As wise, civilised and wholly entertaining as it was when first published in 1956, the novel tells the beautifully absurd story of the inimitable Aunt Dot, her niece Laurie and Father Chantry-Pigg – and of their expedition together to Turkey to explore the possibility of establishing a High Anglican mission there. Each member of the party has an additional extra-curricular motivation for making the trip: Father Chantry-Pigg wishes to meet the fanatics in residence at the top of Mount Ararat; Aunt Dot is set on the emancipation of Turkish women through wider use of the bathing hat; Laurie’s object is
pure pleasure ?

From the 1930s to the 2000s, Fay Weldon has seen and lived our times. As a child in New Zealand, young and poor in London, unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, spag-bol-cook, winer-and-diner, there are few waterfronts that she hasn’t covered, few battles she hasn’t fought. An icon to many, a thorn-in-the-flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. Her life and times cover love, sex, babies, blokes, poverty, work, politics, and not a few Very Famous Names.

Moving from New Zealand to London to Scotland, from the UK to points east and west, Weldon has sipped, gulped, and sometimes spat out the things that make us what we are today.

The Esterhazys, one of Europe’s most prominent aristocratic families, are indelibly inscribed in the history of the Hapsburg Empire. Having gone through epic conquest, tragedy, triumph and near destruction, the Esterhazy family lore is rich, poignant, entertaining and awe-inspiring. Celestial Harmonies is a national epic in the form of fiction, which Esterhazy writes by reinventing the traditional form of the dynastic saga.

Beginning with short sections narrated in the first person, Celestial Harmonies recounts legends, inventions and episodes that form a mosaic in which chronology is abandoned and only one prominent figure exists: ‘My Father’. The character of ‘My Father’ is a Don Juan, a profligate, a tycoon and a scholar, a bishop, an architect, a madman and a tyrant, an envoy and a premier, a student of Helmholtz and the cat in Schrodinger’s experiment. He stands for each and every family member, functioning as a mount for simply everything, a man as unlimited and inexhaustible as the power born by the book’s fictional family.

Celestial Harmonies is a rich, dazzlingly original exploration of the emotional ties that bind men to their fathers, bonds that stand outside time, place and history. Old world glamour meets harsh post-war reality in a novel that touches on all aspects of life and philosophy relevant to us today – the nature of dictatorship, love, hate and family relationships, to meditations on betrayal, God and Christianity.

Fifteen-year-old Alex Cold, his friend Nadia and his eccentric grandmother Kate embark on a journey to a mysterious, hidden land high in the Himalayas. There they find that the peaceful, spiritual lifestyle of the Forbidden Kingdom, which has remained unchanged for generations, is under threat. ‘The Collector’, a rich westerner, is plotting to steal the Golden Dragon, a valuable statue that can foretell the future?

Full of the imagination and wonder that has made Isabel Allende one of the world’s bestselling authors, ‘The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon’ is an enthralling work of fiction that will delight the thousands of readers who bought and loved ‘City of the Beasts’.

Long haunted by her experiences in Afghanistan, Lamb returned there after last year’s attack on the World Trade Centre to find out what had become of the people and places that had marked her life as a young graduate.This time seeing the land through the eyes of a mother and experienced foreign correspondent, Lamb’s journey brings her in touch with the people no one else is writing about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war.

‘Of all books about Afghanistan, Christina Lamb’s is the most revealing and rewarding?a personal, perceptive and moving account of bravery in the face of staggering difficulties.’ Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

‘As an account of how Afghanistan got into its present state, and of the making of the grotesque regime of the Taliban, this book could not possibly be bettered. Brilliant.’ Matthew Leeming, Spectator

‘Lamb’s book combines a love of Afghanistan with a fearless search for the human stories behind the past twenty-three years of war?Her book is not only a necessary education for the Western reader in the political warring that generated the torture, murder and poverty, but also a stirring lament for the country of ruins that was once better known for its poetry and mosques.’ James Hopkin, The Times

In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo Thwe describes his childhood as a member of the Padaung hill tribe, where ancestor worship and communion with spirits blended with the tribe’s recent conversion to Christianity. In the 1930s, Pascal’s grandfather captured an Italian Jesuit, mistaking him for a giant or a wild beast; the Jesuit in turn converted the tribe. (The Padaung are famous for their ‘giraffe women’ – so-called because their necks are ritually elongated with ornamental copper rings. Pascal’s grandmother had been exhibited in a touring circus in England as a ‘freak’.)

Pascal developed a love of the English language through listening to the BBC World Service, and it was while working as a waiter in Mandalay to pay for his studies that he met the Cambridge don John Casey, who was to prove his saviour. The brutal military regime of Ne Win cracked down on ‘dissidents’ in the late 1980s.

Pascal’s girlfriend was raped and murdered by soldiers, and Pascal took to the jungle with a guerrilla army. How he was eventually rescued with Casey’s help is a dramatic story, which ends with his admission to Cambridge to study his great love, English literature.

Richard Fortey is one of Britain’s leading popular scientists. Life: An Unauthorised Biography, was short-listed for the Rhone Poulenc prize and has been reprinted five times. In all he writes, Fortey displays extraordinary range, delight and descriptive gifts which make complicated scientific facts and concepts not only easy to understand but a delight to absorb.

Trilobite! is an unashamedly trilobito-centric view of the world unravelling the history of the exotic, crustacean-like animals which dominated the seas for three hundred million years. These arthropods witnessed continents move, mountain chains elevated and eroded; they survived ice ages and volcanic eruptions, evolving and adapting exquisitely to their environment. They watched through their crystal eyes whilst life evolved. Their own evolution calibrated geological time itself.

Structured like a detective story, this is a light, but highly informative account of the wonders of scientific discovery and an engaging, quirky and fascinating introduction to evolution.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself.
At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.

From the author of the Samuel Johnson prize shortlisted ‘The Return of a King’, this is William Dalrymple’s captivating memoir of a year spent in Delhi, a city watched over and protected by the mischievous invisible djinns. Lodging with the beady-eyed Mrs Puri and encountering an extraordinary array of characters – from elusive eunuchs to the last remnants of the Raj – William Dalrymple comes to know the bewildering city intimately.

He pursues Delhi’s interlacing layers of history along narrow alleys and broad boulevards, brilliantly conveying its intoxicating mix of mysticism and mayhem.

‘City of Djinns’ is an astonishing and sensitive portrait of a city, and confirms William Dalrymple as one of the most compelling explorers of India’s past and present.