlie. Dark hair, blue eyes, familiar smile: there’s no mistaking him. But that’s impossible. Because Charlie died exactly a year ago.

Determined to track down the man in the photograph, Kate follows the trail from Miami to Sicily, where her husband drowned in mysterious circumstances. But when she discovers serious discrepancies in the original investigation, Kate starts to question whether she ever really knew the man she loved so much.

Was Charlie murdered? Was their marriage as perfect as Kate remembers? Who are the people following her? Who can she trust? And is Kate herself to be trusted? Because there are secrets in her past too . . .

The Leopard’s Wife, by Paul Pickering

The Leopard’s Wife is a novel of love in an impossible land. Smiles, a famous concert pianist and English public school boy, wants to make amends with his African-American schoolmaster, Lyman Andrew, who has buried himself in the war-torn jungle of the Congo. Smiles owes his success to the man he helped ruin and harbors a dark secret from the past and his brutal public school. But a bomb has exploded at a hotel in Kinshasa where Smiles was due to play at a peace and reconciliation concert and he is accidentally invited to his own funeral. Coffins are broken open by the Presidential Guard and when he is not in his, Smiles is suspected of being one of the rebels. He escapes on a ramshackle boat with the grand piano meant for his recital, which is now destined for his old schoolmaster, who lives near Kisangani, more than a thousand miles upriver, where the rebel forces are gathering and exiles are fleeing the war in the east. On the way he falls in love with Lola, the beautiful wife of Xavier, the head of the Presidential Guard and the Leopard of the title – even the leopard has a wife, says a Swahili proverb – and Smiles begins to appreciate anew the majesty of creation and the Congo as he brings Beethoven into the atrocity haunted forest. But all the time the Leopard is following . . .

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The Pacific

Sidney C. Philips, an easygoing Alabama teenager, enlisted along with a friend. ‘Manila John’ Basilone was the son of immigrants who found happiness in the rough-and-ready life of a marine. Eugene B. Sledge watched his best friend and his brother go off to war and finally rebelled against his parents to follow them. ‘Shifty’ Shofner was the scion of a prominent family with a long record of military service. Ensign Vernon ‘Mike’ Micheel left the family farm to complete flight school. Between America’s retreat from China in late 1941 and the moment that MacArthur’s plane landed in Japan in August 1945, these five men fought many of the key battles of the war in the Pacific. Here, Hugh Ambrose focuses on their real-life experiences and those of their fellow servicemen, enhancing and expanding upon the story told in the HBO® miniseries. Covering nearly four years of combat with unprecedented access to military records, letters, journals, memoirs, photographs and interviews, this volume offers a unique historical perspective on the war against Japan, from the debacle in Bataan to the miracle of Midway, the relentless vortex of Guadalcanal, the black terraces of Iwo Jima and the killing fields of Okinawa and ultimately the triumphant yet uneasy return home. These are the true stories of the men who put their lives on the line for their country, who were dispatched to the other side of the world to fight an enemy who preferred suicide to surrender; men who suffered hardship and humiliation in POW camps; men who witnessed casualties among soldiers and civilians alike; and men whose medals came at a shocking price; a price paid in full by all.

Churchill’s Wizards, by Nicholas Rankin

By June 1940, most of Europe had fallen to the Nazis and Britain stood alone. So, with Winston Churchill in charge, the British bluffed their way out of trouble, drawing on the trickery which had helped them win the First World War. They broadcast outrageous British propaganda on pretend German radio stations, broke secret codes, conjured up phantom armies and fake airfields with model planes, and sent captured spies back to Germany with false intelligence.

Culminating in the spectacular misdirection that was so essential to the success of D-Day in 1944, Churchill’s Wizards is a thrilling work of popular history filled with almost unbelievable stories of bravery, creativity and deception.

Memory of Flames, by Armand Cabasso

“The Tsar had long dreamt of taking Paris in revenge for Moscow…”

March 1814. With the allied armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia advancing, Paris is in real danger of falling to occupying forces for the first time in 400 years. But at a moment when all efforts should be directed towards the defence of the city, Joseph Bonaparte is concerned with the murder of a retired colonel, and orders Major Quentin Margont to conduct a secret investigation into his death.

Once again Armand Cabasson marries his phenomenal knowledge of the Napoleonic period with his psychiatric expertise to create a gripping and totally convincing narrative.

Horse Soldiers, by Doug Stanton

The Horse Soldiers is the true, dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who entered Afghanistan immediately following September 11, 2001 and, riding to war on horses, defeated the Taliban. Heavily outnumbered, they capture the strategic Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, where they are welcomed as liberators as they ride on horseback into the city, the streets thronged with Afghans overjoyed that the Taliban have been kicked out.

The soldiers rest easy, as they feel they have accomplished their mission. Then the action takes a wholly unexpected turn. During a surrender of Taliban troops, the Horse Soldiers are ambushed by the would-be P.O.W.s and, still dangerously outnumbered, they must fight for their lives in the city’s ancient fortress known as Qala-I Janghi, or the House of War…

Admirals, by Andrew Lamber

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.

They Dared Return, by Patrick K. O’Donnell

It’s July 1943. Frederick Mayer, a German-born Jew is recruited to secret operations unit, the OSS. Along with 4 other German-Jews, he volunteers for behind-enemy-lines operations. All have family members in concentration camps. All want revenge.

Mayer and his comrades are dropped into the ‘Alpine Redoubt’ area of Austria, where Hitler plans to gather his SS units and make a desperate last stand against the Allies. This is the most heavily-policed area of the Third Reich, swarming with Gestapo. Capture means certain death; and for Fred and the other Jews, it means a horrible death. Yet under Hitler’s nose this tiny army blows up trains, steals secrets and even impersonates German officers.

Eventually Mayer is captured and tortured by the Gestapo, but still he does not break. Meanwhile the Allies are approaching, sounding the end for Nazi Germany. Mayer, in his greatest act of chutzpah, convinces his tormentor, the commander of German forces in Innsbruck, to surrender his forces to him, convincing the officer that it would be better to surrender early than risk being shot defending a lost cause. This is a great World War Two story of derring-do and revenge. And it’s never before been told.

Empires of the Sea, by Roger Crowley

In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, despatched an invasion fleet to the island of Rhodes. This was the opening shot in an epic struggle between rival empires and faiths, and the ensuing battle for control of the Mediterranean would last sixty years.

Empires of the Sea tells the story of this great contest. It is a fast-paced tale of spiralling intensity that ranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar and features a cast of extraordinary characters: Barbarossa, the pirate who terrified Europe; the risk-taking Emperor Charles V; the Knights of St John, last survivors of the crusading spirit; and the brilliant Christian admiral Don Juan of Austria. Its brutal climax came between 1565 and 1571, six years that witnessed a fight to the finish, decided in a series of bloody set pieces: the epic siege of Malta; the battle for Cyprus; and the apocalyptic last-ditch defence of southern Europe at Lepanto – one of the single most shocking days in world history that fixed the frontiers of the Mediterranean world we know today.

Empires of the Sea follows Roger Crowley’s first book, the widely praised Constantinople: The Last Great Siege. It is page-turning narrative history at its best – a story of extraordinary colour and incident, rich in detail, full of surprises and backed by a wealth of eyewitness accounts.

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The Death of Bunny Munro

The world is a hard place to be good in … Struggling to keep a grip on reality after his wife’s death, Bunny Munro does the only thing he can think of: with his young son in tow, he hits the road. An epic chronicle of one man’s judgement, The Death of Bunny Munro is also an achingly tender portrait of the relationship between father and son.

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Day After Night, by Anita Diamant

Atlit is a holding camp for “illegal” immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place.

Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.

Reading group questions for Day After Night

Whatever You Love, by Louise Doughty

Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed. When justice is slow, Laura decides to take her own revenge and begins to track down the man responsible.

Laura’s grief reopens old wounds and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty’s father David, their marriage and his subsequent desertion of her for another woman.

Haunted by her past and driven by her need to discover the truth, Laura discovers just how far she is prepared to go for love, desire and retribution.

Whatever You Love is a heart-wrenching and compulsive story from an acclaimed novelist writing at the height of her powers.

My Last Confession, by Helen Fitzgerald

Tips for parole officers:

1. Don’t smuggle heroin into prison.
2. Don’t drink vodka to relieve stress.
3. Don’t French-kiss a colleague to get your boyfriend jealous.
4. Don’t snort speed.
5. Don’t spend more time with murderers than with your son.
6. Don’t invite crack-head clients to your party.

This is Krissie’s advice after being in the job for a month. She’s happy and in love, but her naivety and blind compassion plunge her into a shocking murder case that could jeopardise everything.

The case is that of Jeremy, who is on remand for the brutal murder of his mother-in-law. A tragic childhood accident combined with his lack of alibi seem to make it an open-and-shut case. But Krissie can’t help feeling there has been a miscarriage of justice and battles to secure his release.

A dark family secret is at the heart of the case, and Krissie is out of her depth. Because someone isn’t happy. Someone dangerous. Someone who will stop at nothing to get to her.

Deceptions, by Rebecca Frayn

Julian and Annie have only just announced their forthcoming marriage, when Annie’s twelve-year old son Dan mysteriously fails to come home from school. Despite an extensive police investigation, the days turn into weeks and it is as if he has vanished into thin air. Over the next three years, Annie refuses to give up hope that somewhere her son is alive and will one day return home. Julian, meanwhile, can’t help but yearn for Annie to put the past behind her and move on.

Then, out of the blue, a call from Glasgow brings shocking news of Dan’s fate. And far from being over, it seems the mystery of his disappearance is only just beginning…

Rebecca Frayn on Bookhugger

Grace Williams Says It Loud, by Emma Henderson

This isn’t an ordinary love story. But then Grace isn’t an ordinary girl.

‘Disgusting,’ said the nurse.

And when no more could be done, they put her away, aged eleven.

On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, who can type with his feet, fills Grace’s head with tales from Paris and the world beyond.

This is Grace’s story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny scraps of paper. Most of all, it is about the love of a lifetime.

Emma Henderson on Bookhugger

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010

The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.

Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.

This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-war landscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism’. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.

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The Longshot, by Katie Kitamura

Cal was the one. The kid had everything a fighter needed and if he didn’t become a champion then Riley would have no one to blame but himself…

Cal and his long-standing friend and trainer Riley are on their way to Mexico for a make-or-break rematch with the legendary Rivera, who has never been beaten. Four years ago, Cal became the only fighter to ever take Rivera the distance, even though it nearly ended him. Only Riley, who has been at his side for the last ten years, knows how much that fight changed everything for Cal. And only Riley really knows what’s now at stake, for both of them…

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Playing Days, by Benjamin Markovits

Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits’ Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father – professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it.

It’s an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement – and often intense disappointment – of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself.

Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it’s the story of a young man’s first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.

Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel

Fate takes many forms . . . When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulling into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey – named Beatrice and Virgil – and the epic journey they undertake together. With all the spirit and orginality that made Life of Pi so treasured, this brilliant new novel takes the reader on a haunting odyssey. On the way, Martel asks profound questions about life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity.

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Far North, by Marcel Theroux

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.

Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere – a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society.

What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace’s journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world.

Far North leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity’s origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare – and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world’s fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.

Read a review on our sister site Bookgeeks.co.uk

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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.

An interview with John Carey

Syd Barrett, by Rob Chapman

By February 1972, it was effectively all over for Syd Barrett, founder member and guiding creative force behind the original Pink Floyd. In the summer of 2006 he died at the age of sixty, a remote and sensitive individual whose psychedelic footprints left a trail back to the mid-sixties and the height of the London underground.

With exceptional style and gusto, Syd Barrett dismantles the myth of Loony Syd the Acid Casualty and reveals a young man whose psychedelic parameters expanded too fast, too soon, as his early success with the album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn shocked him into a frenetic pop world he was not yet ready for – and perhaps never even wanted. Maybe, just maybe, Syd was not cut out for the rock ’n’ roll long haul; maybe, like a comet, he was destined to burn bright and leave a long train.

This book is a gateway to a vision of one man’s Arcadia, an exploration of a genius songwriter and artist whose musical influence resonated through punk, post-punk and the artier end of Britpop. Including for the first time extensive interviews with the Barrett family, and with reference to his letters, juvenilia, and work as an artist, Syd Barrett is, finally, the book this most extraordinary of English eccentrics deserves.

Read a review on our sister site, Bookgeeks.co.uk

Class Actor, by Phil Daniels

From his first notable role as a teenage actor alongside Ray Winstone in the cult film Scum, via the central character of Jimmy the mod in the mighty Quadrophenia, to the voice of Blur’s Parklife, Phil Daniels has built a solid reputation as one of Britain’s most talented and well-respected character actors. A graduate of the Anna Scher Theatre in the 1970s, Daniels has always stayed true to his working class roots, lending his roles a much-admired authenticity and integrity. With his distinctive voice, cheeky mistrust of authority figures and wicked sense of humour, Daniels remains a driven individualist committed to his craft.
Daniels’ career covers a period that has seen unprecedented change in UK society, and Class Actor, his first ever autobiography, reads like a provocative popular culture history of the past 30 years. It charts his 1960s childhood in a rundown part of London’s King’s X, his passion for Chelsea FC, his coming of age during punk rock, his anger and disaffection throughout the Thatcher years – perfectly realised in highly acclaimed pieces such as Mike Leigh’s Meantime – through to his role as Kevin Wicks in EastEnders and his place in Britpop’s hall of fame. Class Actor is a lively and entertaining insight into the passions of a unique artist who remains driven to tell ‘ordinary’ people’s lives through drama.

Watch an interview with Phil Daniels

No Angel, by Jay Dobyns

In 2001, Jay Dobyns was the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the Hells Angels. His aim was simple: to examine the criminal underbelly of the world’s most famous biker group and bring a major case against them. No Angel tells the thrilling, adrenaline-soaked story of one man on the brink of losing himself, and lifts the lid on one of the world’s most infamous underworlds. It is a riveting tale of meticulous undercover detective work and a rare and fascinating glimpse inside the secretive world of outlaw biker gangs.

Read an extract on our sister site Bookdagger.com

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.

Listen to an interview with Graham Farmelo

Country Driving, by Peter Hessler

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the long-time Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver’s license. For the next seven years he travelledthe country, tracking how the automobile and the improved transport system were transforming China.Hessler writes movingly of everyday people – farmers, migrant workers and entrepreneurs – who have reshaped the country during one of the most critical periods in its history. Country Driving illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against outsiders, is building the roads and factory towns that will shape the twenty-first century.

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Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns

Spanning Tom Waits’ extraordinary 40-year career, from Closing Time to Orphans, Lowside of the Road is Barney Hoskyns’ unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas.

Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who’s achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous ‘jazzbo’ years in 1970s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years – by way of such shape-shifting ’80s albums as Swordfishtrombones – this exhaustive biography charts Waits’ life step-by-step and album-by-album.

Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is a outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer – the definitive account to date of Tom Waits’ life and work.

A Q&A with Barney Hoskyns

Siberian Education, by Nicolai Lilin

Set in a small and tight-knit community of ‘honest criminals’ in a remote part of Russia, this is a tale of an extreme boyhood – exotic, violent and completely unique. Told from the perspective of a boy gaining his ‘education’ as a member of the Mafia-like Urkas in Transnistria, we get a glimpse inside the strict codes of honour and the rituals of this bizarre community. Besides having a deep distrust of outsiders – especially the police – the community is split into ‘honest’ and ‘dishonest’ criminals and crime is all-pervasive. Even their youngest children are taught to understand violence and when it is appropriate to use it. By the age of six, Nicolai Lilin is given his first ‘pike knife’ by an uncle and by the age of twelve he has been convicted of attempted murder. A huge bestseller in Lilin’s current home country, Italy, Siberian Education is an extraordinary snapshot of a violent world.

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At the Water’s Edge, by Sir John Lister-Kaye

For the last thirty years John Lister-Kaye, one of Britain’s best-known nature writers, has taken the same circular walk from his home deep in a Scottish glen up to a small hill loch. Each day brings a new observation or an unexpected encounter – a fragile spider’s web, an osprey struggling to lift a trout from the water or a woodcock exquisitely camouflaged on her nest – and every day, on his return home, he records his thoughts in a journal. Drawing on this lifetime of close observation, John Lister-Kaye’s new book encourages us to look again at the nature around us and to discover its wildness for ourselves. It also forges wonderful connections between the most unlikely subjects, from photosynthesis and the energy cycle to Norse mythology, to weasels and perfume and to the over-population of our planet. At the Water’s Edge is a lyrical hymn to the wildlife of Britain, and a powerful warning to respect and protect it.

Sir John Lister-Kaye on nature writing

Six Months in Sudan, by James Maskalyk

James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan, in 2007. The newest Médicins Sans Frontières’ doctor in the field, he arrived with only his training, full of desire to understand this most desperate part of the world. He returned home six months later profoundly affected by the experience. Six Months in Sudan is an illuminating and affecting account of saving lives in one of the most harrowing and dangerous places on Earth.

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Koestler, by Michael Scammell

Best-known as the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, Koestler was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals, involved in and commenting on almost every political movement of the twentieth century. As a young man, he was a committed Zionist and moved to Palestine; he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Franco’s Spain; escaped Occupied France; and was a member of the Communist party for seven years, later becoming one of its fiercest critics with the publication of Darkness at Noon.

Without sentimentality, Scammell gives a full account of Koestler’s turbulent private life: his drug use, manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape, and his startling suicide pact with his wife in 1983. Koestler also gives a full account of the author’s voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value.

Michael Scammell creates an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as ‘one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius’.

Chaplin’s Girl, by Miranda Semour

In 1931, City Lights introduced Charlie Chaplin’s new female star to the world. The film – defiantly silent in the age of talkies – was an immediate and international hit. The actress who played the romantic lead had never been on screen or stage before. Chaplin’s film turned her into the most famous girl in the world.
And, like Rhett Butler, the most famous girl in the world didn’t give a damn.

Virginia Cherrill was the beautiful daughter of an Illinois rancher, who ran away to live through some of Hollywood’s wildest years. She was the adoring first wife who broke Cary Grant’s heart when she left him; who turned down the gloriously eligible Maharajah of Jaipur to befriend his wife and rescue her from purdah. Virginia Cherrill presided, during the thirties, over one of England’s loveliest houses, as the Countess of Jersey. Everybody sought her friendship. All that eluded her was love. And when she found it, she gave up all she had to marry a handsome and penniless Polish flying ace, whose dream it was to become a cowboy.

In this glorious, and undiscovered story of Hollywood, international high society, wartime drama and romance, Miranda Seymour works from unpublished sources to recapture the personality of a woman so vividly enchanting that none could resist her.

This is the story of Cinderalla in reverse: of the poor girl who won everything – and gave up all for love. Breathtakingly romantic, exquisitely written, this is the stuff that dreams are made of . . .

The Optimist, by Laurence Shorter

Collapsing stock markets, melting ice caps, floods, tornadoes, terrorism . . . When it comes to bad news, we’ve never had it so good. Perhaps it is time to be a little more optimistic? That’s what Laurence Shorter decided. And that’s why he set himself the challenge of meeting the world’s most cheerful people. Surely with the help of Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson and Bill Clinton, Laurence can find the secret to inner happiness. But first things first – how on Earth is he going to get to meet them?

The Temptress, by Paul Spicer

In Kenya’s ‘Happy Valley’ in the years spanning the 1920s to the 1940s no one paid too much attention to the privileged colonial set as they farmed their estates, partied until dawn and indulged in extra-marital affairs. Not until Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was shot dead at the wheel of his Buick in the early hours of 24 January 1941. Some said the good-looking womaniser had it coming. He was a philanderer who could have had any number of enemies among cuckolded husbands who wanted revenge. Ageing Jock Delves Broughton stood trial for Erroll’s murder but was acquitted and the mystery remained unsolved – until now.

American heiress Alice de Janzé had been conducting a clandestine affair with Joss for years. Married into French aristocracy, her stunning beauty was to prove a fatal lure to men of adventure. Previously tried by a French court for shooting one of her lovers, scandal followed her wherever she went.

She arrived in Kenya as a newly married Countess in the 1920s, but by 1941 she had turned forty and the years of partying had taken their toll. Pushed aside by Erroll for younger lovers, and increasingly isolated, Alice threw herself into an act of desperation, resulting in his murder and her own tragic demise. The Temptress not only solves the mystery of Josslyn Hay’s murder with the utmost conviction – it eloquently paints a portrait of a volatile, captivating woman.

Emergency, by Neil Strauss

With the economic downturn, the hysterical Swine Flu frenzy and the systemic corruption of our political system we need someone to guide us through these difficult times. Emergency tells how Strauss went from shivering the whole night through in a water-logged sleeping bag on a tracking course, with only his broken Blackberry for company, to being the well-trained and even better equipped survival expert he is today. Encountering a host of weird and hilarious characters along the way, Strauss’s timely and wry look at the The End of the World As We Know It will make you glad you chose to be on his side.

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Courtiers

From Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, a hugely engaging book about the men and women who lived and worked at Kensington Palace.

Ambitious and talented people flocked to court in search of power and prestige, but Kensington Palace was also a gilded cage. While its inhabitants were cocooned in comfort and splendour, successful courtiers had level heads and cold hearts; their secrets were never safe. Among them, a Vice Chamberlain with many vices, a Maid of Honour with a secret marriage, a pushy painter, an alcoholic equerry, a Wild Boy, a penniless poet, a dwarf comedian, two mysterious turbaned Turks and any number of discarded royal mistresses.

An eye-opening portrait of an enthralling group of royal servants, Courtiers also throws new light on the dramatic lives of George II and Queen Caroline: a lover murdered, babies snatched, horrific illnesses and tearful deathbed reconciliations.

Peter Pan’s First XI, by Kevin Telfer

The creator of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, was a hugely enthusiastic cricketer of very little talent. That didn’t stop him from leading perhaps the most extraordinary amateur cricket team ever to have taken the field. Some of the twentieth century’s most famous writers including A. A. Milne, P. G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome, regularly turned out for Barrie’s team between 1890 and 1913. This very Edwardian vision of village cricket was only brought to an end by the First World War.

Those years of golden summers were recounted in Barrie’s letters and journals, many revealed here for the first time. Cricket lovers will identify with Barrie’s attempts to assemble a team of competent players.

In Peter Pan’s First XI, Kevin Telfer weaves together cricket, literature, history, humour and biography to create an entertaining account of this little-known band of cricketing Peter Pans – and the age in which they lived.

Africa United, by Steve Bloomfield

A superb portrait of the divided continent of Africa, told through one fo the few things that unites it. Football inspires competition and inflames passions nowhere as strongly as in Africa. Take the player born and raised in Congo who scored the winning goal for Rwanda against the country of his birth and promptly had his house burnt down for his trouble. Or the Kenyan football chant ‘Oliech! Odinga! Obama!’, which celebrates the country’s star striker, its popular prime minister and its most famous adopted son. Meanwhile, the influence of African football continues to spread rapidly through Europe. Today, no Premiership team is complete without a major African star – Drogba, Essien, Touré, Adebayor, and Kanu. Countless African players are now enriching English football and becoming household names. Steve Bloomfield’s wide-ranging and incisive book investigates Africa’s love of football, its increasing global influence, the build-up to the 2010 World Cup and the social and political backdrop to the greatest show on earth.

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A Gambling Man, by Jenny Uglow

From acclaimed biographer Jenny Uglow, a portrait of Charles II and the first decade of the Restoration: a time of glamour and gossip, drama and risk, faction and crisis.

Charles II was thirty when he crossed the channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after the long years of Cromwell’s rule. But there was no going back, no way he could ‘restore’ the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father’s beheading. ‘Honour’ was now a word tossed around in duels. ‘Providence’ could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. Exactly ten years later Charles would stand again on the shore at Dover, laying the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV.

The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles, the ‘slippery sovereign’, layed odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theatres were restored, but it was the king who was the supreme actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court and his colourful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay hidden.

A Gambling Man is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these ten vital years – and a portrait of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.

An interview with Jenny Uglow

Siberian Education, by Nicolai Lilin

Set in a small and tight-knit community of ‘honest criminals’ in a remote part of Russia, this is a tale of an extreme boyhood – exotic, violent and completely unique. Told from the perspective of a boy gaining his ‘education’ as a member of the Mafia-like Urkas in Transnistria, we get a glimpse inside the strict codes of honour and the rituals of this bizarre community. Besides having a deep distrust of outsiders – especially the police – the community is split into ‘honest’ and ‘dishonest’ criminals and crime is all-pervasive. Even their youngest children are taught to understand violence and when it is appropriate to use it. By the age of six, Nicolai Lilin is given his first ‘pike knife’ by an uncle and by the age of twelve he has been convicted of attempted murder. A huge bestseller in Lilin’s current home country, Italy, Siberian Education is an extraordinary snapshot of a violent world.

Watch the author talk about the book, and read two chapters

Nomad, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Nomad is a philosophical memoir, telling how Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to America in search of a new life, and the difficulties she faced in reconciling her two worlds. With vivid anecdotes and observations of people, cultures, and political debacles, this narrative weaves together Hirsi Ali’s personal story — including her reconciliation with her devout father who had disowned her when she denounced Islam — with the stories of other women and men, high-profile and not, whom she encounters. With a deep understanding and intimate perspective of the situation of Muslim women and moderates in the world today and her singular, unwavering intellectual courage, Hirsi Ali offers her always notable, often controversial analysis of Islam vis a vis the superiority of Western democratic values.

Achieving the Impossible, by Lewis Gordon Pugh

In July 2007, Lewis Gordon Pugh became the first person to swim at the North Pole, in temperatures that would kill a normal person, primarily to raise awareness of climate change. Nicknamed ‘the human polar bear’ for his ability to raise his body temperature at will, he has pioneered swims in the world’s most hostile waters, redefining what it is possible to achieve in terms of endurance.

A former member of the SAS, Lewis tells his fantastic story here for the first time. Chapters cover his childhood, growing up with his ‘hero’ Surgeon Rear Admiral father, his early life in South Africa, his gruelling training in the army’s elite regiment, his inspiration and, of course, plenty of action/adventure stories, chronicling his many nail-biting endurance swims. With practical lessons taken from his own life, Lewis explains how recognising one’s passions and taking calculated risks is essential for anyone looking to fulfil their goals. The book will also cover his expedition kayaking to the North Pole in summer 2008 and preparing for his most dangerous swim yet – on Everest! – planned for May 2010. His story is inspiring, entertaining and thrilling in equal measure, and its 39-year-old author is a much-needed role model for our times.

Unplayable, An Inside Account of Tiger’s Most Tumultuous Season, by Robert Lusetich

Since his professional debut in 1996, Tiger Woods has reigned as the world’s greatest living golfer, having singlehandledly increased the popularity of the game and become one of the most recognized faces in the world.

His major knee surgery in 2008 and subsequent nine month absence from professional play raised questions about whether he would be able to return to the same level of play and fulfil his destiny that had before appeared all but assured. And more than just Tiger’s legacy hung in the balance — his continued winning was understood to be crucial for the entire sport, so the stakes were huge for fans, the pro tour, the networks, sponsors, not to mention all the individuals and businesses that make a living off golf.

Robert Lusetich set out in January 2009 to follow Woods for the year. The only journalist to cover every PGA TOUR tournament Tiger played, Lusetich interviewed tournament directors, agents, caddies, PGA Tour officials, sponsors, rival players and those inside Woods’s camp, and has continued to cover Woods through the end of the season, including the subsequent scandal surrounding his marital infidelities.

Unplayable is the definitive, comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at how the 2009 season unfolded for Woods, both personally and professionally. The book offers a richly compelling narrative of Tiger’s victories and defeats — all while conveying the untold story of the bitter rivalries and ongoing tensions among top players — and explains how Woods managed to lead a double-life while dominating in one of the world’s most competitive sports.

Standing apart from all of the other reporting on the scandal to date, Unplayable gives much needed insight into how one of the world’s most reclusive celebrities maintained a public persona at odds with his private life.

No Angel, by Jay Dobyns

In 2001, Jay Dobyns was the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the Hells Angels. His aim was simple: to examine the criminal underbelly of the world’s most famous biker group and bring a major case against them. No Angel tells the thrilling, adrenaline-soaked story of one man on the brink of losing himself, and lifts the lid on one of the world’s most infamous underworlds. It is a riveting tale of meticulous undercover detective work and a rare and fascinating glimpse inside the secretive world of outlaw biker gangs.

Jay Dobyns on the Bookhugger crime panel

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The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe

In November 1960, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn Monroe a dog. His name was Maf. He had an instinct for the twentieth century. For politics. For psychoanalysis. For literature. For interior decoration. This is his story.

Maf the dog was with Marilyn for the last two years of her life. Not only a picaresque hero himself, he was also a scholar of the adventuring rogue in literature and art, witnessing the rise of America’s new liberalism, civil rights, the space race, the New York critics, and was Marilyn Monroe’s constant companion.

The story of Maf the dog is a hilarious and highly original peek into the life of a complex canine hero – he was very much a real historical figure, with his license and photographs sold at auction along with Marilyn’s other person affects. Through the eyes of Maf we’re provided with an insight into the life of Monroe herself, and a fascinating take on one of the most extraordinary periods of the twentieth century.

Our Tragic Universe, by Scarlett Thomas

‘I was reading about the end of the universe when I got a text message from my friend Libby . . .’ If Kelsey Newman’s theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever. But for Meg – locked in a dead-end relationship and with a deadline long-gone for a book that she can’t write – this thought fills her with dread. Meg is lost in a labyrinth of her own devising. But could there be an important connection between a wild beast living on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time, a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe and the Cottingley Fairies? Or is her life just one long chain of coincidences?

Smart, entrancing and buzzing with big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, and how a story might just save your life.

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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, by Monique Roffey

When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era. Her only solace is her growing fixation with Eric Williams, the charismatic leader of Trinidad’s new national party, to whom she pours out all her hopes and fears for the future in letters that she never brings herself to send. As the years progress, George and Sabine’s marriage endures for better or worse. When George discovers Sabine’s cache of letters, he realises just how many secrets she’s kept from him – and he from her – over the decades. And he is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her, with tragic consequences…

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

Imagine an empire that has shut out the world for a century and a half. No one can leave, foreigners are excluded, their religions banned and their ideas deeply mistrusted. Yet a narrow window onto this nation-fortress still exists: an artificial walled island connected to a mainland port, and manned by a handful of European traders. And locked as the land-gate may be, it cannot prevent the meeting of minds – or hearts.

The nation was Japan, the port was Nagasaki and the island was Dejima, to where David Mitchell’s panoramic novel transports us in the year 1799. For one Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, a dark adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith and murder is about to begin – and all the while, unbeknownst to him and his feuding compatriots, the axis of global power is turning…

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A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore

In her dazzling new novel – her first in over a decade – Lorrie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America.

With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a ‘half-Jewish’ farmer’s daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy – a girl escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.

When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn more deeply into the life of their newly adopted child and a household that steadily reveals its complications. With her past becoming increasingly alien to her – her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military – Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she feels herself to be. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences, but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways.

Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.

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Jayne Slayre, by Sherri Browning Erwin and Charlotte Bronte

‘Reader, I buried him.’ So begins Sherri Browning Erwin’s affectionate, funny and brilliantly clever monster mash-up of everyone’s favourite literary classic. Mrs Reed and her children are vampires, Lowood is run by a voodoo headmaster who is turning his pupils into the walking dead, Mr Rochester’s first wife is a werewolf, and Jane must learn to embrace her destiny as a slayer of evil before she can win her heart’s desire. What’s not to love?

Jane Slayre is the one classic which can give Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a run for its money, and Sherri Browning Erwin’s masterful take on a timeless tale will delight monster fans and lovers of Charlotte Bronte alike.

Reading group guide for Jane Slayre

The Gourmet, by Muriel Barbery

France’s greatest food critic is dying, after a lifetime in single-minded pursuit of sensual delights. But as Pierre Arthens lies on his death bed, he is tormented by an inability to recall the most delicious food to ever pass his lips, which he ate long before becoming a critic. Desperate to taste it one more time, he looks back over the years to see if he can pin down the elusive dish. Revealing far more than his love of great food, the narration by this larger-than-life individual alternates with the voices of those closest to him and their own experiences of the man. Muriel Barbery’s gifts as an evocative storyteller are put to mouth-watering use in this voluptuous and poignant meditation on food and its deeper significance in our lives. A delectable treat to savour.

Read an interview with the author

Difficult Daughters, by Manju Kapur

Set around the time of Partition and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Difficult Daughters is the story of a young woman torn between the desire for education and the lure of illicit love.

‘Difficult Daughters is intensely imagined, fluidly written, moving. Through our struggles with our parents, it flings us into their own momentous times, their youthful yearnings for love and independence and life. And so it becomes an urgent and important story about family and partitions and love.’ Vikram Chandra

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešic

Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology. But what does she have to do with a writer’s journey to Bulgaria? Or with a trio of women who decide in their old age to spend a week together at a hotel spa? Dubravka Ugrešic takes a traditional myth and spins it afresh. The result is an extraordinary meditation on femininity, ageing, identity, secrets, storytelling and love.

Atlas of Unknowns, by Tania James

When seventeen-year-old Anju wins an all-expenses-paid scholarship to study in New York for a year, she jumps at the chance to leave her home town in Kerala and embrace all that America has to offer. But there are bittersweet consequences ahead, not only for Anju, but also for the father and older sister she has left behind. For when the lie behnd Anju’s scholarship is suddenly revealed she is left without a visa and, too proud to confess to her family, goes into hiding. She accepts a job in a suburban beauty salon and the offer of a roof over her head from the kindly Bird, who strangely seems to know more about Anju’s past than Anju herself has told her. Meanwhile, Anju’s family are on a mission to find her, trying not to contemplate the possibility that they might never see her again…

Atlas of Unknowns is vibrant, moving and breathtakingly told — the debut of an irresistible and utterly original new voice in fiction.

The People’s Train, by Thomas Keneally

After a long, dangerous escape from Tsarist Russia, Artem Samsurov might have reached sanctuary in Brisbane, Australia, but that doesn`t stop him trying to create a socialist paradise with his fellow emigres and workmates. And despite getting entangled with an attractive female lawyer, then charged with the murder of an informer, he never loses hope that one day the revolution will come. But when he returns to Russia in 1917 to fight alongside his comrades, he cannot know whether it will succeed, or at what cost.

In this enthralling novel, Thomas Keneally brings to life a seismic episode in world history from an unusual, intimate perspective. Basing his story on a real figure, he captures what it was like moment by dramatic moment for the men and women caught up in the maelstrom, and explores the passions, ideals and terrible compromises that fuelled it.

Private Life, by Jane Smiley

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He’s the most famous man their Missouri town has ever produced: a naval officer and an astronomer – a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret’s mother calls the match ‘a piece of luck’.

Yet Andrew confounds Margaret’s expectations from the moment their train leaves for his naval base in San Francisco, and soon she realizes that his devotion to science leaves little room for anything, or anyone, else. She stands by him through tragedies both personal and those they share with the nation. But as World War II approaches, Andrew’s obsessions take a darker turn, forcing Margaret to reconsider the life she’d so carefully constructed.

Private Life is a portrait of marriage and the mysteries that endure even in lives lived side by side, a riveting historical panorama, and an unforgettable novel from one of our finest storytellers.

The Ghost Rider, by Ismail Kadare

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. She opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges an Albanian village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

Sum, by David Eagleman

In this startling book, David Eagleman shows us forty possibilities of life beyond death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These short stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.

Listen to one of the stories

Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne

Squabbling siblings, misfit school-friends and life on the estates of West Dublin are trouble enough. But then a ghost starts haunting the family home and Denny’s life starts getting properly complicated. Hilarious, warm and tragic by turns, Ghosts and Lightning is a refreshing tale of one young man doing the right thing when surrounded by all the wrong choices and finding love in the most unlikely places.

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The Earth Hums in B Flat, by Mari Strachan

Gwenni Morgan is not like any other girl in this small Welsh town. Inquisitive, bookish and full of spirit, she can fly in her sleep and loves playing detective. So when a neighbour mysteriously vanishes, and no one seems to be asking the right questions, Gwenni decides to conduct her own investigation. Mari Strachan’s unforgettable novel was one of the most acclaimed and successful debuts of 2009. It is a heart-breaking and hugely enjoyable story.

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Coast to Coast

Fresh from her successful scoop reporting the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Jan Morris spent a year journeying across the United States, by car, train, ship and aeroplane. In her words a ‘period piece’, Coast to Coast describes an American identity markedly different from today.

In her brilliant prose, Morris records with exuberence and curiosity a time of innocence in the US – when television was in its infancy, the Big Mac had not been invented and the popular song of the day was ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’.

The Newsagent’s Window: Adventures in a World of Second-Hand Cars and Lost Cats, by John Osborne

‘I had met a lot of special people through newsagents’ windows, and spent many enjoyable days with them. I found out about a community I never knew existed, the heart of rural Britain. I learned that everyone had a story to tell, and that people who live very ordinary lives are much more fascinating than explorers or pop stars.’

John Osborne’s second book is a comic voyage through small-town Britain via the ads in newsagents’ windows: lost kittens, personal ads, a second-hand bike for sale, yoga classes … Moving into an unfurnished house, John at first uses the ads in newsagents’ windows to buy practical things like a bed and a settee. But on impulse one day he replies to an advert for a psychic masseur named Lucy, who tells him some startling home-truths as he sits on her settee in his pants.

So begins a year of self-discovery and a wild obsession with newsagents’ windows, which take John to a shoe-exhibition, to an Alan Ayckbourn play, to a wrestling match. He finds himself the owner of a man’s entire video collection, a second-hand bike, a clapped-out Ford Escort – and discovers a community of a bygone age. Looking to improve his German, he meets a pretty German girl named Leni …

Hilarious and thought-provoking, The Newsagent’s Window restores our faith – in our fellow human beings, in a world without ebay – and reveals the odd things that can happen if you let newsagents’ windows dictate your day.

Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris, by Lucian Randall

The Sun newspaper asked if Chris Morris’s July 2001 Brass Eye Special on paedophilia was ‘the sickest TV ever?’ It was certainly the most controversial, though his uncompromising style of comedy meant he was rarely far from trouble.

Morris first came to national prominence at the heart of a group of virtually unknown comedians brought together by Armando Iannucci. This book follows them from their 1991 news satire On the Hour, which transferred from radio to television where it was reinvented as the equally successful The Day Today. It became impossible to watch bulletins without thinking of Morris’s Paxmanesque anchor character chastising a reporter — ‘Peter! You’ve lost the news!’ — or authoritatively delivering nonsense headlines: ‘Sacked chimney worker pumps boss full of mayonnaise.’ Meanwhile co-star Steve Coogan created a lasting anti-hero in Alan Partridge, imbued with a horrible life all of his own.

But Morris himself was always the most compelling character of all. Drawing on exclusive new interviews and original research, this book creates a compelling portrait of Morris from his earliest radio days and of the comedians and writers who frequently took on the industry they worked in, polarising opinion to such a degree that government ministers threatened to ban them entirely. THIS IS THE NEEEWWWWS!

Contested Will, by James Shapiro

From the bestselling and prize-winning author of 1599, an investigation of one of the most contentious issues in English history: who did write Shakespeare’s plays? And why does it matter so much to us?

For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays, among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles and Sir Derek Jacobi.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what is really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical and, if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?

The Leader Who Had No Title A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life, by Robin Sharma

Robin Sharma believes there are certain skills and attitudes that allow you to rise to extraordinary success. In his powerful new parable, he offers a story designed to help people from all walks of life to achieve great things.

Blake DiFranco is down on his luck, trying to make ends meet. His job is unsatisfying, and he is disenchanted with the world around him. One day, an enigmatic family friend offers him a life-altering opportunity: spend a day studying with a mysterious group of teachers and learn the secrets of limitless success. Blake is sceptical, but something compels him to take the opportunity seriously. The next morning, he embarks on a journey to discover the true meaning of the LWT philosophy – Lead Without a Title. He is ushered through the lessons of the four teachers: Anna, a maid who shows him that every job can be done with passion; Ty, a surfer who reminds him how important it is to rise to the riskiest challenges; Jackson, a former CEO who shows him the value of relationships; and Jet, a masseur who proves that greatness begins within. Blake’s world changes as the teachers make him realize his own potential to achieve greater things than he’d ever imagined.

The book is packed with real-world lessons, catchy aphorisms and inspiring exercises that will help any business person realize extraordinary results. Sharma distils over fifteen years of working with high-performers to deliver real-world strategies and foster a winning mindset. Here are formulas that will build success amidst times of deep change and will help readers to make positive changes both at work and at home.

Emergency, by Neil Strauss

With the economic downturn, the hysterical Swine Flu frenzy and the systemic corruption of our political system we need someone to guide us through these difficult times. Emergency tells how Strauss went from shivering the whole night through in a water-logged sleeping bag on a tracking course, with only his broken Blackberry for company, to being the well-trained and even better equipped survival expert he is today. Encountering a host of weird and hilarious characters along the way, Strauss’s timely and wry look at the The End of the World As We Know It will make you glad you chose to be on his side.

Gross Misconduct My Year of Excess in the City, by Venetia Thompson

Venetia Thompson takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride inside the final year of excess in the City. Working as one of only a few female inter-dealer bond brokers, the blonde ex-public school girl (nicknamed ‘posh bird’ and ‘airbags’ ) threw herself headlong into a ‘work hard, play hard’ culture of extravagance. Determined not to be bullied by the brash Essex wide boys and Alpha males around her, she partied with as much gusto as her colleagues, taking all the life offered: the £900 bottles of wine, the six-hour lunches, the days out at Cartier Polo, the Champagne-fuelled nights at lap-dancing clubs, the Chanel handbags and the meaningless sex.

Then, as easily as she’d slipped into the life, she was catapulted back out, when a satirical article she penned for The Spectator, spilled the beans on how her co-workers and bosses really behaved. Now, in Gross Misconduct, Thompson tells the full, unexpurgated story of what really went on in the mad, macho world of London’s City traders during the boom years.

The Four Gospels, by Various

Encouraging the reading of the Bible as literature rather than doctrine, the four central gospels are presented here in the beauty of the Authorised King James Version, with four fresh, modern introductions. The revelatory essays, by A.N. Wilson, Nick Cave, Richard Holloway and Blake Morrison, were commissioned for the groundbreaking Pocket Canons series. They offer piercing, moving and highly personal responses to the most influential story of the last two thousand years: the life of Jesus Christ. Including: A.N. Wilson on The Gospel According to Matthew; Nick Cave on The Gospel According to Mark; Richard Holloway on The Gospel According to Luke; Blake Morrison on The Gospel According to John and the Authorised King James Version of all four Gospels.

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A Matter of Life and Death

A Matter of Life and Death profiles some of the world’s most eminent and pioneering pathologists. This is a hidden world, yet one we will all inevitably encounter at some time in our lives, for pathology lies at the cornerstone of modern medicine. It is pathologists who are responsible for recognising new diseases such as AIDS, SARS or bird flu, and for diagnosing which cancer a patient is suffering from. And it is pathologists who must explain the cause of death at the autopsy table. A Matter of Life and Death tells fascinating stories of mysterious illnesses and miraculous scientific breakthroughs. But it is also crammed full of extraordinary characters – from the forensic anthropologist with his own Body Farm in Tennessee to the doctor who had a heart-and-lung transplant and ended up using her own lungs for research.

California Schemin’: How Two Lads from Scotland Conned the Music Industry, by Gavin Bain

California Schemin’ is the remarkable real life story of how two rappers from Dundee pretended to be two rappers from California and duped the record industry out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd – or Silibil N’ Brains, as they became known – were two ordinary Scottish boys who shared an extraordinary dream: to become rap superstars. Creating new identities for themselves, they persuaded the music industry that they were the latest hot young talent from California. Silibil N’ Brains then lived out that lie for more than two years, securing an enormous record deal with Sony and being catapulted into the industry high-life, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Madonna, Eminem and D12.

But, ironically, they could never actually deliver and promote the album that they were paid so much money to put together. As soon as they became famous they would be recognised by anyone who had known them in their former lives in Scotland and the dream would evaporate. As the pressure mounted, there would be disastrous consequences…

California Schemin‘ is a story of incredible highs and terrible lows, of doing whatever it takes to follow your dream.

Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain, by Phillip Blond

Conventional politics is at a crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In Red Tory, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face.

Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family.

Red Tory offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond’s ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.

The Last Game Love, Death and Football, by Jason Cowley

On 26 May 1989, the final day of the season, Arsenal travelled to Anfield to face the mighty Liverpool, needing a two-goal victory to claim a championship that seemed for so many reasons to belong to their opponents. What followed was one of the most remarkable football matches at the end of one of the most dramatic and politically charged seasons in English football history; a season that marked the transition between old and new football and which would come to be seen as a threshold for astonishing changes not just in football but in the wider culture.

Featuring interviews with the main players in this drama, including many of the legendary figures who took part in that famous final game, The Last Game is a probing and resonant work of dramatic reportage that reflects on the stark changes the national sport has undergone in twenty tumultuous years. Journeying from the intense and hostile terraces of the 1980s, where male violence and tribalism coupled with decrepit stadiums led to tragedies like Heysel and Hillsborough, to the new commercialism that has engulfed the modern game, where fans have turned customers and, some say, security has come at the cost of identity, The Last Game tells the story of how a nation was changed by one astonishing game.

The Selfish Society: How We All Forgot to Love One Another and Made Money Instead, by Sue Gerhardt

Ambitious and wide-ranging, The Selfish Society reveals the vital importance of understanding our early emotional lives, arguing that by focusing on the attention we give to our young children we can create a better society.

Open any newspaper, and what do you find? Violence and crime, child abuse and neglect, expenses scandals, addiction, fraud and corruption, environmental melt-down

Is Britain indeed broken? How did modern society get to this point? Who is to blame? How can we change?

We have come to inhabit a culture of selfish individualism which has confused material well-being with happiness. As society became bigger and more competitive, working life was cut off from child-rearing and the new economics ignored people’s emotional needs. We have lived with this culture so long that it is hard to imagine it being any different. Yet we are now at a turning point where the need for change is becoming urgent. If we are to build a more reflective and collaborative society, Gerhardt argues, we need to support the caring qualities that are learnt in early life and integrate them into our political and economic thinking.

Inspiring and thought-provoking, The Selfish Society sets out a roadmap to a more positive and compassionate future.

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff Guinn

Bonnie & Clyde were the first American icons created by modern media. These media-savvy gangsters nurtured a self-image of murderous glamour for Depression-era Americans who hungered for entertainment and larger-than-life characters who defied authority. But the fact is, they were among the most inept criminals in history. Just kids in their early twenties when they started robbing banks and mom-and-pop stores, and killing lawmen, Bonnie and Clyde botched almost every bank robbery they attempted, and sometimes they had to break into gum machines to get meal money. Yet, thanks to the media, Bonnie and Clyde were a great, epic love story and became national icons on a par with cinema gangsters Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.

The Lost Battles, By Jonathan Jones

Michelangelo and Leonardo lived five centuries ago, but their works still obsess our culture, with a popular and universal quality that nothing else matches.

They have been equally revered and famous since their lifetimes, but our admiration for them exists mostly in isolation of each other. But in 1504 they competed with each other directly, to paint the walls of a room in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. It is remarkable enough that the same city had produced two such geniuses in the same century — let alone that they met and exhibited together. But this competition, perhaps the most important event in the history of Renaissance art, the moment at which individual style came to command its own value, has been largely forgotten because the rival works did not survive.
This great artistic clash, Jonathan Jones argues in this riveting account, marks the true beginning of the High Renaissance. Re-creating sixteenth-century Florence with astonishing verve and aplomb, The Lost Battles not only sheds new light on the making of the modern world but, in its portrait of two cultural titans going toe to toe, rewires our understanding of the personalities of the Renaissance’s greatest icons.

Six Months in Sudan, by James Maskalyk

James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan, in 2007. The newest Médicins Sans Frontières’ doctor in the field, he arrived with only his training, full of desire to understand this most desperate part of the world. He returned home six months later profoundly affected by the experience. Six Months in Sudan is an illuminating and affecting account of saving lives in one of the most harrowing and dangerous places on Earth.

Mandela – A Biography, by Martin Meredith

Nelson Mandela stands out as one of the most admired political figures of the twentieth century. It was his leadership and moral courage above all that helped to deliver a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa after years of racial division and violence and to establish a fledgling democracy there.

Martin Meredith’s vivid portrayal of this towering leader was originally acclaimed as ‘an exemplary work of biography: instructive, illuminating, as well as felicitously written’ (Kirkus Reviews), providing ‘new insights on the man and his time’ (Washington Post). Now Meredith has revisited and significantly updated his biography to incorporate a decade of additional perspective and hindsight on the man and his legacy and to examine how far his hopes for the new South Africa have been realised.

Published as South Africa celebrates 100 years since its founding and hosts the 2010 World Cup, Mandela is the most thorough and up-to-date account available of the life of its most revered hero.

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