Then They Came for Me

Oneworld Publications 2012, Paperback, 384 pages, £10.99

Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s contested presidential elections for Newsweek magazine. He thought he’d be returning in just a few days to Paola, his pregnant fiancée. Instead, he was incarcerated under false charges of espionage in Evin, a state prison notorious for its role in Iran’s history of torture and oppression. His release came four months later, only after a global campaign supported by Hillary Clinton.

Suffering regular beatings, forced confessions, and threats of execution, Bahari draws strength from the similar experiences of his family in the past: his father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must being doing to fight for his freedom.

Exposing the contradictions at the heart of Ahmadinejad’s paranoid regime, this moving memoir is also a beautifully written portrait of modern Iran that carries a vital and troubling message as other countries in the region strive for democracy.

Praise for the book:
“A profound, yet intimate insight into modern day Iran, told through Bahari’s own and his family’s experience of living through it. A wonderful book.”
- Jon Snow, Channel Four News

“What makes Bahari’s account so readable is not only his sense of fair play — he tries to understand the motivations of the regime, and of his torturer — but also his keen sense of fun and humour.” – The Sunday Times

“A superb account … Insightful and brave.”
- Jane Corbin, journalist and reporter for BBC’s Panorama

“A beautifully written account of life in Iran, filled with insights not only into the power struggles and political machinations but into the personal, emotional lives of the people living in that complicated country. Maziar Bahari is a brave man and a wonderful storyteller.”
- Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World

The Flying Man

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £16.99

Meet Maqil – also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel – a chancer and charlatan.

A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He’s a compulsive gambler – driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself.

From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can’t resist trying it on; he’s still playing his game, and the game won’t be over until it’s been won.

The Flying Man

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £16.99

Meet Maqil – also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel – a chancer and charlatan.

A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He’s a compulsive gambler – driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself.

From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can’t resist trying it on; he’s still playing his game, and the game won’t be over until it’s been won.

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The Berlin Crossing

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 368 pages, £19.99

Brandenburg 1993: The Berlin Wall is down, the country is reunified and thirty-year-old school teacher Michael Ritter feels his life is falling apart. His wife has thrown him out, his new West German headmaster has fired him for being a socialist, former Party member and he is still clinging on to the wreckage of the state that shaped him. Disenfranchised and disenchanted, Michael heads home to care for his terminally ill mother.

Before she dies, she urges him to seek out an evangelical priest, Pastor Bruck, who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. When Michael eventually tracks him down, he is taken on a journey of dark discoveries, one which will shatter his foundations, but ultimately bring him hope to rebuild them.

When God Was a Rabbit

Headline Review 2011, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Young Elly Portman’s world is shaped by those who inhabit it: her loving but maddeningly distractible parents; a best friend who smells of chips and knows exotic words like ‘slag’; an ageing fop who tapdances his way into her home, a Shirley Bassey impersonator who trails close behind; lastly, of course, a rabbit called God. In a childhood peppered with moments both ordinary and extraordinary, Elly’s one constant is her brother Joe.

Twenty years on, Elly and Joe are fully grown and as close as they ever were. Until, that is, one bright morning when a single, earth-shattering event threatens to destroy their bond forever.

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Charles Dickens

Viking 2011, Hardcover, 576 pages, £30.00

Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin (Winner)

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist – the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.

At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried – against his wishes – in Westminster Abbey.

Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children.

Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

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Before I Go To Sleep

Doubleday 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £12.99

‘As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me …’

Welcome to Christine’s life.

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• Win an audiobook of Before I Go To Sleep on Bookdagger!

Room

Picador 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £7.99

Jack is five. He lives with Ma in a single locked room and, as far as he’s concerned, that’s the entire world. But then Ma explains there’s a world outside – and when she and Jack manage to escape, Jack has to learn to live outside of Room…

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The Good Cook

BBC Books 2011, Hardcover, 320 pages, £25.00

Simon Hopkinson loves food and he knows how to cook it. The Good Cook is the result of over 40 years’ experience and is based on Simon’s belief that a good cook loves eating as much as cooking.

How the ingredients you choose and the way you cook them will turn a good recipe into a great dish. That a cheap cut of meat cooked with care can taste as nice as a choice cut prepared by indifferent hands.

Structured around Simon’s passion for good ingredients (Anchovy and Aubergine, Cheese and Wine, Smoked and Salted Fish, Ham, Bacon and A Little Pig) and written with Simon’s trademark perfectionism and precision, this is a book that you will cherish for life.

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