**A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the year by FT • Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction • Winner of the 2025 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction*“A trove of thrilling material . . . skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply research...

The New York Times bestselling account of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.At the time, the detective was a relatively new inv...

**Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book!From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London**In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home a...

Summer 1860, an elegant country house, a young boy is found dead in an outside privy. All clues point towards the murderer being a member of the grieving household.Called to the scene is the most celebrated detective of his day, Jonathan Whicher from Scotland Yard. But this case challenges him in ways he's never been challenged before.Over twenty years later, still haunted by the case, Whicher visits the murderer. As they replay the past, they start to question the nature o...

**Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR *•*The Sunday Times •The New Statesman •The Times •The Spectator •The TelegraphShortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection**“Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”—The Times (Lo...

From the winner of the Edgar Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize, a cultural history of “everyday madness”The Book of Phobias and Manias is a thrilling compendium of 99 obsessions that have shaped us all, the rare and the familiar, from ablutophobia (a horror of washing) to syllogomania (a compulsion to hoard) to zoophobia (a fear of animals).Phobias and manias are deeply personal experiences, and among the most common anxiety disorders of our time,...

"I think people marry far too much; it is such a lottery, and for a poor woman--bodily and morally the husband's slave--a very doubtful happiness." -Queen Victoria to her recently married daughter VickyHeadstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age 31 in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A successful civil engineer, Henry moved them, by then wi...

A fascinating biography of the woman champion motorboat racer of the 1920s who in the '30s bought and became 'ruler' of an island in the British West Indies. 'Joe' Carstairs was born in London in 1900, the daughter of a Scottish colonel and an American heiress. Educated in Connecticut, she returned to Europe in 1916 and drove ambulances for the Women's Legion in France. She deserted her husband at the church door (marriage was a prerequisite of her coming into her $4 million inheritance) a...

'Jaw-droppingly amazing' DAILY MAILWINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBorn in 1900 to a promiscuous American oil heiress and a British army captain, Marion Barbara Carstairs realised very early on that she was not like most girls. Liberated by war work in the First World War, Marion reinvented herself as 'Joe'. She dressed in men's clothes, smoked cigars and cheroots, tat...

**Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR *•*The Sunday Times •The New Statesman •The Times •The Spectator •The TelegraphShortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection**“Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”—The Times (Lo...

**A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the year by FT • Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction • Winner of the 2025 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction*“A trove of thrilling material . . . skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply research...

From the winner of the Edgar Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize, a cultural history of “everyday madness”The Book of Phobias and Manias is a thrilling compendium of 99 obsessions that have shaped us all, the rare and the familiar, from ablutophobia (a horror of washing) to syllogomania (a compulsion to hoard) to zoophobia (a fear of animals).Phobias and manias are deeply personal experiences, and among the most common anxiety disorders of our time,...