** Sunday Times Bestseller **
Brilliant, heartbreaking and highly original, Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling.
'A marvel' Marlon James
This is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read.
Stylish and open-hearted, this is a very different kind of love story, elevated and energised by being set in the world of creativity and video gaming * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * RADIO 2 BOOKCLUB Pick for July * GRAZIA Summer Reading Pick * 'Utterly brilliant. In this sweeping, gorgeously written novel, Gabrielle Zevin charts the beauty, tenacity, and fragility of human love and creativity' JOHN GREEN This is not a romance, but it is about love Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world -- of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over, fades from view. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love - making games to delight, challenge and immerse players, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sadie and Sam build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success- Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling imaginative quest as it examines the nature of identity, creativity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play and, above all, our need to connect- to be loved and to love. 'Exquisite' TAYARI JONES, Women's Prize-winning author of An American Marriage 'A beautifully wrought saga of human connection and the creative process, of love and all of its complicated levels' ERIN MORGENSTERN 'A brilliant story about life's most challenging puzzles' NATHAN HILL, New York Times-bestselling author of The Nix
From the author of TikTok sensation My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, The Times, New Statesman, Good Housekeeping & Daily Mail.
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot in a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did for many of the village's children.
Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine.
But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.
An exquisitely told tragic tale of thwarted love, My Policeman is soon to be adapted into film by Amazon Prime starring Harry Styles and Emma Corrin.
It is in 1950s' Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom.
**THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLER**
Discover the book that inspired Gareth Southgate's leadership style.
'Interesting and provocative...
Toru Watanabe is looking back on the love and passions of his life and trying to make sense of it all. As his first love Naoko sinks deeper into mental despair, he is inexorably pushed to find a new meaning and a new love in order to survive.
*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*
'Savage, funny, frequently on the verge of teetering into lunacy...' Vogue
Discover this deliciously dark satire on modern privilege from the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen.
It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility;
'This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived'
This is the story of a group of strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, brought together to save it from catastrophe.
An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.
Moving through history and across landscapes, this tree-filled novel unfurls our potential to destroy or restore the natural world.
'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it' Barack Obama
THE MILLION-COPY GLOBAL BESTSELLER and WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
Vintage Earth is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.
Looking for a summer read with bite?
'OUTRAGEOUS, SMART, FUN' BONNIE GARMUS, Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
'BRILLIANT' Stylist
'INCREDIBLE' Carmen Maria Machado
One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.
Instead, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...
'Terrifically alive' Observer
'I tore through it' Lisa McInerney
'The spiritual successor to Angela Carter' Evening Standard
'Funny and unnerving as hell' Jenny Offill
'Every joint and sinew of the story is restless with a sense of threat' London Review of Books
'The air trembled, gold and green and clear, at the edges of the forest'
A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.
This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.
'Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling.' Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
**PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN**
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.
'A great storyteller' Madeline Miller, author of Circe
In this powerful new collection, Charlotte Higgins foregrounds Greek mythology's most enduring heroines.
Here are the myths of Heracles and Theseus, the Trojan war, Thebes and Argos and Athens. They are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures and resourceful witches.
In this telling the female characters take centre stage as Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation of these ancient stories, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling.
With a series of original drawings by Chris Ofili.
'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns'
While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzeard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzeard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.
Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again. A young forest is slowly spreading over the valley - Elzeard has continued his work. Year after year the narrator returns to see the miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man's creative instinct. miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct.
'I love the humanity of this story and how one man's efforts can change the future for so many' Michael Morpurgo, Independent
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.
'His stomach trembled with desire and fear and wonder because he knew what he'd seen. A woman. Right there, in the water'
On a quiet day, near the Caribbean island of Black Conch, a mermaid raises her barnacled head from the flat grey sea. She is attracted by David, a fisherman waiting for a catch, singing to himself with his guitar. Aycayia the mermaid has been living in the vast ocean all alone for centuries.
When Aycayia is caught and dragged ashore by American tourists, David rescues her with the aim of putting her back in the ocean. But it is soon clear that the mermaid is already transforming into a woman.
This is the story of their love affair, of an island and of the great wide sea.
'Mesmerising' Maggie O'Farrell
'A unique talent' Bernadine Evaristo
'Not your standard mermaid' Margaret Atwood
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.
'You must love the land, my children, and ring it in with your love'
On the island of Wayo Wayo, every second son must leave on the day he turns fifteen as a sacrifice to the Sea God. Atile'i however is determined to defy destiny and become the first to survive. Across the sea, Alice Shih's life is interrupted when a vast trash vortex comes crashing onto the shore of Taiwan, bringing Atile'i with it.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Atile'i and Alice retrace her late husband's footsteps into the mountains, hoping to solve the mystery of her son's disappearance. On their journey, memories will be challenged, an unusual bond formed, and a dark secret uncovered that will force Alice to question everything she thought she knew.
'A haunting and evocative tale, beautifully told. I wept at the description of the dying whales and the approaching tsunami... I think this work will be a classic' Hugh Howey, author of Wool
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.
'KAREN ARMSTRONG IS A GENIUS' A.N. Wilson
In this hugely powerful book, Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour: we need to learn to think and feel differently about the natural world - to rekindle our spiritual bond with nature.
For most of human history, and in almost all the world's cultures, nature was believed to be sacred, and our God or gods to be present everywhere in the natural world. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in modern times, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom: it also set in train the destruction of the natural world.
Taking themes that have been central to the world's religious traditions - from gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence - Armstrong offers practical steps to help us develop a new mindset to reconnect with nature and rekindle our sense of the sacred.
Sacred Nature reveals the most profound connections between humans and the natural world. It speaks to anyone interested in our relationship with nature, worried about the destruction of our environment, and searching for new ways of thinking to shape the action needed to save our planet.
'One of our best living writers on religion' Financial Times
'Karen Armstrong is one of the handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion' Alain de Botton
A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's mesmerizingly surreal classic, now with a new introduction by the author
Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.
The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down.
As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece.
'Wonderful... Magical and outlandish' Daily Mail
'Hypnotic, spellbinding' The Times
'Cool, fluent and addictive' Daily Telegraph
'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them'
At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.
Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it.
'An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia - nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries... This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent' Financial Times
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.
'Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril - that moronic word again - but because someone was telling him it was with such enthusiasm'
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. He now spends his days speaking for enormous fees and half-heartedly heading a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time, she's having the affair.
When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity arises for Beard to simultaneously save his marriage and the world from environmental disaster.
'Savagely funny... Enormously entertaining' Sunday Times
'A satirical masterpiece...it will come to be regarded as a classic' Daily Telegraph
'A stunningly accomplished work, possibly his best yet' Financial Times
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.
'Magisterial' - Guardian
'Outstanding' - Ian Kershaw
Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West.
Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. The regime he heads is autocratic and corrupt.
Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin's leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with.
Philip Short's magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin's Russia. Since becoming President in 2000, his obsession has been to restore Russia's status as a great power, unbound by western rules. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War?
To explain is not to justify. Putin's regime is dark. He pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths.
This book is as close as we will come to understanding Russia's ruler. It also makes us revise long-held assumptions about the course of global politics since the end of the Cold War.
'Extraordinary . . . radiant' Sunday Times
'An existential tour-de-force' Eimear McBride
'Elatingly risky' Guardian
'We read in order to come to life.'
With fierce imagination, a woman revisits the moments that shape her life; from crushes on teachers to navigating relationships in a fast-paced world; from overhearing her grandmothers' peculiar stories to nurturing her own personal freedom and a boundless love of literature.
Fusing fantasy with lived experience, Checkout 19 is a vivid and mesmerising journey through the small traumas and triumphs that define us - as readers, as writers, as human beings.
* A 'Books of 2021' pick in the Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times Culture and New Statesman *
'This is her new book to shake the world anew' Sebastian Barry
'Mesmerising, whip-smart, full of genius . . . It is also very funny' Elaine Feeney
'Her voice is all her own' Anne Enright
**THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR**
**Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Dagger Awards 2022**
____________________________________
Murder. Assassination. Revenge.
Discover the first short story collection from the King of Scandi Crime.
Meet a detective on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a hired assassin facing his greatest adversary; and two passengers meeting by chance on a plane, spelling romance or something far more sinister.
In his first ever collection of short stories, this master of crime delivers a gripping, edge-of-your seat read that you won't be able to put down.
*JO NESBO HAS SOLD OVER 50 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE*
PRAISE FOR JO NESBO:
'A storyteller with few equals' Daily Express
'The king of Scandicrime' Financial Times
'Deliciously dark' Heat
'Nightmare-inducing and terrific' The Times
READERS LOVE JO NESBO:
***** 'Intriguing, mysterious, full of suspense' Netgalley reader
***** 'To say I couldn't put it down is an understatement...' Netgalley reader
***** 'A great read with plenty of twists and surprises' Netgalley read
'Wonderful, mind-broadening... a journey to alternative realities as extraordinary as any you'll find in science fiction' The Times, Book of the Week
'Magnificent' Guardian
Enter a new dimension - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.
We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.
Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the threads of scent, waves of electromagnetism and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.
'A stunning achievement - steeped in science but suffused with magic'
Siddhartha Mukherjee, author The Emperor of All Maladies
'Magnificent - an unbelievably immersive and mind-blowing account of how other animals experience our world'
Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals
'A delightful sensory experience: to see the world through the touch-vision of a scallop, to taste through the feet of a mosquito and hear through the feet of an elephant'
Gaia Vince, author of Transcendence
'One of the most intriguing new novels of the summer.' Independent
For the sake of women everywhere, Ms Shibata is going to pull off the mother of all deceptions...
A prizewinning, thrillingly subversive debut novel from a new star of Japanese fiction, perfect for readers of Convenience Store Woman and Breasts and Eggs
'Always expect the unexpected when you're not expecting.' Sloane Crosley
'Darkly funny and surprisingly tender.' Kirsty Logan
As the only woman in her office, Ms Shibata is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her coworkers' dirty cups - because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms Shibata is not pregnant.
Pregnant Ms Shibata doesn't have to serve coffee to anyone. Pregnant Ms Shibata isn't forced to work overtime. Pregnant Ms Shibata can rest, watch TV, take long baths, and even join an aerobics class for expectant mothers. But she has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Before long, it becomes all-absorbing, and with the help of towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app that tracks every stage of her 'pregnancy', the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.
Diary of a Void will keep you turning the pages to see just how far Ms Shibata will go.
Translated from the Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North
A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's breakout hit, now with a new introduction by the author
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
'Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around' Time Out