How does an iconic brand die? For more than two decades, Blockbuster was America's favorite way to watch movies. Millions of customers visited more than eight thousand stores around the globe every week, providing more data about movie audiences than anyone in history had ever owned. If any company should have predicted the disruptive forces coming down the pike, it was Blockbuster. But as new threats emerged, none of its five CEOs had answers, and the company collapsed long before its tim...

An exotic and ambitious collection in which deceptively simple structures are built to carry an impressive weight of interest and reference. – Andrew MotionThe guardian spirit of this book is a mahogany sculpture called Eve, part of the permanent collection in the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. She's looking over her shoulder. Her gaze takes in journeys across the Atlantic, beaches in the Caribbean, a boarding school in Yorkshire, departures and...

*THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN, Matt Haig's new novel from the world of The Midnight Library, is out now*If you loved The Midnight Library, read How to Stop Time next!HOW MANY LIFETIMES DOES IT TAKE TO LEARN HOW TO LIVE?Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old history teacher, but he’s been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, fr...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERA RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB PICKWINNER OF THE 2017 BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD FOR POPULAR FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARHOW MANY LIFETIMES DOES IT TAKE TO LEARN HOW TO LIVE?Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old history teacher, but he's been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England ...

Since 2000, the online anthology Best New Zealand Poems has showcased the most exciting and memorable poetry produced in this country. Here, for the first time, is a selection of this work in book form. Edited by founding publisher Bill Manhire, and writer Damien Wilkins, this anthology is an indispensable guide to the richness, strangeness, and liveliness of contemporary poetry. With over sixty poets appearing, there's classic work by some of the best-known figures in our writing...

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Tucked away along a shady path towards the north-east edge of Hampstead Heath is a sign: Women Only. This is the Kenwood Ladies' Bathing Pond.Floating in the Pond's silky waters, hidden by a canopy of trees, it's easy to forget that you are in the middle of London. On a hot day, thousands of swimmers from eight to eighty-plus can be found waiting to take a dip before sunbathing in the adjoining meadow. As summer turns to autumn and then winter, the Pond is still visited by a large ...

*Rediscover the light in the dark with the author of Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing'A treasure of a book, wonderfully attentive in outlook and generous in spirit.' – Amy LiptrotShortlisted for the Wales Creative Nonfiction Book of the Year 2019'A diary that reveals the healing power of the natural world.' The GuardianRediscover the light in the dark…As November stubs out the glow o...

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.'Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with h...

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley’s Staying Alive, which became Britain’s most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers who’ve wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder....

Michael Ondaatje’s selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.

Art, landscape and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' latest collection, Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The book opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, The Weeping Woman. The poem's parts are almost interlocking reflections that echo the cubistic manner of the painting and allow us to enter the shifting surfaces of Dora Maar's mind and her journey of self reclamation.