Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize'A remarkable achievement...should become a classic.' - Margaret Drabble'Light writes beautifully...Common People is part memoir, part thrilling social history of the England of the Industrial Revolution, but above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.' - The Times Book of...

Loathing, anger, shame – and deep affection: Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her servants was central to her life. Like thousands of her fellow Britons she relied on live-in domestics for the most intimate of daily tasks. Her cook and parlour maid relieved her of the burden of housework and without them she might never have become a writer. But unlike many of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf was frequently tormented by her dependence on servants. Uniquely, she explored her violent, oft...

WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE'The greatest memoirs offer all the complex shades and colours that we expect in fiction. A Radical Romance is more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art' GuardianAlison Light met the charismatic social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead.Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he, twenty years her ...

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars.From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces t...

A fascinating account of life as a member of the Communist Party of Great BritainThe Lost World of British Communism is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain’s most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London’s East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives, to evoke the world of British Communism in the 1940s. Samuel conjures up the era when the movemen...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Common People: The History of An English Family by Alison Light, read by Caroline Laskowska.Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.Epic in scope and deep in feeling,...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin, read by Jill Balcon and David Shaw-Parker.Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats.In the hands of Whitbre...

Everyone is not as they seem in this fantasy novel, replete with war, witchcraft and secrets.As evening falls, the city of Esteburg begins to stir. Christophor Morden, one of the king's special inspectorate, is woken early by a call to the city prison. A heinous crime has been committed and the police suspect supernatural causes.The investigation will take Christophor far from home, to a village on the edge of the Kingdom. There he will discover the signs of an unholy ritua...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown, read by Gordon Kennedy.As former Prime Minister and our longest-serving Chancellor, Gordon Brown has been a guiding force for Britain and the world over three decades. This is his candid, poignant and deeply relevant story.In describing his upbringing in Scotland as the son of a minister, the near loss of his eyesight as a student and the death of hi...

He lived a double-life in the sixtiesFaked his own death in the seventiesAnd retained his cover in the eightiesA period thriller with powerful political and espionage themes, Agent Twister is the remarkable story behind one of the greatest scandals of the 1970s, told in full for the first time. If you think you know the true story of John Stonehouse – think again.It’s November 1974 an...

Brought to you by Penguin.Lady Hale is an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and for the causes she has championed. Spider Woman is her story.As 'a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire', she only went into the law because her headteacher told her she wasn't clever enough to study history. She became the most senior judge in the country but it was an unconventional path to t...

Brought to you by Penguin.A vastly entertaining and unique history of the interaction between spying and showbiz, from the Elizabethan age to the Cold War and beyond.Throughout history, there has been a consistent crossover between show business and espionage, often producing some of the most extraordinary undercover agents, and occasionallyleading to disastrous and dangerous failures. The fact that one relies on publicity and the other on ...