WINNER OF THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE'S RUNCIMAN AWARD 2026

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

‘Magical… A book that will refresh your soul.’ Carol Drinkwater, author of The Olive Farm

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THE TRUE STORY OF A COURAGEOUS LEAP INTO A NEW LIFE (moved this to be top of descript)

In 2000, burnt out by city living, Julian Hoffman and his wife Julia took a bold step: they left everything behind and moved to Prespa in northern Greece – a remote landscape of vast lakes, snow-capped mountains and stone villages.

Here, their seasons are punctuated by unforgettable encounters, including nesting summer pelicans, a springtime stare-down with a bear and a winter meeting with fourteen tiny birds above a frozen doorway.

Lifelines is a story of new beginnings – of searching for home in an unfamiliar place, finding community across borders and truly finding your place in the world.

‘I was enthralled and won't be the only reader making travel plans.’ Gaia Vince

• AN FT BEST SUMMER BOOK
• An inspiring read about moving abroad and starting life again.
• Set amongst the beautiful Greek landscape.
• Full of soul-warming encounters with the natural world.
• The perfect summer read to take on holiday, an ideal non-fiction beach book.

‘An inspiring call to throw caution to the wind … Lifelines is not just beautiful, it is quite literally encouraging. It will make you brave.’ Observer

‘This remarkable book describes Julian and Julia's odyssey as they meet others on similar quests to find home, be they bears, pelicans or humans.’ Lee Durrell, MBE

Wigmore Hall does not boast a grand façade, but behind it lies something extraordinary: one of the world’s most beloved concert halls, within whose walls we find exceptional performers, composers, impresarios and, of course, audiences. The story of Wigmore Hall is the story of music in the 20th and 21st centuries – and of London itself.

In this illuminating book, bestselling author Julia Boyd digs deep into the Hall’s rich history to uncover the secrets of its success. One of London’s prime cultural gems, Wigmore Hall has witnessed fame and failure, love and loss, joy and despair, triumph and tragedy. Reflecting the remarkable changes that have taken place in performance, repertoire and concert-going during its 125 years, it is a tale that encompasses the whole gamut of human experience. Above all, it reminds us of the wonder of music and the artists who create it.

With a stellar cast of performers, among them Ferruccio Busoni, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Benjamin Britten, Myra Hess and Leoš Janácek, not to mention audiences that included Virginia Woolf, Maurice Ravel and Bertrand Russell, this is the sometimes surprising but always intriguing history of ‘London’s most sumptuous temple of music’.

Praise for Julia Boyd:

‘Utterly absorbing’ The Times

‘Fascinating’ Daily Mail

‘Exceptional' Mail on Sunday

‘Gripping’ Spectator

‘A triumph’ iNews

'Reading Hannah’s story, compellingly told, you will fall in love with these increasingly endangered birds, true masters of the sky.’ Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE 



The inspirational story of a bird lover who became a nature-warrior in a David v Goliath battle to save swifts from extinction.

Nature Needs You tells the compelling story of how Hannah, without campaigning experience, funding or contacts, set out to save swifts from extinction in the UK. Her mission is to change the law and make ‘swift bricks’ mandatory so that the birds who nest in our walls will have a future in Britain. Nature Needs You delves into the highs and lows of trying to win hearts and minds, grab the news agenda with her naked Feather Speech, win Caroline Lucas and Lord Zac Goldsmith’s support, navigate meetings with Secretaries of State and debates in the Houses of Parliament, survive the trolling and midnight self-doubt and raise a petition with the requisite 100,000 signatures for a Parliamentary debate. At stake, with a decline in numbers of over 60% since 1995, are the birds who have become our symbol of summer, the swifts screaming in the skies above us.

Steeped in love for the wild, by a talented writer, Nature Needs You is a clarion call to save the nature on our doorsteps and to prove that passion can be a superpower in bringing change to nature-depleted Britain. Raw, funny, self-deprecating and unstoppable in turn, this is nature writing with the pace of a thriller. Hannah is now knocking at the door of the new Labour Secretary of State for Housing, in the hope that, where Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove failed, Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook will save our swifts.

‘I applaud Hannah’s book; her inner steel and her sassy take on conservation are inspiring. I am so heartened that there are courage-driven young women holding nature in the light so that it WILL be seen by the powerful.’ Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon

‘This book might make you scream. It is the story of a fight that started with a promise to a small bird. It is about bird spirit and the spirit of a very singular human. Hannah Bourne-Taylor has a searing eye for both truth and charlatans.’ Keggie Carew, author of Beastly

‘A wonderful book that will make you furious, hopeful and inspired by turns. Buy it, read it and then become an activist yourself.’ Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of Shearwaters 

CHARTING THE RISE AND FALL OF FIRST-CLASS CRICKET: WHAT COMES NEXT?

‘A remarkable account of cricket’s fascinating journey from its origins … to the present day.’ Ehsan Mani, former President of the ICC

In its early forms in the 18th century, cricket was a commercial entertainment, a vehicle for gambling alongside cock-fighting or wrestling. In the Victorian era, the sport was recreated as a means of keeping order in England’s public schools and increasingly allied with ideas of virtue and manliness. Exported by empire loyalists, cricket took root across the globe – thriving in some countries, indelibly linked with racism and colonialism in others.

From Australia to the Caribbean to Afghanistan, Oborne and Heller explore cricket’s expansion and its later role in decolonisation, education and politics. They argue that in recent years the game – dominated by the wealth and scale of franchise cricket – has come full circle, less a sport than a commercial enterprise once more. In consequence, they believe it is in crisis. As big money has taken over the game, is cricket losing its integrity and meaning?

Comprehensive in scope and drawing on contemporary scholarship, this masterful account is an essential read for cricket fans everywhere.

Praise for Full Circle

 ‘A proper, meaty history, independent in perspective, global in its sweep and trenchant in its judgements.’ Gideon Haigh

 ‘A truly global history of cricket, that draws on a wide range of sources and is itself elegantly written.’ Ramachandra Guha, author of The Commonwealth of Cricket

‘[An] encyclopaedic journey through the history of the game.’ Fazeer Mohammed, cricket commentator and journalist

THE TIMES – ‘The best historical fiction books of 2025’

‘A wonderful, unsentimental novel about male friendship in wartime’ Antonia Senior, The Times



The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking portrayal of friendship forged in the trenches of the First World War.

‘In this vivid and engaging novel of war and friendship, Barney Campbell shows us once again that he is a natural writer. This is a novel of men at arms of the highest quality’. Alexander McCall Smith

Edward Salter is a shy, reserved lawyer whose life is transformed by the outbreak of war in 1914. On his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign, he befriends the charming and quietly courageous Theodore Thorne. Together they face the carnage and slaughter, stripped bare to their souls by the hellscape and only sustained by each other and the moments of quiet they catch together.

Thorne becomes the crutch whom Edward relies on throughout the war. When their precious leave from the frontline coincides, Theo invites Edward to his late parents’ idyllic estate in Northamptonshire. Here Edward meets Thorne’s sister Miranda and becomes entranced by her.

Edward escapes the broiling, fetid charnel-house of Gallipoli to work on the staff of Lord Kitchener, then on to the Western Front and post-war espionage in Constantinople. An odd coolness has descended between Edward and Theo. Can their connection and friendship survive the overwhelming sense of loss at the end of the war when everything around them is corrupted and destroyed?

The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking, sweeping portrayal of friendship and its fragility at the very limits of humanity. 

'Visceral, intensely moving and illuminating’ Country Life Magazine

From the award-winning author of  The Seafarers  and  Wintering  comes a fascinating exploration of the most miraculous substance on Earth: water.

It falls in a moment. When the heaviest droplets of ice can no longer be held, the first raindrop slips from the sky and plunges, down through the damp, cold air, thawing as it plummets. Splashing into the sodden hillside, rainfall merging with river source, it flows for the first time.

The Waterlands  is a new story of water, revealing its natural rhythms and miraculous power. Follow a raindrop as it flows through diverse waterscapes: river sources in the upland moors; saltmarsh-flanked firths and estuaries; serene and spectacular lochs; crystal-clear chalk streams; blanket bogs that are both land and liquid, a thin skin of peat over millennia-old water.

On this epic journey, award-winning writer Stephen Rutt visits these places where life flourishes, revealing how water shapes the land, shapes our lives – and how we shape it in return. Beautifully blending geography, ecology, climate writing and social history, The Waterlands  is a captivating retelling of the water cycle, and an urgent call to protect our most essential resource.

You’ll never see a raindrop the same way again.

Praise for  The Seafarers  and  Wintering:

‘A beautifully illuminating portrait of lives lived largely on the wing and at sea.’ Julian Hoffman, author of  Lifelines  

‘A poignant testament to how we can find peace in the rhythms of the natural world.’  The Times,  Nature Books of the Year 2019

‘Rutt’s dreamy prose is as cool and elegant as the season he charts.’ Jon Dunn,  BBC Wildlife

They might have said goodbye to the USSR –  but can they ever say farewell to Russia?

Snow, concrete, the KGB: that’s the cliche ´ of the Soviet Union. But its collapse in 1991 sparked a story at once messier and more compelling than any stereotype. Thirty-five years on, Moscow may brim with champagne bars and blacked-out Mercedes – but what became of the other fourteen states that emerged from the ashes?S

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Luc Barnes crossed the former USSR to find out, from the gleaming towers

of Azerbaijan to the former gulags of Kazakhstan, tech-hungry Estonia to the minarets of Uzbekistan. Along the way, he finds epic mountains, cobblestoned old towns and storied Silk Road cities -  not to mention Georgian wine, Armenian brandy and vodka in industrial supply.

Travelling thousands of miles, he gathers a chorus of voices: nomads in mountain yurts, TikTok-fuelled activists, small-town taxi drivers and many who still look uneasily over their shoulder for the secret police. With insight, empathy and a healthy dose of mordant wit, he asks what has happened -  and why – to the people and their hopes and dreams since the great promise of independence.

By turns hilarious, angry and heart-stopping, this is a darkly comic, deeply human portrait of a region the West still misunderstands – and a warning of what happens when empires break but the habits of empire refuse to die.

If you loved The Silk Roads, Nothing to Envy  or The Places in Between, and have a soft spot for Bill Bryson, clear space on your shelf: this is the book for you.

• Joe Luc Barnes speaks fluent Russian and is one of the few people, if not the only person, to have visited all 15 former Soviet countries since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
• Offers essential insights into a restless region where Russia, China and the West all vie for dominance.
• Covers: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine – and, of course, Russia.  

From the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings comes a beautiful and unexpected memoir of motherhood and wildness –  ‘ASTONISHING’  (Sunday Times)

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‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing’  LUCY JONES, author of Matrescence  

When Helen Jukes becomes pregnant, the manuals she reaches for feel hollow; the well-meaning advice of friends oddly suffocating. With her body transforming, she’s left with urgent, unanswered questions.  

So she looks elsewhere. Beyond humans, and into the overlooked worlds of polar bears, bonobos, burying beetles and a host of other creatures whose ways of mothering look very different to our own.  

What she finds is both unsettling and electric: an expansive reimagining of care, instinct and what it might mean to be a mother – animal and human – today

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‘Joyful and expansive’  Guardian

‘Astounding . . . Read it to feel the slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.’ Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

‘Blows societal ideas about parenthood wide open.’  Marchelle Farrell, author of  Uprooting

‘Honest and unflinching’  Stylist

‘A book to devour.’  Joanna Wolfarth author of Milk

An alternative history of Britain through the scandalous stories of 52 MPs who behaved very badly indeed?

‘Funny, eye-opening and jaw-dropping.’ CHARLIE HIGSON

Over the centuries, the House of Commons has been full of MPs standing up against tyranny; remarkable people doing remarkable things for the good of all. Yet there have been just as many cheats and liars who have played games, played the markets and played the people who put their trust in them.

Members Behaving Badly  tells the story of our nation from 1603 to 1945 through 52 of these parliamentary villains: abusers, kidnappers and murderers, violent men doing violent deeds, often using parliament as a front and excuse. These are the MPs who made history – for all the wrong reasons.

There’s rake and poet Sir Charles Sedley, whose illicit partying while sozzled and stark naked on a tavern balcony caused a sensation even in Restoration London; the stock-jobbing, flip-flopping chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, who proposed taxes that sparked a revolution; David Lloyd George, Britain’s saviour during the First World War, but whose avarice, corruption and abuse of honours ruined his political party forever; and many more.

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‘Thoroughly entertaining? Full of the woeful and riotous tales of the many men who have disgraced the benches of Westminster.’ Jonathan Healey, author of The Blazing World

‘Kilroy’s storytelling is brimming with detail, sprinkled throughout with wit and humour.’ Kate Vigurs, author of Mission France

‘A riot of malfeasance and misbehaviour’ Roger Moorhouse, author of Wolfpack