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

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 novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

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.

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 lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

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

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Elna Baker

Growing up in a family shaped by conventional ideas of femininity, Elna Baker turned to food for self-expression. But at the age of 22, unemployed and with few romantic prospects, she faced the reality of her situation and it hit her hard. 
 
In one year, Elna Baker lost over 8 stone. 
 
Suddenly, strangers on the street who had once shouted insults were smiling spontaneously. Men who would never have given her a second glance were falling at her feet. Elna's new life was a fairytale, but adoration came at a price. She was reliant on appetite suppressants and weight loss shakes to keep her dream body alive. If old Elna became unlovable, new Elna would do everything she could to denounce her former self. 
 
Ten years later, on the eve of her dream wedding, a spell lifts. In choosing the version of herself that the world around her idolised, Elna had left her true self behind. Now, she would have to burn her dream life to the ground and rebuild it. 
 
Pretty for a Day is a vulnerable, witty and eye-opening story of the frivolity of beauty and the heartbreaking reality of extreme weight loss. This is the story of millions of women and, indeed, many men who are overwhelmed by impossible standards imposed through advertising, movies, celebrity culture, social media, and even our own friends and family. 
 
With the widespread availability of weight loss medication, like Ozempic and Mounjaro, we can choose to be thin for the first time in history. No one knows for sure what the medical or social consequences will be. 
 
Now, Elna Baker's searing memoir offers a roadmap to understand the devastating impact of weight loss. This is the story of how, after decades of undoing, Elna Baker finally got her body back.

Pretty for a Day

Simon Jenkins

A Short History of The English Village

Charlotte Fox Weber

Sacred Monster (noun): Someone who loomed very large in your life at a formative stage of young adulthood (15-30), changing your sense of self to the core. 
 
Most of us have a Sacred Monster. An ex-partner, an old boss, a tricky friend. That person we cannot seem to dislodge from our psychological landscape (or dreamscape). You may have pre-scripted emotional responses to certain situations because of the hold this Sacred Monster has over you, even if you’ve outwardly ‘moved on’. Years after that relationship ended, we deify our monsters, sometimes sabotaging new relationships, seeing others (and ourselves) through our monster’s lens. 
 
Via her clients’ moving recollections and stories, psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber opens a new conversation about how and why we cling to these figures who appalled and enthralled us. Beneath the surface of our biggest choices about how we live, she asks: how do our Sacred Monsters confound us? And what might it mean to be free of them? 
 
With this new framework for self-understanding, we can recognise and better name these lingering figures in our past who unconsciously shape our present. In doing so, we might understand ourselves better, more humanely, allowing ourselves to lead truly fulfilling, exciting lives.

Sacred Monsters

A Book About Love and Cruelty

Vaclav Smil

From the internationally bestselling author, a revealing look at the surprising numbers that uncover the hidden forces shaping our world 
 
'There is no author whose books I look forward to more' Bill Gates 
 
‘There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like Smil’ Guardian 
 
What do marriage, milk and the black market tell us about the state of humanity? Most people would say, not much at all. But the numbers reveal startling truths about who we are, how we live and where we’re headed. For centuries we’ve told ourselves stories about how the world works – yet the data often point to a very different reality. In Numbers Tell Stories, Vaclav Smil shows how statistics challenge conventional thinking and illuminate the hidden forces shaping our lives. 
 
Take marriage. Weren’t people in the past married off as children? In fact, in eighteenth-century France, the median age was 29 for men and 27 for women – not that different to today. Or longevity. Should we look to Japan to unlock the secrets of a long, healthy life? Perhaps – but only one in five Japanese men and women retains full independence in old age. Even the world’s healthiest nation still has far to go. And waste. It sounds absurd, but discarded electronics contain more gold per ton than gold ore itself – our rubbish is richer than our mines. 
 
Climate change is another challenge we know is huge – but the real shock is the scale of the economic effort required to act in time. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions on the recommended timescale would demand 15 to 20 per cent of annual GDP in wealthy countries – roughly equivalent to the resources mobilised by the Allies to win the Second World War. Numbers on that scale are not abstract: they would transform daily life. 
 
Behind every familiar story, Smil uncovers the statistics that can reframe the past, jolt our view of the present, and change how we think about the future.

Numbers Tell Stories

How Data Reveals the Surprising Truths About Our World

Ben Macintyre

The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America – unknown to the public – would be to use nuclear weapons. Redwood is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of British and American governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot and prevented Armageddon. 
 
‘Redwood’ was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly-trained six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB’s deepest secrets, compelled to swap sides by a shaming secret of his own. Facing exposure, with both the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and his own KGB colleagues closing in, he demanded that MI6 try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape plan. 
 
This is the gripping tale of one man’s courage, and its extraordinary unintended consequences that still shape our world today. It’s about a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; about marriage, loyalty, betrayal and sexual dysfunction; and about how decisions made in secret can have huge, long-term ramifications. 
 
Drawing on never-before-seen material from archives in multiple countries, and interviews with the participants including officers from MI6 and MI5, the KGB and CIA, Redwood combines the shadowy world of the Spy and the Traitor with the action of SAS: Rogue Heroes. It lifts the lid on an unknown and highly significant Cold War victory, on the machinations of history's Great Game, and on how espionage really works. 
 
Without Redwood, our world would be very different – and might not exist at all.

Redwood

The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy

Erin Goeres

The definitive character-led history of the most famous year in history, written in authoritative and dynamic prose by Dr Erin Goeres. 
 
On 5 January 1066, Edward the Confessor's death plunged the nation into a succession crisis that would indelibly change England forever. Mere hours after Edward’s remains had been laid to rest, his brother-in-law Harold II seized power, inciting the wrath of two formidable challengers: King Haraldr of Norway and Edward’s ambitious cousin, William, Duke of Normandy. 
 
In this startling new history, Dr Erin Goeres unveils the intense drama that unfolded over the tumultuous nineteen days between the Battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings in the Autumn of 1066, and which led to the deaths of two monarchs, ending a centuries-long Anglo-Scandinavian rule. 
 
Drawing on sources from England, Normandy and Scandinavia, Goeres uncovers complex histories, characters, and motivations. We meet the women at the heart of the fray – such as William's enigmatic wife, Matilda of Flanders, the alleged lover of Harold of England and the ‘driving force’ behind her husband's invasion – as well as the regular people who were swept up in events beyond their control, such as a farmer, beheaded for an unwillingness to give his jacket to a Norwegian invader. 
 
Nineteen Days in Autumn is a gripping tale of three nations entwined, the devastating consequences of their unravelling and the subsequent memorialisation of this saga, which has given rise to the nationalistic myths of today.

Nineteen Days in Autumn

A New History of 1066

Jon Ronson

** AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW ** 
 
The million-copy bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the award-winning BBC podcast Things Fell Apart moves to Penguin for his first book in eleven years, a darkly comic true crime mystery set within the masculinity crisis, The Castle. 
 
I honestly have no clue what is going on. 
This is very weird. 
We left. Was completely fucked. All good now. 
 
When Jon Ronson received a series of disquieting texts after his son Joel had been lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England under false pretences late one evening, it set Ronson Sr. off on an extraordinary adventure into a world of unmoored men on a desperate search for purpose, whatever the cost. 
 
Why did the wealthy scion of a gilded age tycoon entice Jon’s son to his castle on the pretext of a party, when the reality was something else entirely? Could Jon uncover what was really going on inside that strange castle? Why was a popular online lawncare influencer wrongly implicated in a bizarre plot to traumatize millions of unsuspecting children? And, more pressingly, why are two recently paroled murderers on their way to pay Jon an ominous visit? 
 
Against the backdrop of the sometimes moving, often disturbing masculinity crisis, Jon follows the trail of those men who are acting out, checked out or just plain out of time. Drawing on his trademark brand of humour, psychological insight and unrivalled prescience, and told in the riveting style of a true crime thriller, The Castle marks Jon Ronson’s triumphant return to the written page in his darkest and most wildly enjoyable journey yet – deep into the recesses of the Castle and the secret lives of men. 
 
PRAISE FOR JON RONSON: 
 
‘Simultaneously frightening and hilarious’ The Times 
 
‘Funny and compulsively readable’ Louis Theroux 
 
‘His scalpel-sharp journalistic mind comes wrapped in disarming, diffident warmth’ Miranda Sawyer, Guardian 
 
‘Ronson is one of our most important modern-day thinkers’ US News & World Report 
 
‘Funny and thought-provoking . . . original, inspired journalism’ Financial Times 
 
‘Gutsy and smart’ New York Times 
 
‘Simmering with humour, weirdness and pathos’ Sunday Times 
 
‘A diligent investigator and a wry, funny writer, Ronson manages to be at once academic and entertaining’ Boston Globe 
 
‘The belly laughs come thick and fast – my God, he is funny’ Observer

The Castle

Jonathan Fennell

Between 1931 and 1949, a series of crises broke out that threatened collective security, world order and the internal cohesion of states across the globe. At the heart of these crises was a world war that shook the foundations of global power, a watershed moment in the history of the Twentieth Century. Collapse is the first volume of an authoritative trilogy that tells the story of the Second World War through this international lens, covering theatres of war in multiple continents and analysing worldwide trends.Combining military, political, social and economic history, Professor Jonathan Fennell explores the first part of this "long war", from 1931-1942, through exciting new sources that explore what it really meant to live through this violent time. Using an innovative approach which explores the personal alongside the political, the global alongside the local, he shows how a world that many considered civilised collapsed into barbarity.Through immersive storytelling and a cast of characters and communities, Collapse links the home and battle fronts and ties together the stories of great campaigns with the dramatic political and social changes of the Twentieth Century, and in doing so, transforms our understanding of this monumental conflict.

Collapse

A Global History of the Second World War, 1931-1941

Robert Moor

In Trees is a wondrous, curious journey through the wilds of nature and the gnarls of history, exploring how trees – from the mightiest sequoia to the tiniest bonsai – can teach us to grow wise. 
 
One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home, unwittingly embarking on what would become a decade-long, globe-spanning adventure in trees. From Darwin to Attenborough, Brecht to Wordsworth, cutting-edge scientists and Zen monks and Bonsai artists, In Trees explores the fundamental and meaningful role of trees in the natural world. 
 
From Ethiopia and Papua to the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Lake District, bestselling author Robert Moor uncovers the hidden art of 'tree-thinking', a powerful tool for approaching humanity's oldest questions: What is the secret to growing old well? How do we set down deeper roots in an increasingly chaotic world? And most importantly, how should we – as individuals, as communities, as stewards of the Earth – live? 
 
Weaving together history, ecology, philosophy, neuroscience, mythology, literature, and the abstract qualities of identity, belonging and memory, In Trees shares extraordinary stories of how trees have become embedded in our culture, lifestyle and imagination for centuries, becoming the key to almost everything on our planet. 
 
What began as an ode to the miracle of trees blossoms into a joyous, daring, fiercely hopeful endeavour that reveals . . . To truly grasp the wisdom of a tree, you need to begin thinking like one.

In Trees

An Exploration of Ancient Living Wisdom from Wild Branches to Deep Roots

Chris Smalls

The outrageous, jaw-dropping true story of the man who took on a corporate giant – and won. 
 
A dedicated and experienced Amazon employee, Chris Smalls had begun to feel frustrated by the inner workings of the retail giant – he kept being passed over for promotion, with little to no explanation. So when his colleagues and friends began falling ill in the Covid pandemic, and with no assurances of safety or even sick leave from the top, he made the only choice left available to him. He staged a walkout with friend Derrick Palmer, eventually finding himself on the picket line without a job. 
 
What began as a demand to keep essential employees safe in a crisis would grow into a movement devoted to achieving dignity and security for the wage worker, triggering a groundswell of organizers at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Apple – and across the world. We follow Smalls’s years of sacrifice and economic uncertainty as a father of three, from fighting warehouse managerial politics in an effort to make ends meet, to his ascension as the leader of a new generation’s labour movement. 
 
When the Revolution Comes is the riveting inside story of how a young Black man from Hackensack, NJ with little-to-no resources led a scrappy band of Staten Island warehouse workers in an improbable fight against Amazon to create its first Labor Union. An exposé of life lived in the laboratory of capitalism and a terrifying depiction of what it’s like to be working class in America, this book tells a new, empowering story of what is possible when the overworked, underpaid and disempowered join together, forming a movement born in community.

When the Revolution Comes

A Story About Capitalism

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

Yeganeh Torbati

A moving, riveting and immersive story of six Iranians who, together, lived the entire arc of modern Iranian history: the promise of the 1979 revolution, its betrayal by the Islamic mafia state and a people’s undying spirit of resistance. 
 
Fuelled by Iranians’ dreams of social justice and political freedom, the 1979 revolution swept aside the shah’s ailing, repressive monarchy. But in its place the revolution’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini and his acolytes built a system that served his narrow Islamic fundamentalist faction and worsened every failing and brutality that had existed under the shah. Award-winning journalists Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati tell the entwined stories of six Iranians, providing a powerful new lens on Iran’s recent history in all its bitter twists and stubborn hope: 
 
• Mehdi Karroubi: a devotee of Khomeini, he rose to the heights of power on the wave of the revolution, before being cast out of its inner circle. 
 
• Hila Sedighi: a young activist, who gave voice through her poetry to her peers’ hopes during the reform years and ultimately immortalised their shattered dreams. 
 
• Amir Moghadam: an ambitious government bureaucrat, who witnessed corruption and graft on a scale that impelled him to take enormous risks to expose the truth. 
 
• Said Rahmani: a successful global tech entrepreneur who returned to Iran to spark a start-up boom in his native country, and encountered a ruthless security state that wanted his company for itself. 
 
• Rozhin Yousefzadeh and Kosar Eftekhari: both born in the 1990s, they escaped their gendered destinies by leaving their hometowns for Tehran, where they joined a mass movement that confronted a ferocious state apparatus: the Woman Life Freedom protests. Each paid an enormous price. 
 
Through vivid and original reporting, Stolen Revolution offers a compulsively readable new story of Iran, centring ordinary Iranians’ lives, whilst providing a visceral understanding of how life is actually lived under a modern authoritarian state. This is a harrowing story of power, corruption and greed – and those brave individuals who fought back.

Stolen Revolution

Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran

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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