82ASK

A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Michael Symmons Roberts

'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS 
 
A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. 
 
The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. 
 
Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision. 
 
Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find. 
 
'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss

Quartet for the End of Time

On Music, Grief and Birdsong

Charles King

'A delicious history of music, power, love, genius, royalty and adventure. Unforgettable' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFORE 
 
'A mesmerising journey through one of the most fascinating and creative moments in human history' AMANDA FOREMAN 
 
London - Dublin, 1741-42. 
An actress mired in scandal plans her escape from an abusive husband. 
A penniless sea captain sets out to rescue the city’s abandoned infants. 
An African Muslim and former captive in the colonies becomes a celebrity. 
A grieving political dissident seeks release from his torment. 
And a great composer to kings – George Frideric Handel – now ill and straining to keep an audience’s attention, faces a decision that will secure his place in history. 
 
'An absolute delight, beautifully told' PETER FRANKOPAN 
 
Evoking a pivotal moment at the birth of modernity, a time of fear, conspiracy and uprising, and featuring some of the most unusual and brilliant personalities of the eighteenth century, Every Valley is a cinematic and moving drama of hope in the darkness and the entangled lives that shaped a masterpiece. 
 
'Fascinating...cinematic...truly informative, imaginative and engaging' Financial Times

Every Valley

The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah

The Story of Handel’s Messiah

Neneh Cherry

A SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, EVENING STANDARD, UNCUT AND ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 
 
Top of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket, and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry. 
 
But navigating fame and family wasn't always simple. In this beautiful and deeply personal memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her as a woman and an artist. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy. 
 
Musician. Songwriter. Collaborator. Activist. Mother. Daughter. Lover. Friend. Icon. This is her story.

A Thousand Threads

Graeme Lawson

Wonderfully engaging, expansive and ambitious, Sound Tracks tells the history of our relationship with music in sixty detective stories, each focusing on the discovery of a musical instrument - or its fragments - in archaeological digs around the world. Taking us from the present day - finding a 100-year-old wax cylinder recording on a flea market - all the way back to the dawn of time - the thrilling discovery of a prehistoric flute - long-lost music is itself reconstructed as we enter the worlds of those who created it. 
 
We feel the delight of a child in Peru in 700 AD, playing with a water-filled pot designed to chirp like a bird; we appreciate the difficult task of a soldier sending signals by trumpet to the next watchtower on Hadrian's Wall; we can almost hear the sounds of the sixty-four bells buried in a tomb in China in the 5th century BC. 
 
Graeme Lawson takes us on a grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries, revealing that music is part of human DNA - not just in its role as pastime, entertainment or religious expression but also as a medium in which we commemorate our pasts, communicate with each other, and shape our identities, relationships and communities. 
 
Written with verve and passion and brimming with astonishing insights, Sound Tracks is an enthralling alternative history of humanity in which the silences of the past are filled with a wonderful treasure hoard of forgotten sounds and voices.

Sound Tracks

A Musical Detective Story

Uncovering Our Musical Past

Clinton Heylin

In 2016 it was announced that Bob Dylan had sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin - author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone) - to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa - as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office - so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers - Dylan himself included - have said is wrong; often as not, a case of, Print the Legend. 
 
This is the second instalment of the definitive biography (following A Restless Hungry Feeling) of one contemporary culture's most iconic and mysterious figures - musical revolutionary, Nobel Prize-winner, chart-topping recording artist. 
 
Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021

‘Far away from Myself’

Amy Key

Is it possible life without romantic love isn't so bad? 
 
An essential memoir about building life on your own terms 
 
***A SUNDAY TIMES AND INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'The book I've been waiting for my entire life' 
DOLLY ALDERTON, author of Everything I Know About Love 
 
'Marks an important shift in ideas about intimacy' 
OBSERVER 
 
'The harbinger of real talent' 
SUNDAY TIMES 
 
When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. 
 
Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed. 
 
With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a book which inspires us to live and love more honestly.

Arrangements in Blue

Notes on Love and Making a Life

Dr. Susan Rogers

Ogi Ogas

'Extraordinary insights about music, emotion and the brain...An instant classic' Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music 
 
This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music. It's also the story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in L.A. to become Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain and one of the most successful female record producers of all time. 
 
Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Dr Susan Rogers takes readers behind the scenes of record-making and leads us to musical self-awareness. She explains that everyone possesses a unique 'listener profile', shows how being musical can mean actively listening, and encourages us to think about the records that define us. Lively and illuminating, this book will refresh your playlists, deepen your connection to artists, and change the way you listen to music. 
 
'Superb... this book can show you how to be a better listener' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'A provocative blend of studio stories and fascinating neuroscience' Alan Light, author of Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain 
 
'Fizzing with energy and insight...a crucial addition to the canon of music must-reads' Kate Hutchinson

This Is What It Sounds Like

What the Music You Love Says About You

Caroline Davison

***WINNER OF THE NEW ANGLE PRIZE FOR LITERATURE*** 
***WINNER OF THE HWA NON-FICTION AWARD*** 
 
A beautifully written exploration of the world of Edwardian folk music, and its influence on the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams 
 
In January 1905 the young Vaughan Williams, not yet one of England's most famous composers, visited Norfolk to find folk songs 'from the mouths of the singers'. An old fisherman, James 'Duggie' Carter, performed 'The Captain's Apprentice', a brutal tale of torture sung to the most beautiful tune the young composer had ever heard. 
 
With this transformational moment at its heart, the book traces the contrasting lives of the well-to-do composer and a forgotten cabin boy who died at sea, and brings fresh perspectives on folk-song collectors, the singers and their songs. 
 
***AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4*** 
 
'A quirky, fascinating read. Davison excels in evoking English landscapes' Sunday Times 
 
'Animated, entertaining... Presenting a richly complex picture of a subject that can all too easily be shrouded in a sentimental haze' Daily Telegraph

The Captain's Apprentice

Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Story of a Folk Song

Ian Macdonald

Revolution in the Head

The Beatles Records and the Sixties

Jarvis Cocker

The Sunday Times bestselling hit memoir from Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. 
 
'It's real gold... its storytelling first class' Sunday Times 
 
What if the things we keep hidden say more about us than those we put on display? 
 
We all have a random collection of the things that made us - photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer. When Jarvis Cocker starts clearing out his loft, he finds a jumble of objects that catalogue his story and ask him some awkward questions: 
 
Who do you think you are? 
 
Are clothes important? 
 
Why are there so many pairs of broken glasses up here? 
 
From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley's Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, this is the hard evidence of Jarvis's unique life, Pulp, 20th century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he'd rather forget. 
 
This is not a life story. It's a loft story. 
 
'Nostalgic, playful and beautifully designed' Daily Mail 
 
'Brilliant...lurid, entertaining' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Terrific... Very funny' Guardian 
 
* A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Daily Mail and Uncut *

Good Pop, Bad Pop

'The definitive, scrupulously researched biography of a life steeped in mystery' Observer 
 
The definitive biography of one contemporary culture's most iconic and mysterious figures - musical revolutionary, Nobel Prize-winner, chart-topping recording artist 
 
In 2016 it was announced that Bob Dylan had sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin - author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone) - to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa - as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office - so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers - Dylan himself included - have said is wrong; often as not, a case of, Print the Legend. 
 
 
With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his arrival in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of his three undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different. That other story will be told in Volume 2, to be published in autumn 2022. 
 
Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1

A Restless Hungry Feeling: 1941-1966

Peter Doggett

Read the definitive biography of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, whose music and career illuminate the legacy of 1960s counterculture. 
 
Between 1969 and 1974, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were the most successful, influential and politically potent rock band in America. More than any of their peers, they channelled and broadcast all the radical anger, romantic idealism and generational angst of their era. The vast emotional range of their music, from delicate acoustic confessionals to raucous counter-culture anthems, was mirrored in the turbulence of their personal lives. 
 
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is the first major biography of a band whose first two albums are undisputed rock classics, and which continues to attract a large and loyal following to their sporadic reunions. At the same time, Peter Doggett illuminates the pivotal years of 1960s counterculture through the story of four of its key protagonists, whose music, beliefs and relationships with each other chronicle both its trajectory and its legacy. 
 
'A fascinating, rip-roaring and timely re-telling of a corner of music history' Frank Turner

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

The definitive biography

Ian Marchant

‘My book of the year. Extraordinary’ The Times 
 
 A new history of counterculture in the UK, from the release of Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 to the passing of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994 
 
Deep in a wood in the Marches of Wales, in an ancient school bus there lives an old man called Bob Rowberry. 
 
A Hero for High Times is the story of how he ended up in this broken-down bus. It's also the story of his times, and the ideas that shaped him. It's a story of why you know your birth sign, why you have friends called Willow, why sex and drugs and rock’n’roll once mattered more than money, why dance music stopped the New-Age Travellers from travelling, and why you need to think twice before taking the brown acid. 
 
It’s also a story of friendship between two men, one who did things, and one who thought about things, between theory and practice, between a hippie and a punk, between two gentlemen, no longer in the first flush of youth, who still believe in love. 
 
 ‘This amiable and engaging blog-doc is an Odyssey for elective outsiders’ Iain Sinclair, Guardian

A Hero for High Times

A Younger Reader’s Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New-Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 1956–1994

Nick Coleman

***ONE OF BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN MUSIC BOOKS OF 2018*** 
 
‘A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it’ Nick Hornby in The Believer 
 
What happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing? 
 
 The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences – as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself. 
 
 Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn. Above all, it is a story of what it means to feel.

Voices

How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life

Haruki Murakami

Seiji Ozawa

An intimate conversation about music and creativity, between the internationally bestselling writer Haruki Murakami and world-class conductor, Seiji Ozawa. 
 
 Haruki Murakami's passion for music runs deep. Before turning his hand to writing, he ran a jazz club in Tokyo, and the aesthetic and emotional power of music permeates every one of his much-loved books. Now, in Absolutely on Music, Murakami fulfills a personal dream, sitting down with his friend, acclaimed conductor Seiji Ozawa, to talk about their shared interest. 
 
 They discuss everything from Brahms to Beethoven, from Leonard Bernstein to Glenn Gould, from record collecting to pop-up orchestras, and much more. 
 
'Absolutely on Music is an unprecedented treasure... Talking about music is like dancing about architecture, it's often said, but what joy to watch these two friends dance.' Guardian

Absolutely on Music

Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

Sylvie Simmons

WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR 
 
The definitive biography of the late Leonard Cohen - singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. 
 
The genius behind such classic songs as Suzanne, So Long, Marianne, Bird on the Wire and Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a man of spirituality, emotion, and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life - sex, religion, power, meaning, love. 
 
I'm Your Man explores the facets of Cohen's life. Renowned music journalist Sylvie Simmons draws on Cohen's private archives and a wealth of interviews with many of his closest associates, colleagues, and other artists whose work he has inspired. 
 
Containing exclusive material and interviews, this is the biography to buy on Leonard Cohen.

I'm Your Man

The Life of Leonard Cohen

Neil Corcoran

In 2016, Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. This collection of essays by leading poets and critics – with a new foreword by Will Self – examines Dylan’s poetic genius, as well as his astounding cultural influence over the decades. 
 
‘From Orpheus to Faiz, song and poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition’ Salman Rushdie 
 
‘The most significant Western popular artist in any form or medium of the past sixty years’ Will Self 
 
‘For fifty and some years he has bent, coaxed, teased and persuaded words into lyric and narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary and inevitable’ Andrew Motion 
 
‘His haunting music and lyrics have always seemed, in the deepest sense, literary’ Joyce Carol Oates 
 
‘There is something inevitable about Bob Dylan… A storyteller pulling out all the stops – metaphor, allegory, repetition, precise detail… His virtue is in his style, his attitude, his disposition to the world’ Simon Armitage

Do You Mr Jones?

Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors

John Seabrook

How do you make a song into a global smash hit that is guaranteed to make millions? 
 
Read The Song Machine and find out! 
 
 
From Tin Pan Alley and Motown to Rihanna and Taylor Swift, manufactured music has existed since the record industry began. 
 
But who are the hit-manufacturers that can create a tune that is so catchy, so wildly addictive, that it sticks in the minds of millions of listeners? 
 
 
In The Song Machine, John Seabrook dissects the workings of this machine, travelling the world to reveal its hidden formulas, and interview its geniuses – ‘the hitmakers’ – at the centre of it all. Hilarious and jaw-droppingly shocking, this book will change how you think and feel about music, as well as how you listen to it. 
 
‘Revelatory, funny, and full of almost unbelievable details’, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation 
 
‘As addictive as its subject’ Sunday Times

The Song Machine

How to Make a Hit

Ambitious and groundbreaking, Electric Shock tells the story of popular music, from the birth of recording in the 1890s to the digital age, from the first pop superstars of the twentieth century to the omnipresence of music in our lives, in hit singles, ringtones and on Spotify. 
 
 Over that time, popular music has transformed the world in which we live. Its rhythms have influenced how we walk down the street, how we face ourselves in the mirror, and how we handle the outside world in our daily conversations and encounters. It has influenced our morals and social mores; it has transformed our attitudes towards race and gender, religion and politics. 
 
 From the beginning of recording, when a musical performance could be preserved for the first time, to the digital age, when all of recorded music is only a mouse-click away; from the straitlaced ballads of the Victorian era and the ‘coon songs’ that shocked America in the early twentieth century to gangsta rap, death metal and the multiple strands of modern dance music: Peter Doggett takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the history of music. Within a narrative full of anecdotes and characters, Electric Shock mixes musical critique with wider social and cultural history and shows how revolutionary changes in technology have turned popular music into the lifeblood of the modern world.

Electric Shock

From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music

Johnny Rogan

NOW UPDATED WITH A NEW EPILOGUE 
 
In the summer of 1964, aged twenty, Ray Davies led the Kinks to fame with their number one hit ‘You Really Got Me’. Within months, they were established among the pop elite, swamped by fans and fast becoming renowned for the rioting at their gigs. 
 
But Ray’s journey from working-class Muswell Hill to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame was tumultuous in the extreme, featuring breakdowns, bitter lawsuits, spectacular punch-ups and a ban from entering the USA. His relationship with his brother Dave is surely the most ferocious and abusive in music history. Based on countless interviews conducted over several decades, this richly detailed and revelatory biography presents the most frank and intimate portrait yet of Ray Davies.

Ray Davies

A Complicated Life

Joseph O'Connor

At college in 1980s Luton, Robbie Goulding, an Irish-born teenager, meets the elusive Fran Mulvey, an orphaned Vietnamese refugee. Together they form a band. Joined by cellist Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock and her twin brother Seán on drums, The Ships in the Night set out to chase fame. But the story of this makeshift family is haunted by ghosts from the past. 
 
Spanning 25 years, The Thrill of it All rewinds and fast-forwards through an evocative soundtrack of struggle and laughter. Infused with blues, ska, classic showtunes, New Wave and punk, using interviews, lyrics, memoirs and diaries, the tale stretches from suburban England to Manhattan’s East Village, from Thatcher-era London to the Hollywood Bowl, from the meadows of the Glastonbury Festival to a wintry Long Island, culminating in a Dublin evening in July 2012, a night that changes everything. 
 
A story of loyalties, friendship, the call of the muse, and the beguiling shimmer of teenage dreams, this is a warm-hearted, funny and deeply moving novel for anyone that’s ever loved a song.

The Thrill of it All

Salman Rushdie

‘The first great rock ’n’ roll novel in the English language’ The Times 
 
On Valentine’s Day, 1989, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, disappears in a devastating earthquake. 
 
Her lover, the singer Ormus Cama, cannot accept that he has lost her, and so begins his eternal quest to find her and bring her back. His journey takes him across the globe and through cities pulsating with the power of rock ’n’ roll, to Bombay, London and New York. 
 
But around the star-crossed lover and his quest, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears are appearing in the very fabric of reality, and exposing the abyss beyond. And Ormus has to confront just how far he is willing to go for love.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Simon Morrison

As heard on Radio 4 Book of the Week 
 
Lina Prokofiev was alone in her Moscow apartment one night when the telephone rang. The caller insisted that she come downstairs to collect a parcel, but when she reached the courtyard she was arrested for treason. 
 
First enraptured by the young pianist and rising star, Serge Prokofiev, during a courtship in Brooklyn, then abandoned by him in Moscow, Lina survived one of the darkest periods in Soviet history – enduring eight years in the Gulag after she received that fateful telephone call. 
 
Unfolding with the intrigue of a spy novel, The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev traces the largely untold story of a remarkable woman who gave up her career, her country and her freedom for the brilliant man she married.

The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev

The Story of Lina and Serge Prokofiev

Alan Rusbridger

In 2010, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, set himself an almost impossible task: to learn, in the space of a year, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 – a piece that inspires dread in many professional pianists. 
 
His timing could have been better. 
 
The next twelve months were to witness the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, the English riots, and the Guardian’s breaking of both WikiLeaks and the News of the World hacking scandal. 
 
In the midst of this he carved out twenty minutes’ practice a day – even if that meant practising in a Libyan hotel in the middle of a revolution as well as gaining insights and advice from an array of legendary pianists, theorists, historians and neuroscientists, and even occasionally from secretaries of state. 
 
But was he able to play the piece in time?

Play It Again

An Amateur Against The Impossible

Howard Goodall

*** Accompanies BBC2's major new TV series and The Story of Music in 50 Pieces on Radio 3 *** 
 
In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation – harmony, notation, sung theatre, the orchestra, dance music, recording, broadcasting – strikes us with its original force. He focuses on what changed when and why, picking out the discoveries that revolutionised man-made sound and bringing to life musical visionaries from the little-known Pérotin to the colossus of Wagner. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, why some chords sound discordant and what all post-war pop songs have in common.

The Story of Music

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 WELLCOME TRUST BOOK PRIZE 
 
How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss. 
 
The Train in the Night is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion - and go one further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music, by going back to the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe. 
 
The result a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, about taste and love and suffering and delusion and longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true.

The Train in the Night

A Story of Music and Loss

No artist offered a more incisive and accurate portrait of the troubled landscape of the 1970s than David Bowie. Cultural historian Peter Doggett explores the rich heritage of Bowie's most productive and inspired decade, and traces the way in which his music reflected and influenced the world around him. From 'Space Oddity', his dark vision of mankind's voyage into the unknown terrain of space, to the Scary Monsters album, Doggett examines in detail Bowie's audacious creation of an 'alien' rock star, Ziggy Stardust, and his increasingly perilous explorations of the nature of identity and the meaning of fame. 
 
Mixing brilliant musical critique with biographical insight and acute cultural analysis, The Man Who Sold The World is a unique study of a major artist and his times.

The Man Who Sold The World

David Bowie And The 1970s

John Cooper Clarke

‘Yes, it was be there or be square as, clad in the slum chic of the hipster, he issued the slang anthems of the zip age in the desperate esperanto of the bop. John Cooper Clarke: the name behind the hairstyle, the words walk in the grooves hacking through the hi-fi paradise of true luxury’ 
 
Punk. Poet. Pioneer. The Bard of Salford’s seminal collection is as scabrous, wry &amp; vivid now as it was when first published over 25 years ago. 
 
‘The godfather of British performance poetry’ 
Daily Telegraph

Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt

Colin Grant

Discover the untold history of reggae legends of Bob Marley and the original Wailers. 
 
The perfect must-read if you loved the film One Love. 
 
Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trench Town R&amp;B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers - one of the most influential groups in popular music. Now one of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines the story of the influential reggae band. 
 
Charting their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, Colin Grant shows us why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, he travels in search of the last surviving Wailer. 
 
'In Grant's hands life in Trench Town in the 1960's is energetic and theatrical, rich in comedy and tragic irony...This brilliant book is not just about Jamaica, but about ourselves' Guardian

I & I: The Natural Mystics

Marley, Tosh and Wailer

David Malouf

Perfectly preserving the tone and mood of the novel whilst condensing it into two acts, David Malouf, with the gift for language already evident from his novels and poetry, presents afresh the timeless story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, one of the most enduring literary classics of all time. The love between Jane and Mr Rochester, and the mystery of the woman behind the locked door, are here set to music in the opera composed by Michael Berkeley.

Jane Eyre

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter