In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engin...

*Shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize*A Times and Sunday Times Book of the YearA Wall Street Journal Book of the YearA Spectator Book of the YearA Times Literary Supplement Book of the YearA New Yorker Book of the YearSome called it a craze. To others it was a cult. Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with ca...

Winner of The Story PrizeLonglisted for the Joyce Carol Oates PrizeA Time Top 10 Best Fiction Book of 2023 and Must Read Book of 2023A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Library Journal, Electric Literature, and the New York Public Library

**Brought to you by Penguin.Brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of European history through one of the most important imperial networks ever built**'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire and continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s ‘extraordinary greatness’.Over the two th...

From the author of the acclaimed biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, new perspectives on how Luther and others crafted his larger-than-life imageMartin Luther was a controversial figure during his lifetime, eliciting strong emotions in friends and enemies alike, and his outsized persona has left an indelible mark on the world today. Living I Was Your Plague explores how Luther carefully crafted his own image and how he has been portraye...

**Brought to you by Penguin.The untold story of post-war Britain. Told through the lives of the two men who helped shape it: Sir David Barclay and Sir Frederick Barclay.**You May Never See Us Again is the only definitive story of David and Frederick Barclay - commonly known as the Barclay brothers. Born poor, these enigmatic twins built one of the biggest fortunes in Britain together from scratch and spent six decades at the epicentre of British business, media and...

From the acclaimed author of the Harlem Detectives series, a masterful autobiographical novel about the injustices of the prison system and the humanity that flourishes despite itJimmy Monroe is serving a twenty-year sentence for robbery. Terror and chaos reign in the prison, where corrupt, racist guards mete out capricious punishments like time in "the hole," where inmates' sense of reality slips away in total darkness. When a fire breaks out amid these mounting i...

Brought to you by Penguin.As a child, Chris Thorogood dreamed of seeing Rafflesia - the plant with the world's largest flowers. He crafted life-size replicas in an abandoned cemetery, carefully bringing them to life with paper and paint. Today he is a botanist at the University of Oxford's Botanic Garden and has dedicated his life to studying the biology of such extraordinary plants, working alongside botanists and foresters in Southeast Asia to document t...

Enter the mysterious world of sixteenth-century science, where astronomers and alchemists shared laboratories.In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view—one guided by observation, technology and logic.But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening bras...

Daring, honest, and written with the comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that marks Franzen's fiction, The Discomfort Zone tells of the formation of one young mind in the crucible of an everyday American family.

'A message of hope' TLS'Inspiring' Spectator'A sumptuous mix of poetry, story and deep philosophical truths' FERGUS BUTLER-GALLIE'Colin Heber-Percy is a reliable guide' REV RICHARD COLESThis book is a hymn to getting lost. Drawing on his experience as a troubled schoolboy, a burnt-out screenwriter at the BBC, an 'awkward' priest in the Church of England, Colin Heber-Percy refl...

***This audio edition is read by the author and was recorded in a remote studio in Shetland.'Storm Pegs* perfectly captures the knotting of language and landscape. I was transported.' - Katherine May, Sunday Times bestselling author of Wintering**From the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the **Highland Book PrizeWhat if the answer to ‘Where am I?’ is ‘heaven’?**In her late twenties, celebrated poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetla...