Paris, May 1940. Nazi troops storm the city and at Le Bourget airport, on the last flight out, sits Dr Alexandre Yersin, his gaze politely turned away from his fellow passengers with their jewels sewn into their luggage. He is too old for the combat ahead, and besides he has already saved millions of lives. When he was the brilliant young protégé of Louis Pasteur, he focused his exceptional mind on a great medical conundrum: in 1894, on a Hong Kong hospital forecourt, he identified and vac...

Just when you thought it was safe to start showing off again, the bestselling authors of The Book of General Ignorance and 1,277 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off are back. With a foreword by Stephen Fry, this parcel of unimaginable information is here to solve a few common misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings.Octopuses have six legs, oranges aren't orange, bats aren't blind, napoleon wasn't short, vikings didn't wear horned helmets, there is no such thing...

The renowned French author's modern masterpiece: "one of the great novels of the century . . . on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov" ( Boston Globe).Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec's "elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel" begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, a rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, movin...

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit."—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Satur...

Travelling through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the twilight of the French colonial regime, Norman Lewis witnesses these ancient civilisations as they were before the terrible devastation of the Vietnam War. He creates a portrait of traditional societies struggling to retain their integrity in the embrace of the West. He meets emperors and slaves, brutal plantation owners and sympathetic French officers trapped by the economic imperatives of the colonial experiment. From tribal animists t...

A stunning and poignant autobiographical look at the myriad experiences that shape a meaningful life, by the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries.“Surely one of the most moving and intriguing farewell notes ever written.... Intensely beautiful in its spirit.” —Alexander McCall Smith, New StatesmanIn January 2014, Henning Mankell received a diagnosis of lung cancer. Quicksand is a response to this shattering n...

Alone - though he was just married - and on foot, Nicholas Crane embarked on an extraordinary adventure: a seventeen-month journey along the chain of mountains which stretches across Europe from Cape Finisterre to Istanbul. His aim was to explore Europe's last mountain wilderness and to meet the people who live on the periphery of the modern world.

Dateline: Toronto collects all 172 pieces that Hemingway published in the Star, including those under pseudonyms.Hemingway readers will discern his unique voice already present in many of these journalistic pieces, particularly his knack for dialogue. It is also fascinating to discover early reportorial accounts of events and subjects that figure in his later fiction. As William White points out in his introduction to this work, “Much of it, over ...

Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator"Travel writing in excelsis." -Jan Morris, author of Venice"A thrilling and gorgeous tale, packed with meteorological wonder." -Amy Liptrot, author of The OutrunNick Hunt sets off on an unlikely quest: to follow four of Europe's winds across the continent....

Collins Shorts – insight in an instant.Join David Attenborough on his journey through the cultural history of the birds of paradise, one of the most exquisite and extravagant, colourful and intriguing families of birds. In this short, the world’s best-loved naturalist explains why these charismatic birds dance so beautifully.Collins Shorts are a fresh look at the ebook short, with the emphasis on vibrant design, animated content and expert authors who can provide accessible...

A personal glimpse into the life of writer, journalist, war correspondent, adventurer Ernest Hemingway, ranging from experiences in the Spanish Civil War and World War II to his passion for bullfighting and first safari in Africa.Spanning the years 1920 to 1956, this priceless collection of articles and letters shows Hemingway's work as a reporter, from correspondent for the Toronto Star to contributor to Esquire, Colliers, and Look. As f...

La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.