Ambitious young reporters Josie and Laurent arrive in Prague in 1968 to cover a revolution unfolding behind the Iron Curtain. It’s the story of a lifetime. A dream come true.A dream that’s about to become a nightmare.Soviet tanks thunder into the city, changing everything. Josie receives a cryptic message from a shrouded stranger on a mist-covered bridge, and soon she and Laurent are propelled onto a collision course with nefarious villains...

Ambitious young reporters Josie and Laurent arrive in Prague in 1968 at a time of upheaval, keen to cover a revolution unfolding behind the Iron Curtain.It's the story of a lifetime. A dream come true.A dream that's about to become a nightmare.At dawn on a mist-covered bridge, Josie receives a cryptic message concealed inside a song. Before she can make sense of it, Soviet tanks thunder into the city, changing every...

Enter a world of coded messages, secret gatherings, maps made by spies, walls that have ears, cellars dripping with menace, skyscrapers that trap you in the clouds, and elevator rides that could be your last.When Harrison, the 14-year-old son of American diplomats, lands in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, all he wants is to be left alone with his daydreams and his music.But his father has vanished. His mother is keeping secrets. And his friend Prudenc...

“An utterly gripping thriller . . . and a highly sophisticated piece of literary legerdemain” from the Lambda Award–winning author of Night Soil (The New York Times).When the five hundreth person they know dies of AIDS, Colin and Justin flee New York City. They end up in Galatia, a Kansas town founded by freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War whose population is now divided, evenly but uneasily, between African Americans descended from the town...

** Longlisted for the 2024 Cundill History Prize**‘A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book’ Annie ProulxA way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban.In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people...

An e book that will soften the hearts of even the most stubborn non-believers and atheists, written by a former devout atheist. If this book opens the eyes of only one person, it will have been worth the effort.

A historian's personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nationFrom Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?Patrick Joyce...

What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the ...

The liberal governance of the nineteenth-century state and city depended on the "rule of freedom." As a form of rule it relied on the production of certain kinds of citizens and patterns of social life, which in turn depended on transforming both the material form of the city (its layout, architecture, infrastructure) and the ways it was inhabited and imagined by its leaders, citizens and custodians.Focusing mainly on London and Manchester, but with reference also to Glasgow, Dubli...

Brought to you by Penguin.A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban.In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations, and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland ...

For centuries, spiritual seekers have profited from reading accounts of people’s spiritual journeys. Well-known examples include Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, Teresa of Avila’s The Story of Her Life, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, and M.K. Gandhi’s The Story of my Life. Reading such spiritual autobiographies can provide us with light for our own journeys and can help us correct course when we veer off the path. Some readers of this autobiography by Kevin Patrick Joyce, Surprise...

With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an internati...