Adam Henson is perhaps the best-known farmer in the UK, presenting on BBC's Countryfile to millions of viewers each Sunday evening. He's also appeared on Lambing Live, Secret Britain, Coast and Inside Out. Adam also runs the award-winning Cotswold Farm Park in Gloucestershire, which welcomes family visitors all year round and is home to many rare breeds. He has a monthly column in Countryfile magazine, as well as the Cotswold Life magazine. He has written several books including the Sunday Times bestseller Like Farmer, Like Son. This is his first children's book and it is the perfect introduction to the farm.

Adam Henson

Adam Henson presents Countryfile, often from his 650-hectare farm in the Cotswolds. Having studied Agriculture at college, Adam took over Bemborough Farm from his father, Joe. The farm now grows wheat, spring barley and oilseed rape, runs a flock of 400 commercial ewes and has the UK's leading collection of rare breeds, many of which are in demand for film sets and advertisements. Cotswold Farm Park (www.cotswoldfarmpark.co.uk) offers a total countryside experience for all the family, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors each year. 
 
Adam presented Lambing Live with Kate Humble, writes for Countryfile magazine and has appeared on Radio 4's On Your Farm and Farming Today. He is the author of three previous books, Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land, the Sunday Times bestseller, Like Farmer, Like Son and A Farmer and His Dog.

Adam Higginbotham writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, Businessweek, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and The Atavist. He began his career in magazines and newspapers in London, where he was the editor-­in-chief of The Face and a contributing editor at The Sunday Telegraph. The author of Midnight in Chernobyl, he lives in New York City.

Adam Higginbotham

Adam Hills is an internationally recognised comedian and host of award-winning Channel 4 show The Last Leg. His collection of stories from a life in comedy, Best Foot Forward, was a Times bestseller.

Adam Hills

Adam Howling

Adam J. Kurtz

Adam Jacot de Boinod

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for his second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Orphan Master’s Son (‘Excavates the very meaning of life’ New York Times). His short story 'Nirvana' won the prestigious Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of acclaimed story collections, Fortune Smiles and Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives with his family in San Francisco.

Adam Johnson

Adam Kay is a former doctor who has written five million books and sold seven copies. No, hang on – he’s written seven books and sold five million copies. His debut book, This is Going to Hurt, is a literary sensation: a Sunday Times number one bestseller for over a year, winning a record-breaking four National Book Awards and selling over 3 million copies. Kay adapted This is Going to Hurt as a BAFTA-winning comedy-drama series for the BBC. Adam Kay’s children’s books have been translated into 32 languages and sold over 1 million copies, making him one of the UK’s bestselling children’s authors. Kay’s Anatomy became the fastest-selling children’s general non-fiction hardback of the decade. His first picture book, Amy Gets Eaten, was published in 2023, and his first children’s novel, Dexter Procter the Ten-Year-Old Doctor, was published in September 2024.

Adam Kay

Adam studied illustration and animation, and received a BA followed by an MA from the Edinburgh College of Art. As a student he won a competition to create a short film for MOMI and Channel 4, and once his career producing animated commercials was under way, he became an illustrator as well. He has regular columns in the UK and the US.

Adam Larkum

Adam Lashinsky

Adam Macqueen

Adam Mars-Jones

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Adam O'Riordan

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Adam Phillips

Adam Rackley

Adam Richardson is the UK's top trending health and fitness coach with a rapidly growing audience across both TikTok and Instagram. Adam is passionate about removing barriers to exercise and movement, a philosophy that is key to his work as a Personal Trainer in which he strives to help his clients feel more confident, as well as more fit and healthy.

Adam Richardson

Adam Roberts is acknowledged as the senior scholar of international relations in the UK. He was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University 1986-2007, and President of the British Academy 2009-13 - the head of humanities in Britain. He was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2002-08), a member of the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board (2003-15) and is now on the Board of Advisers of the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is the author of The Amateur Gourmet and Secrets of the Best Chefs, and coauthor of Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 and currently writes The Amateur Gourmet Newsletter on Substack. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog, Winston. Food Person is his first novel.

Adam Robinson is based in the Middle East and is a regular contributor to newspapers in the Arab world and also to the British media. He is the author of numerous books on the region, including Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.

Adam Robinson

Adam Ross

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and geneticist at University College London. His books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans, and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Argue with a Racist. He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC radio and television, including Inside Science and The Cell. Adam has also worked as a science advisor on many films, including the Oscar-winning Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).

Adam Rutherford

Adam Smith

Adam Smyth runs the 39 Step Press, an experiment in printing, from a cold barn in Oxfordshire. He is also Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Adam Smyth

Adam Sweeting

Adam Tandy

Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992 and he has published two books of stories and ten further novels, most recently Missing Fay (2017), and six poetry collections. 
 
 
www.adamthorpe.net

Adam Thorpe

Adam Tooze is the author of the highly praised Crashed, The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction, all published by Allen Lane. He has been the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Tooze has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

Adam Tooze

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Penelope Lively

The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the family, she began to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. 
 
In a needlework sampler, she sees her grandmother and the wartime children that she sheltered under her roof in 1940. Potted meat jars remind her of the ritual of doing the flowers for church. The smell of the harness room brings her Aunt Rachel - avant-garde artist, fervent horserider - vividly back to life. 
 
In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively delves into the domestic past of her former home, and tells of her own youth and the contrasts between life today and the way they lived then.

A House Unlocked

Alexander Aciman

Emmett Rensin

From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF. 
From Paradise Lost: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL. 
Perhaps you once asked yourself, 'What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince his words, muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub?' No doubt such questions would have been swiftly resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com. This, in essence, is Twitterature. 
From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN??? 
Here are over 60 of the greatest works of literature - from Beowulf to Bronte, Kafka to Kerouac, Dostoevsky to Dickens - distilled in the voice of Twitter to their pithiest essence, providing everything you need to master the literature of the civilised world, while relieving you of the task of reading it. 
From Dante's Inferno: I'm havin a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone.

Twitterature

The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter

Robin Lane Fox

This remarkable and original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal.

Travelling Heroes

Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer

William Shakespeare

These are Shakespeare's greatest writings on power in all its forms - in love, in war, in politics and in the family. From Macbeth's vaulting ambition to Richard II's fragile grip on authority, from the violent rivalries of King Lear to the exquisite poetry of the love sonnets, these pieces show, with philosophical subtlety and psychological acuity, how we manipulate and dominate each other. 
 
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

On Power

Jonathan Bate

How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned? 
 
Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, Soul of the Age leads us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colourful and often violent world that shaped and informed Shakespeare's thinking. Written by one of the world's leading experts, it combines almost everything there is to know about the man and his work in one sensational narrative, and brings us closer than ever to understanding what being Shakespeare was actually like.

Soul of the Age

The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare

Michio Kaku

Physics of the Impossible takes us on a journey to the frontiers of science and beyond, giving us an exhilarating insight into what we can really hope to achieve in the future. 
 
Everyday we see that what was once declared 'impossible' by scientists has become part of our everyday lives: fax machines, glass sky-scrapers, gas-powered automobiles and a worldwide communications network. Here internationally bestselling author Micho Kaku confidently hurdles today's frontier of science, revealing the actual possibilities of perpetual motion, force fields, invisibility, ray guns, anti-gravity and anti-matter, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots and cyborgs, time travel, zero-point energy, even extraterrestrial life. And he shows how few of these ideas actually violate the laws of physics. 
 
Where does the realm of science fiction end? What can we really hope to achieve? 'Anything that is not impossible, is mandatory!' declares Kaku in this lucid, entertaining and enlightening read.

Physics of the Impossible

A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel

Anne Fadiman

Butterflies, ice-cream, writing at night, playing word games...in this witty, intimate and delicious book Anne Fadiman ruminates on her passions, both literary and everyday. From mourning the demise of letter-writing to revealing a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from Balzac's coffee addiction to making ice-cream from Liquid Nitrogen, she draws us into a world of hedonistic pleasures and literary delights. This is the perfect book for life's ardent obsessives.

At Large and at Small

Confessions of a Literary Hedonist

George Orwell

Beginning with a dilemma about whether he spends more money on reading or smoking, George Orwell&rsquo;s entertaining and uncompromising essays go on to explore everything from the perils of second-hand bookshops to the dubious profession of being a critic, from freedom of the press to what patriotism really means. 
 
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves &ndash; and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives &ndash; and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Books v. Cigarettes

Marcel Proust

In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. 
 
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves &ndash; and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives &ndash; and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Days of Reading

Alison Light

Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants &ndash; cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write. 
 
Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, Alison Light chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century&rsquo;s greatest writers.

Mrs Woolf and the Servants

Valerie Grove

Novelist, playwright and barrister John Mortimer has led an extraordinarily rich life, privately and professionally, much of it in the public eye. His own writings, from the play A Voyage Round My Father to the memoirs Clinging to the Wreckage and Murderers and Other Friends, have given his many fans plenty of insights. But now for the first time a biographer has had full access to Mortimer, his circle of friends and colleagues, and their diaries and letters. The result is a riveting account of the life of one of the great figures of our time. A Voyage Round John Mortimer is revealing of many aspects of Mortimer's legal and literary career, from his first attempts at writing novels and the early help he offered his barrister father through to the great triumphs of Rumpole and the Oz trial.

A Voyage Round John Mortimer

Charles Nicholl

In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster &ndash; it is the only occasion his spoken words are recorded. The case seems routine &ndash; a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry &ndash; but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist&rsquo;s famously obscure life-story. Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating episode in Shakespeare&rsquo;s life. Marshalling evidence from a wide variety of sources, including previously unknown documentary material on the Mountjoys, he conjures up a detailed and compelling description of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked, and in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure and King Lear.

The Lodger

Shakespeare on Silver Street

Stanley Wells

'Enjoyable, lively &hellip; such a pleasure to read &hellip; renders the drama of Shakespeare&rsquo;s contemporaries more than fringe entertainment&rsquo; Independent 
 
Shakespeare is one of the greatest of all English figures, considered a genius for all time. Yet as this enthralling book shows, he was at heart a man of the theatre, one among a community of artists in the teeming world of Renaissance London &ndash; from the enigmatic spy Christopher Marlowe to the self-aggrandizing Ben Jonson, from the actor Richard Burbage to the brilliant Thomas Middleton. By bringing Shakespeare&rsquo;s contemporaries to life, Shakespeare &amp; Co throws fresh new light on the man himself. 
 
&lsquo;Warm, cheerful, generous &hellip; Wells sketches a whole gallery of Shakespeare&rsquo;s fellow playwrights &hellip; He brings each vividly to life, making you feel that you&rsquo;ve met them personally in some Blackfriars tavern&rsquo; Simon Callow 
 
&lsquo;It was a time and place teeming with excitement, anecdote and incident, and Wells, in this richly enjoyable work, brings it to life with a novelist&rsquo;s sense of the telling detail&rsquo; Dominic Dromgoole 
 
&lsquo;Enthralling&rsquo; Observer 
 
&lsquo;This is one of the most sane and exciting books on Shakespeare I have read for a long time&rsquo; Scotland on Sunday

Shakespeare and Co.

Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story

Leonard Cohen

Book of Longing is Leonard Cohen's first book of new poetry since Book of Mercy was published two decades ago. It collects Cohen's poetry written between the 1980s and the present, and also includes his wonderfully witty and sensuous illustrations, including numerous playful self-portraits. The illustrations interact with, and complement, the poetry in unexpected and fascinating ways. Book of Longing demonstrates the range and depth of Cohen's work, revealing an extraordinary gift of language and visual art that speak with rare clarity, passion and timelessness.

Book of Longing

Heloise

Peter Abelard

The illicit relationship between Peter Abelard, a medieval philosopher, and his young pupil Heloise is one of history&rsquo;s most legendary and tragic love affairs. From reckless ecstasy to public scandal and cruel separation, their eloquent and intimate letters tell the story of their passionate, doomed romance. 
 
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love&rsquo;s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love&hellip;.

Forbidden Fruit

From the Letters of Abelard and Heloise

Robert Crawford

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland&rsquo;s rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. 
 
In Scotland&rsquo;s Books poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish writing and its relationship to the country&rsquo;s history. Stretching from the medieval masterpiece of St Columba&rsquo;s Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the imaginative, thriving world of twenty-first-century writing with authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding collection traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavour of the original work, full quotations in their own language, previously unpublished works by authors and plenty of new research. Informative and readable, this is the definitive guide to the marvellous legacy of Scottish literature.

Scotland's Books

The Penguin History of Scottish Literature

Aesop

Sardonic, wry and wise, Aesop&rsquo;s Fables are some of the most enduring and well-loved literary creations in history. In a series of pithy, amusing vignettes, Aesop created a vivid cast of characters to demonstrate different aspects of human nature. Here we see a wily fox outwitted by a quick-thinking cicada, a tortoise triumphing over a self-confident hare and a fable-teller named Aesop silencing those who mock him. Each jewel-like fable provides a warning about the consequences of wrong-doing, as well as offering a glimpse into the everyday lives of Ancient Greeks.

Aesop's Fables

John Stubbs

John Donne's life story is inextricably tied up with the fabric of a society in the throes of religious persecution. His family had long been subject to the terror inflicted upon Catholics under the reign of Elizabeth I, and while his brother languished in prison, and his mother and uncles fled to exile in Europe, Donne was consumed by the question of his own faith and by trying to figure out what it is that connects human beings - and keeps them apart. 
 
In his biography of Donne, John Stubbs chronicles not only a long and bitter sectarian conflict, but also the love story of a young couple who broke the rules of their society, and paid the ultimate price. 
 
From the raucous streets of late sixteenth-century London to the personal and political intrigues of Donne's family and public life, from the horrors of the Reformation to the delight of Donne's poetry, John Stubbs' book is a vivid, dazzling biography of an extraordinary man, as well as a compelling portrait of England at a time of bewildering transformation..

John Donne

The Reformed Soul

Ed Glinert

From the Globe at Bankside to the Wimpole Street home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London is, and always has been, crammed with literary life.  Playwrights, novelists, diarists, poets and essayists throughout the centuries have roamed its streets, met in its cafes and retaurants and strolled in its parks and gardens.   They have been inspired by its monuments, churches, law courts and theatres and have created fictional Londoners as diverse as Mr Pickwick, Sherlock Holmes, Bertie Wooster, Mrs Dalloway and Winston Smith, whose fortunes are played out against a London backdrop.   This updated edition of The Penguin Literary Guide to London is a must for all book lovers and readers.

Literary London

A Street by Street Exploration of the Capital's Literary Heritage

David Lodge

In 2004 three major novels featuring Henry James as a character were published - one of them went on to win the Booker Prize. It was not David Lodge's AUTHOR AUTHOR. In this fascinating new book, a kind of postscript to his novel, Lodge traces the conception, writing and publication of his book, and reveals with extraordinary candour and revealingly comic moments the poignancy and indeed anguish of discovering too late that others were working on the same subject, and the odd feelings of rivalry and jealousy that this engendered. The result is a wonderfully comic work with serious psychological and literary insights which suggestsnothing less than a short story by the Great Master, James, himself.

The Year of Henry James

The Story of a Novel

John Armstrong

Is it possible to be truly happy? In an imperfect world, how can we live well with what we have, and accept what we don&rsquo;t have? 
 
In Love, Life, Goethe, John Armstrong looks at the life of the renowned yet often misunderstood writer Goethe to show the surprising ways in which we can learn from him, whether in love, suffering, friendship or family. He shows how relevant Goethe is to the way we live today, and how he wanted (much the same as us) to live life well. From work to our relationships to money and success, John Armstrong explores the main themes of our existence through Goethe, and helps us learn how to live.

Love, Life, Goethe

How to be Happy in an Imperfect World

Dominic Dromgoole

'An absolute delight ... boozy, bawdy, generous-hearted ... utterly original and relishable' Sunday Times 
 
Shakespeare has always been a big part of Dominic Dromgoole's life. This is the story of how he has stumbled, shambled and occasionally glided through the years with Shakespeare as his guide - whether reading Julius Caesar aloud to cows as a boy, listening to Peter O'Toole crack dirty jokes at his parents' kitchen table, acting in car-crash student productions or putting on his own. Along the way he shows us what Shakespeare's rough-and-ready genius can teach us about love, war, sex, death, drunkenness, friendship ... and just about everything. 
 
'Friendly, inclusive, I warmed to it immediately ... A terrific book' Evening Standard 
 
'The book is clearly a triumph ... You laugh out loud and cringe in equal measure' Spectator 
 
'Superb ... thrillingly entertaining ... throbs with vigour, honesty and passion' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A record of a lifelong obsession - articulate, intelligent and passionately set down ... Dromgoole's enthusiasm has a sincerity and warmth that are infectious' Observer 
 
'Irresistibly seductive' Independent on Sunday

Will and Me

How Shakespeare Took Over My Life

Apollonius of Rhodes

A hero will have his day ... 
 
It is a task that no man has ever completed: to bring back a magical ram's fleece that lies hidden in a far-off land, guarded by an all-seeing serpent. But one man, Jason, must try. His life depends on it. 
 
Upon the orders of the King, Jason must cross deadly seas with the crew of his ship, the Argo, negotiate treacherous clashing rocks, fight fire-breathing bulls and confront the terror of the harpies before claiming his prize - and winning the heart of the witch-princess Medea.

Jason and the Golden Fleece

Thomas Malory

He was born to be King. But he would die for his people ... 
 
From the moment he draws the sword Excalibur from a magic stone, King Arthur is hailed as the saviour of England. With his loyal band of brothers, the Knights of the Round Table, he reigns over a golden age of chivalry and enchantment. 
 
But dark forces are stirring in the land. Sir Launcelot's fatal attraction to Arthur's beautiful wife Guenever threatens to divide the realm. And when the scheming Mordred tries to usurp the King, one last epic battle must be fought on English soil ...

King Arthur's Last Battle

Jesse Byock

In a land of ice, great warriors search for glory... 
 
When a dragon threatens the people of the north, only one man can destroy the fearsome beast. Elsewhere, a mighty leader gathers a court of champions, including a noble warrior under a terrible curse. The Earth's creation is described; tales of the gods and evil Frost Giants are related; and the dark days of Ragnarok foretold. 
 
Journey into a realm of legend, where heroes from an ancient age do battle with savage monsters, and every man must live or die by the sword ...

Sagas and Myths of the Northmen

Herodotus

A king who would be worshipped as a god... 
 
When Xerxes, King of Persia, crosses the Hellespont at the head of a formidable army, it seems inevitable that Greece will be crushed beneath its might. But the Greeks are far harder to defeat than he could ever have imagined. 
 
As storms lash the Persian ships, and sinister omens predict a cruel fate for the expedition, Xerxes strives onward, certain his enemies will accept him as their king. But as he soon discovers, the Greeks will sacrifice anything, even their lives, to keep their liberty...

Xerxes Invades Greece

David Crystal

Ben Crystal

This compilation, in the tradition of the Victorian miscellany, gathers together essential facts and fascinating insights into the plays and poems, the man behind them (insofar as this is known), and the context in which he worked. Put together by an actor and a linguist - the pair who brought you 'Shakespeare's Words' (25000 copies sold to date) - it will be quirky, illuminating and endlessly interesting. Topics covered include lost plays, what he would have studied at school, Shakespeare's pronunciation, why the Globe burned down and the difference between a Folio and a Quarto.

The Shakespeare Miscellany

Tahar Ben Jelloun

In this extraordinary non-fiction novel, based on a true story, Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971, took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of Morocco. With sixty others Salim was incarcerated in a secret prison complex in the Moroccan desert: he was to remain there for nearly twenty years. 
 
 
 
In starkly eloquent, beautiful prose, Ben Jelloun relates the prisoners' experiences as they struggle to survive. The son of a witty, feckless courtier who disowns him, Salim tells stories to keep sane - from the suras of his beloved Koran to the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even in the darkest, most terrible conditions, sympathy, insight, the human quest for meaning and understanding, never desert Salim. The resulting novel is a wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human spirit and its determination to survive. 
 
 
 
'A masterpiece' Judges of the IMPAC award 
 
 
 
'a sad and splendid book' New York Times Book Review

This Blinding Absence of Light

Francis Bacon

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. 
Francis Bacon's landmark writings on subjects ranging from anger and ambition, marriage and money to envy and empire established him as the founding father of modern scientific thinking, with his rejection of superstition and his emphasis on proof and experiment, rational enquiry and reasoned argument.

Of Empire

Black Star Series

Blacklist

Set inside Blandings Castle, this comedy series follows Lord Emsworth and his pig Empress as they meet with his dysfunctional family and friends, and the havoc that follows.

Blandings

Blandings Castle

Blood City Rollers

Bloodlines

Blossom Street

Blue Ant

Bluey

Bodyguard

Bodyguard Series

Bollocks to Alton Towers

Book of Dust Series

Borderlands

Born Wicked

Boudica: the last defender of the Celtic culture; the only woman openly to have led her warriors into battle; the only British warrior to have stood against the might of Imperial Rome - and triumphed. 
 
This is her story.

Boudica

Boy Soldier

Brain Chemicals

Brave Bunnies

Bridge

Bridget Jones's Diary

Brief Encounters

Bright Young Things

Brotherband

Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age detectives living in the modern world. Together they head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, ready to solve any of the weird and wonderful crimes that fall across their desks.

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