‘A fascinating and often violent odyssey, spanning more than 1,000 years of conflict and culture’ Independent on Sunday

Centre of the first great Slav civilisation in the tenth century, then divided between warring neighbours for a millennium, Ukraine finally won independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tiring of their own corrupt governments, Ukrainians have since mounted two popular revolutions, taking to the streets to demand fair elections and closer ties to Europe. In the spring of 2014, Russia responded by invading Crimea and sponsoring a civil war in the Russian-speaking Donbass. Threatened by Moscow, misunderstood in the West, Ukraine hangs once more in the balance. Speaking to pro-democracy activists and pro-Russia militiamen, peasants and miners, survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s famine, Anna Reid combines history and travel-writing to unpick the past and present of this bloody and complex borderland.

‘Beautifully written and lovingly researched’ Daily Telegraph
‘Gripping history’ The Times

On a bleak, wintry morning in Victorian England, Dr Ned Courtine arrives in the sleepy cathedral town of Thurchester for a reunion with his former university friend, Austin Fickling. Over 20 years have passed since they last saw each other, and Fickling appears anxious and gaunt, ravaged by a strange, existential guilt. In order to deflect Courtine’s questions from himself, Fickling recounts the story of Thurchester’s ghost, William Burgoyne, once a royalist and treasurer of the cathedral who was murdered in the aftermath of the Civil War. The macabre tale of murder and deception captures Courtine’s imagination, and he finds himself unknowningly drawn into a world of haunting evil.

A masterpiece of Victorian suspense as well as a dazzling meditation on human passions, THE UNBURIED is a murder mystery that lingers – even after all has been resolved.

Kinta Beevor was five years old when she fell in love with her parents’ castle facing the Carrara mountains.

She and her brother ran barefoot, exploring an enchanted world. They searched for wild mushrooms in the hills with Fiore the stonemason, and learned how to tickle trout. The freedom and beauty of life at the castle attracted poets, writers and painters, including D.H. Lawrence and Rex Whistler. The other side to Kinta’s childhood was very different, for it was spent with her formidable great aunt, Janet Ross, in a grand villa outside Florence. But soon the old way of life and Kinta’s idyllic world were threatened by war.

Nostalgic, yet unsentimental and funny, A TUSCAN CHILDHOOD is a book which transports the reader to bohemian, aristocratic Italy and the sound of bells from a distant campanile.

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What is it like to be a brain surgeon?

How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands, to cut through the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason?

How do you live with the consequences when it all goes wrong?

DO NO HARM offers an unforgettable insight into the highs and lows of a life dedicated to operating on the human brain, in all its exquisite complexity. With astonishing candour and compassion, Henry Marsh reveals the exhilarating drama of surgery, the chaos and confusion of a busy modern hospital, and above all the need for hope when faced with life’s most agonising decisions.

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Winner:
PEN Ackerley Prize
South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature

Shortlisted:
Costa Biography Award
Duff Cooper Prize
Wellcome Book Prize
Guardian First Book Award
Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize

Longlisted:
Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction

Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor’s The Second World War never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.

‘I was given H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story at Christmas 1936 and I’ve still got that copy. It was a direct inspiration for me in my career as a historian’ Antonia Fraser

‘It is written in a way that really captured my imagination and which nurtured my interest in the history of our great nation’ David Cameron

‘One of the most influential works of history of the 20th century’ Times Educational Supplement

We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood.

‘Dazzling’ New York Times

‘A tour de force’ Guardian

‘Blazing’ New Yorker

Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomas’s best-known and best-loved work, his radio play completed in 1953 at the very end of his life. It tells the story of a seaside village during one spring day, populated by a cast of curious characters who we meet while still asleep, having wild dreams. Then as dusk and darkness fall at the end of the day, we say ‘Goodnight’, tucking them back into bed, to sleep once more.

Lyrical, funny and moving, Under Milk Wood creates a rich modern pastoral, a tapestry of dreams and reality which has captured the imaginations of generations of readers.

A Welsh epic, a work of poetic genius, a modern classic.

Pamela Mountbatten was born at the end of the 1920s into one of Britain’s grandest families. The daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and his glamorous wife Edwina Ashley, she was brought up by nannies and governesses as she was often parted from her parents as they dutifully carried out their public roles. A solitary child, she learned to occupy her days lost in a book, riding or playing with the family’s animals (which included at different times a honey bear, chameleons, a bush baby, two wallabies, a lion, a mongoose and a coati mundi). Her parents’ vast social circle included royalty, film stars, senior service officers, politicians and celebrities. Noel Coward invited Pamela to watch him filming; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. dropped in for tea and Churchill would call for ‘a word with Dickie’.

After the war, Pamela truly came of age in India, while her parents were the Last Viceroy and Vicereine. This introduction to the country would start a life-long love affair with the people and the place.

‘A phenomenon, a prodigy, a marvel’ Evening Standard

ONE OF THE BBC’S 100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD

A modern classic, this epic tale of families, romance and political intrigue, set in India, never loses its power to delight and enchant readers.

At its core, A Suitable Boy is a love story: the tale of Lata – and her mother’s – attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world’s population faces its first great general election and the chance to map its own destiny.

‘Seth is the best writer of his generation’ The Times

‘Fiction on a grand scale. By the time you reach the last page you will have absorbed a splendid story, full of the tangle and perfume of India’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The greatness of the novel, its unassailable truthfulness, owes less to research than to imagination, an instinctive knowledge of the human heart’ Observer

‘You should make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life’ The Times