A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

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Nick Hornby

What could possibly connect Prince, the great twentieth century singer songwriter, and Charles Dickens, the great writer of classics usually stuffed into the hands of adolescents too early? What could these two geniuses, one born in 1812 in England, and the other in 1950s Minneapolis, have in common? 
 
For Nick Hornby, Dickens and Prince are two artists that compare to no others. At the young age of 24, they both had their breakthroughs, Prince with '1999' and Dickens with The Pickwick Papers. At 26, Prince released 'Purple Rain' and Dickens' Oliver Twist was published, and, by 30, both artists were huge stars. 
 
No one else had such a relentless work ethic and produced such a staggeringly original and enormous body of work. Where did their magic come from? How did they use it? And, in the end, did it kill them? 
 
Tracing their lives, from the early years to their relationships with women, their finances to their inability to stop working, Dickens and Prince is a brilliantly surprising and joyous uncovering of the essence of a very particular and unique type of genius.

Dickens and Prince

A Particular Kind of Genius

Alistair Owen

William Boyd

In this probing series of exclusive interviews, Alistair Owen talks to William Boyd about his works and the life which has inspired them. 
 
The conversations which emerge are a deep-dive into film, art, theatre, literature and the life of a writer. This is one of Britain's most beloved authors on what it is to write in a variety of forms.

The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd

Rob Wilkins

WINNER OF THE 2023 LOCUS AWARD FOR NON-FICTION 
WINNER OF THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION 
 
'Always readable, illuminating and honest. It made me miss the real Terry.' - Neil Gaiman 
 
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At the time of his death in 2015, award-winning and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett was working on his finest story yet - his own. 
 
The creator of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, Terry Pratchett was known and loved around the world for his hugely popular books, his smart satirical humour and the humanity of his campaign work. But that's only part of the picture. 
 
Before his untimely death, Terry was writing a memoir: the story of a boy who aged six was told by his teacher that he would never amount to anything and spent the rest of his life proving him wrong. For Terry lived a life full of astonishing achievements: becoming one of the UK's bestselling and most beloved writers, winning the prestigious Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood. 
 
Now, the book Terry sadly couldn't finish has been written by Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, friend and now head of the Pratchett literary estate. Drawing on his own extensive memories, along with those of the author's family, friends and colleagues, Rob unveils the full picture of Terry's life - from childhood to his astonishing writing career, and how he met and coped with what he called the 'Embuggerance' of Alzheimer's disease. 
 
A deeply moving and personal portrait of the extraordinary life of Sir Terry Pratchett, written with unparalleled insight and filled with funny anecdotes, this is the only official biography of one of our finest authors. 
 
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'Sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully, intimate . . . it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer's working life.' - Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Observer

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes

The Official Biography

John le Carré

A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carré's own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Beginning with his 1940s childhood, it includes accounts of his National Service and his time at Oxford, and his days teaching the 'chinless, pointy-nosed gooseberry-eyed British lords' at Eton. It describes his entry into MI5 and the rise of the Iron Curtain, and the flowering of his career as a novelist in reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall. Through his letters we travel with him from the Second World War period to the immediate moment in which we live. 
 
We find le Carré writing to Sir Alec Guinness to persuade him to take on the role of George Smiley, and later arguing the immorality of the War on Terror with the chief of the German internal security service. What emerges is a portrait not only of the writer, or of the global intellectual, but, in his own words, of the very private, very passionate and very real man behind the name.

A Private Spy

The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020

James Patterson

HIS BEST STORIES ARE THE STORIES OF HIS LIFE 
 
· His father grew up in a New York poorhouse called the 'Pogie' 
· He worked at a psychiatric hospital where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell. Both were patients 
· He was at Woodstock and was also an usher at the Fillmore East 
· He was CEO of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson North America when he was thirty-seven. He wrote the ad jingle, 'I'm a Toys 'R' Us Kid' 
· He once watched Norman Mailer and James Baldwin square off to fight 
· He's played golf with three US presidents and has nine holes-in-one 
· Dolly Parton sang Happy Birthday to him over the phone. She calls him Jimmy James 
 
James says, 'I always wanted to write the kind of novel that is read and re-read so many times the binding breaks, and the book literally falls apart, pages scattered in the wind. I'm still working on that one.'

James Patterson: The Stories of My Life

Malachy Tallack

Shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award 2022 
 
Growing up in Shetland with its myriad lochs and burns, Malachy Tallack and his brother would roam the island in search of trout, and in so doing discovered a sense of freedom, of wonder - and an abiding passion. 
 
But why is it that fishing - or the mere contemplation of catching a fish - can be so thrilling and so captivating? 
 
Why is it that time spent beside water can be imprinted so sharply in memory? 
 
Why is it that what seems a simple act - of casting a line, waiting and hoping - can leave so much room for mystery? 
 
Here award-winning author and singer-songwriter Malachy Tallack tells the story of his own infatuation with fishing, a pastime that has brought him joy (and frustration) since early childhood. And in bringing together memoir, nature writing and reflections on culture and history, he explores why angling means so much to so many. 
 
Beautifully written and hugely engaging, it is a book about attention, about nature, and that sense of wonder; it is about a way of engaging with the world, of reaching out - and feeling it reach back.

Illuminated By Water

Nature, Memory and the Delights of a Fishing Life

Elizabeth Boyle

Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty. All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning. 
 
Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she knew how - by immersing herself in the literature that has been her first love and life's work for over two decades. 
 
Fierce Appetites is the exhilarating and deeply humane result. Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedevilled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion and occasional dark humour. 
 
Fierce Appetites is captivating and original - as an insight into the mind and heart of a groundbreaking scholar, and as a wise and reassuring account of what it is to be human.

Fierce Appetites

Lessons from my year of untamed thinking

Loving, losing and living to excess in my present and in the writings of the past

Justin Webb

'Searingly honest... gripping... fascinating and hugely entertaining.'- Sunday Times 
 
'Moving and frank ... A story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s.'- Misha Glenny 
 
'A crisp, unself-pitying memoir of a 'trainwreck' youth ... I've always likes Webb on the radio. But I like him much more after reading this book. He offers precisely the kind of brisk honesty and considered analysis he expects from his interviewees. Our politicians should all read it, and step up their game.' -Telegraph 
......................................................................................................................................................... 
 
Justin Webb's childhood in the 1970s was far from ordinary. 
 
Between his mother's un-diagnosed psychological problems, and his step-father's untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn't much better. 
 
Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is as much a portrait of a troubled era as it is the story of a dysfunctional childhood, shaping the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now. 
........................................................................................................................................ 
 
'I thoroughly enjoyed Justin Webb's bonkers childhood. He captures the middle class of the age with a tenacity only possible in one of its victims.' -Jeremy Paxman

The Gift of a Radio

My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

Clover Stroud

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'With brutal, beautiful honesty, Clover articulates how bereavement shocks and dislocates - and in all the pain, there's SO much life.' MARIAN KEYES 
 
'MUST READ ... A remarkable acount of love and grief.' - DAILY MAIL 
 
'She is a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life's horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on.' SPECTATOR 
............................................... 
 
'Can death bring something good to my life?' 
 
A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. 
 
It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human. 
 
'A beautiful addition to the literature of loss. It will serve as a lit match, to be passed from one person to the next in the darkest moments.' THE SUNDAY TIMES

The Red of my Blood

A Death and Life Story

Kevin Birmingham

In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? 
 
The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. As reports of his trial tore through Europe, readers asked themselves: could the instincts of nihilism, the philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, also drive a man to murder? Showing how both men's lives were directed by the intoxicating new ideas swirling around Europe in the nineteenth century, The Sinner and the Saint also reveals why they still appal and entice us today. Thrilling and definitive, this is the story of a masterpiece.

The Sinner and the Saint

Dostoevsky, a Crime and Its Punishment

Claire Tomalin

How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction? 
 
From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds transformed his life and catapulted him to international fame; he became the writer who most inspired Orwell and countless others, and predicted men walking on the moon seventy years before it happened. 
 
In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today.

The Young H.G. Wells

Changing the World

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker win - the first by a Black woman - was a revolutionary moment both for British culture and for her. After three decades as a trailblazing writer, teacher and activist, she moved from the margins to centre stage, taking her place in the spotlight at last. Her journey was a long one, but she made it, and she made history. 
 
MANIFESTO is Bernardine Evaristo's intimate and inspirational, no-holds-barred account of how she did it, refusing to let any barriers stand in her way. She charts her creative rebellion against the mainstream and her life-long commitment to the imaginative exploration of 'untold' stories. And drawing deeply on her own experiences, she offers a vital contribution to current conversations around social issues such as race, class, feminism, sexuality and aging. 
 
This is a unique book about staying true to yourself and to your vision. It's about how to be unstoppable - in your craft, your work, your life. It is Bernardine Evaristo's manifesto for never giving up.

Manifesto

A radically honest and inspirational memoir from the Booker Prize winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

Richard Zenith

For many thousands of readers Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is almost a way of life. Ironic, haunting and melancholy, this completely unclassifiable work is the masterpiece of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic writers. 
 
 Richard Zenith's Pessoa at last allows us to understand this extraordinary figure. Some eighty-five years after his premature death in Lisbon, where he left over 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) can now be celebrated as one of the great modern poets. Setting the story of his life against the nationalistic currents of European history, Zenith charts the heights of Pessoa's explosive imagination and literary genius. 
 
 Much of Pessoa's charm and strangeness came from his writing under a variety of names that he used to write in wildly varied styles with different imagined personalities. Zenith traces the back stories of virtually all of these invented others, called 'heteronyms', demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. Zenith's monumental work confirms the power of Pessoa's words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life.

Pessoa

An Experimental Life

Rosita Boland

'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are: 
 
A close companion. 
An intimate associate or friend. 
 
The third one is: 
A fellow soldier. 
 
My friends have been all those things to me.' 
 
In this stunning essay collection, award-winning journalist Rosita Boland explores the many friendships that have shaped her life. Surprising and beautiful, she writes about the imaginary friends of early childhood, books that have provided companionship and joy, kindred spirits met while travelling, the friend she hoped might become something more, and also the friendships that become lost over time. 
 
Life-affirming, affecting and wise, Comrades is a powerful exploration of what it is to live, to connect, and to be human in this world.

Comrades

A Lifetime of Friendships

Amartya Sen

Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen, home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, the little university town of Santiniketan, where he was raised as much by his grandparents as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19. 
 
Home in the World shows how Sen's experience shaped his ideas - about economics, philosophy, identity, community, famines, gender inequality, social choice and the power of discussion in public life. The joys of learning and the importance of friendship are powerfully conveyed. He invokes some of the great thinkers of the past and his own time - from Ashoka in the third century BC and Akbar in the sixteenth, to David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Maurice Dobb, Kenneth Arrow and Eric Hobsbawm. Above all, Sen emphasises the importance of enlarging our views as much as we can, of human sympathy and understanding across time and distance, and of being at home in the world.

Home in the World

A Memoir

Gavanndra Hodge

When Gavanndra Hodge was seven years old her world was a precarious place. Her father was a hairdresser and drug dealer to Chelsea's most decadent inhabitants; her mother an alcoholic ex-model. So, it was up to Gavanndra to keep her sister safe. 
 
But when Candy dies suddenly on holiday aged nine, Gavanndra's family, already so fragile and damaged, implodes. 
 
With only memories of Candy's awful final moments, Gavanndra embarks on a journey to write her way back to the little girl whose death tore her family apart. 
 
The Consequences of Love is a story of loss and recovery, trauma and memory. It is a joyous and compelling account of the strength of the love between sisters and how nothing is ever truly lost if we are brave enough to return to where we began.

The Consequences of Love

Will Self

Will's mother's hokey homily, Waste not, want not... hisses in his ears as he oscillates furiously on the spot, havering on the threshold between the bedroom and the dying one... all the while cradling the plastic leech of the syringe in the crook of his arm. Oscillating furiously, and, as he presses the plunger home a touch more... and more, he hears it again and again: Waaaste nooot, waaant nooot..! whooshing into and out of him, while the blackness wells up at the periphery of his vision, and his hackneyed heart begins to beat out weirdly arrhythmic drum fills - even hitting the occasional rim-shot on his resonating rib cage. He waits, paralysed, acutely conscious, that were he simply to press his thumb right home, it'll be a cartoonish death: That's all folks! as the aperture screws shut forever.

Will

Benjamin Moser

Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant, serious mind combined with her striking image, her rigorous intellectualism and her ground-breaking inquiries into what was then seen as 'low culture' - celebrity, photographs, camp - propelled her into her own unique, inimitable category and made her famous the world over, emblematic of twentieth-century New York literary glamour. 
 
 
Sontag is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted personal archives and on hundreds of interviews conducted with many people around the world who spoke freely for the first time about Susan Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait of an endlessly complex, dazzling woman; one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, who lived one of its most fascinating lives.

Sontag

Her Life

Clare Pollard

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? 
 How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? 
 And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? 
 
Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of Clare Pollard's childhood reading and her re-discovery of the classic tales as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think.

Fierce Bad Rabbits

The Tales Behind Children's Picture Books

Zadie Smith

There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. Written in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, as the global situation changed almost hourly, Intimations is a series of six deeply personal essays responding to the ever-evolving experience of lockdown. Crafted with Zadie's trademark intelligence, wit and style but also suffused with a striking intimacy and tenderness, these essays attempt to organize the feelings and thoughts that the events of 2020 so far have provoked. A vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love, Intimations is an essential book in extraordinary times.

Intimations

Six Essays

Clare Carlisle

Søren Kierkegaard is now celebrated as the father of existentialism - yet his contemporaries described as a philosopher of the heart. In the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen analysing love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious longing and defiance, and forging a new philosophical style rooted in the inward drama of being human. His restless creativity was spurred on by own failures: his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, haunted him throughout his life. Though tormented by the pressures of celebrity, he lived amidst the crowds in Copenhagen, known by everyone but, he felt, understood by no one. When he collapsed exhausted at the age of 42, he was still pursuing the question of existence: how to be a human being in this world? 
 
Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's remarkable life as far as possible from his own perspective, conveying what it was like to be this Socrates of Christendom - as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards

Philosopher of the Heart

The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

Susan Sontag

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh

Diaries 1964-1980

With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective, Sontag's diaries reveal the inner workings of her mind, her insecurities and her passions. This compelling account of the evolution of America's greatest post-war intellectual allows us to behold the moral and political awakening of the artist and critic.

Reborn

Early Diaries 1947-1963

Seymour M. Hersh

Seymour Hersh's fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every major newspaper in the English-speaking world, honours galore, and no small amount of controversy. In this memoir he describes what drove him and how, even when working for some of the US's most prestigious publications, he worked as an independent outsider. Here, he tells the stories behind his own groundbreaking stories as he chases leads, cultivates sources, and grapples with the weight of what he uncovers, daring to challenge official narratives handed down from the powers that be. In telling these stories, Hersh divulges previously unreported information about some of his biggest scoops, including the My Lai massacre and the horrors at Abu Ghraib. This is essential reading on the power of the printed word at a time when good journalism is under fire as never before.

Reporter

David Gilmour

'Superb, beautifully written, touching and occasionally very funny' Andrew Roberts 
 
David Gilmour's superb biography of Rudyard Kipling is the first to show how the life and work of the great writer mirrored the trajectory of the British Empire, from its zenith to its final decades. His famous poem 'Recessional' celebrated Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, but his last poems warned of the dangers of Nazism, and in those intervening years Kipling, himself an icon of the Empire, was transformed from an apostle of success to a prophet of national decline. As Gilmour makes clear, Kipling's mysterious stories and poetry deeply influenced the way his readers saw both themselves and the British Empire, and they continue to challenge us today. 
 
'A fine, fair and generous work ... Gilmour's celebrated life of Curzon demonstrated his mastery of imperial nuance and esoteric character, and he brings to this book just the right combination of empathy, distaste and 
fastidious detachment ... there is never a flaccid line, and never a hasty judgement' Jan Morris, New Statesman 
 
'Every now and again a book comes along that sheds new light on a life we thought we knew. David Gilmour's beautifully-written biography of Rudyard Kipling is just such a work ... This is literary biography at its very finest' George Rosie, Sunday Herald 
 
'An enthralling biography of a mind ... essential reading for anyone who cares about how a writer finds, and passionately lives, his subject' Ruth Padel, Daily Telegraph 
 
'The best Kipling biography yet written ... Gilmour's account of this driven man shines with intelligence' J. B. Pick, Scotsman

The Long Recessional

The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling

Colm Tóibín

'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses 
 
In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce - and examines their earliest influences: their fathers. With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn't feed his own family. This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

Didier Eribon

"There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... 
 
Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class, shame in relation to the milieu in which I grew up, why, when once I had arrived in Paris and started meeting people from such different class backgrounds, I would often find myself lying about my class origins... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?" 
 
Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what it means to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times.

Returning to Reims

Deborah Levy

What does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom? 
 
In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience: embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.

The Cost of Living

Living Autobiography 2

Dawn French

This is Dawn French's fabulously inventive take on modern life - the twists and turns, the surprises, the hurts and the delights. Yes, especially those. It's a way for readers to take a lovely ramble through the year together with Dawn. Think of it as Dawn's diary, with places for the reader to personalize the book with their own thoughts and experiences . . . perfection.

Me. You. Not a Diary

The No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller

Hilary Spurling

Peerless literary biographer Hilary Spurling turns her attention to Anthony Powell, an iconic figure of English letters. Equally notorious for his literary achievements and his lacerating wit, Powell famously authored the twelve-volume, twenty-five year magnum opus, A Dance to the Music of Time. This enduringly fascinating portrait of mid-20th-century Britain has never been out of print, inspiring TV and radio adaptations and elevating the author to The Times' list of fifty greatest British writers since 1945. 
 
Master novelist, well-connected socialite and keen-eyed social observer, Powell comes into focus as never before in this authoritative biography from one of our generation's greatest biographers.

Anthony Powell

Dancing to the Music of Time

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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