2021 is turning out to be another extraordinary year, from Covid crises and vaccine victories to lockdown learning, haddock havoc and Capitol coups. But, then, it has also been a very familiar story of Brexit blunders and Trumpian tantrums. The nation’s greatest cartoonists have recorded it all with searing wit and astonishing creativity. Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2021 brings together cartoons from the nation’s finest satirists, along with captions from Britain’s leading cartoon expert, to tell the story of another tumultuous twelve months.

‘An absolute beauty of a book. Every character is a gem, the many locations spring to vivid life, the book is an intricate and moving exploration of journeys and the infinite unexpected turns they can take – and somehow Towles makes it all seem effortless. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again’ TANA FRENCH

‘The best novel I’ve read in years. Epic and original, mesmeric and life-affirming, in THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY Amor Towles takes his unmatched gift for storytelling and puts it on the road. Every beautiful paragraph takes the reader a mile further into a world where our choices matter, where life surprises us, and where people are worth the trouble. This is one of those rare and special books that drive us home to ourselves’ CHRIS CLEAVE

‘With exquisitely drawn characters, beautiful writing and a real sense of moral integrity, The Lincoln Highway already feels like an American coming of age classic to sit alongside The Catcher In The Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird’ Red
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In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

With his mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett plans to pick up his eight-year-old brother Billy and head to California to start a new life.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have stowed away in the trunk of the warden’s car. They have a very different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take the four of them on a fateful journey in the opposite direction – to New York City.

Bursting with life, charm, richly imagined settings and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from the pen of a master storyteller.
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‘[A] wise and wildly entertaining novel . . . Towles has snipped off a minuscule strand of existence – 10 wayward days – and when we look through his lens we see that this brief interstice teems with stories, grand as legends’ New York Times

‘Finely observed and beautifully written. Amor Towles is that rare combination of writer and storyteller’ JEFFREY ARCHER

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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

‘Laws are silent in times of war.’ Cicero

One of the great epics of political and historical fiction, The Cicero Trilogy charts the career of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero from his mid-twenties as an ambitious young lawyer to his dramatic death more than thirty years later, pursued by an assassination squad on a cliff-top path.

The extraordinary life that unfolds between these two episodes is recounted by Cicero’s private secretary, Tiro: the law cases and the speeches that made his master’s name; the elections and conspiracies he fought; the rivals who contended for power around him – Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Clodius, Catalina, and, most menacingly, Caesar; and, at the heart of it all, the complex personality of Cicero himself – brilliant, cunning, duplicitous, anxious, brave, and always intensely humane.

More than ten years in the writing, and now published in a single volume for the first time, The Cicero Trilogy brings the world of the Roman republic vividly to life. Here is its grandeur, ambition and corruption; and here is its tumultuous collapse into dictatorship and anarchy – a story of the fragility of democratic institutions that holds a warning for our own time.

‘Never a dull day, never a dull sentence.’ Daily Mail
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This second volume of the bestselling diaries of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the Prime Minister so admired by Chips was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: ‘The war must be more than half over.’

For much of this period, Channon is genuinely an eye-witness to unfolding events. He reassures Neville Chamberlain as he fights for his political life in May 1940. He chats to Winston Churchill while the two men inspect the bombed-out chamber of the House of Commons a few months later. From his desk at the Foreign Office he charts the progress of the war. But with the departure of his boss ‘Rab’ Butler to the Ministry of Education, and Channon’s subsequent exclusion from the corridors of power, his life changes – and with it the preoccupations and tone of the diaries. The conduct of the war remains a constant theme, but more personal preoccupations come increasingly to the fore. As he throws himself back into the pleasures of society, he records his encounters with the likes of Noël Coward, Prince Philip, General de Gaulle and Oscar Wilde’s erstwhile lover Lord Alfred Douglas. He describes dinners with members of European royal dynasties, and recounts gossip and scandal about the great, the good and the less good. And he charts the implosion of his marriage and his burgeoning, passionate friendship with a young officer on Wavell’s staff.

These are diaries that bring a whole epoch vividly to life.

‘A fine and profoundly intelligent novel’ ELIZABETH DAY
‘A yearning, wistful, lovelorn novel, intent on exploring the price of being human’ Sunday Times
‘Faulks on his best form’ Telegraph
‘Fascinating . . . impeccably researched . . . At the heart of this rich, dark story, however, is not politics but psychology . . . Faulks’s committed fans will be left looking forward to the next instalment of this thought-provoking trilogy’ The Times
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1914: Aspiring journalist Anton arrives in Vienna where he meets Delphine, a woman of experience and deep secrets. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton comes to life. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with her mother in a small town has been cosseted and cold. After a few years of schooling, she encounters a young lawyer who spirits her away to Vienna. However, what she imagines to be love soon crumbles, and she leaves the city behind to take a post at the snow-capped sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933: Having lost many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton is sent to write about the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place, on the banks of a silvery lake where the roots of human suffering are laid bare, two people will see each other as if for the first time.
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Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and awaits the coming of another, SNOW COUNTRY is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced an epic love story of timeless resonance.
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‘A magnificent, moving novel’ Independent
‘Faulks’s most poignant love story yet’ Antony Beevor
‘A tale of love – lost and found – and the strength of the human spirit’ Sunday Telegraph

Brendan has always lived a careful, constrained life. A salesman who never liked the work, he’s a man who has stayed in his marriage and his faith because it was what was expected of him. But now, having lost his job after corporate downsizing and on the cusp of sixty, he finds himself scrambling to somehow stay afloat in the only Los Angeles work on offer to a man his age – driving for Uber.

When one of his rides, a retired professor named Elise, asks to be dropped off outside an abortion clinic where she now volunteers, Brendan finds himself literally driving right into the virulent epicentre of one of the major issues of our time, engulfing his life in the process.

A novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity, Afraid of the Light is a tough, affecting social thriller that speaks volumes about the corrosive divisions of our troubled times.
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‘Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global affairs’ OBSERVER

‘Immerses us in a glamorous, star-studded world, but is full of raw human emotion. Its characters felt completely real to me – each one is flawed and messy and impossible not to love.‘ BETH O’LEARY
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A lifetime holding it together.
One party will bring it crashing down.

Malibu: August, 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over-especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control.
By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames.

But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.
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‘The perfect, literal, beach read, with the emotional depth of the ocean‘ HOLLY BOURNE

‘A sex-on-the-beach cocktail (quite literally) of a book’ PANDORA SYKES

‘This summer’s must-read novel’ SARRA MANNING, RED

‘Sun-drenched … addictive and fun, it’s an essential addition to your summer reading list’ STYLIST, Best Fiction of 2021

‘I adored everything about this’ DAILY MAIL

‘Unapologetically escapist beach-read fiction’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘I did not want this book to end!’ PRIMA, Book of the Month

‘Pure exhilaration’ THE TIMES

‘Imagine Blue Water High and Selling Sunset had a lovechild’ EVENING STANDARD

‘A superfun foray into the 1980s … Delicious’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, Novel of the Week

‘Hugely enjoyable’ MAIL ON SUNDAY

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Praise for Daisy Jones & The Six

‘Utterly believable . . . fantastically enjoyable’ THE TIMES
‘Pitch perfect’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘Prepare to be obsessed’ STYLIST
‘I devoured this in a day, falling head over heels for it’ REESE WITHERSPOON
‘I LOVE it . . . I can’t remember the last time I read a book that was so fun’ DOLLY ALDERTON
‘I didn’t want this book to end’ FEARNE COTTON

‘Beautifully written, incredibly accessible and deeply researched’ JAMES O’BRIEN

‘An absolute masterpiece’ DAN SNOW

‘Illuminates England’s weird and wonderful early history with erudition and wit’ IAN HISLOP
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Sixteen hundred years ago Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Grand cities and luxurious villas were deserted and left to crumble, and civil society collapsed into chaos. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea, and established themselves as its new masters.

The Anglo-Saxons traces the turbulent history of these people across the next six centuries. It explains how their earliest rulers fought relentlessly against each other for glory and supremacy, and then were almost destroyed by the onslaught of the Vikings. It explores how they abandoned their old gods for Christianity, established hundreds of churches and created dazzlingly intricate works of art. It charts the revival of towns and trade, and the origins of a familiar landscape of shires, boroughs and bishoprics.

It is a tale of famous figures like King Offa, Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, but also features a host of lesser known characters – ambitious queens, revolutionary saints, intolerant monks and grasping nobles. Through their remarkable careers we see how a new society, a new culture and a single unified nation came into being.

Drawing on a vast range of original evidence – chronicles, letters, archaeology and artefacts – renowned historian Marc Morris illuminates a period of history that is only dimly understood, separates the truth from the legend, and tells the extraordinary story of how the foundations of England were laid.
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‘A rich trove of ancient wonders’ IAN MORTIMER

‘A fascinating journey into the world of Anglo-Saxon Britain’ THE TIMES, Best Books to Read for Summer

‘A much-needed book – accessible, eminently readable … It’s a gripping story, beautifully told’ BERNARD CORNWELL, author of The Last Kingdom

‘This is top-notch narrative history … A big gold bar of delight’ SPECTATOR

‘A vivid, sharply drawn story of seven centuries of profound political change … Superbly clear and evocative’ THOMAS PENN

‘A thorough and accessible account of this important period’ ELEANOR PARKER, FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Morris guides the reader with aplomb … Rounded and nuanced’ LITERARY REVIEW

‘[A] compelling narrative of this turbulent time’ PIPPA BAILEY, NEW STATESMAN