The "flamboyant and elegantly written saga" of the legendary author's family and their lifesaving nautical advances across eighteenth century Scotland ( Publishers Weekly ).For centuries the seas around Scotland were notorious for shipwrecks. Mariners had nothing to aid their navigation but a single coal-fire light on the east coast, which was usually extinguished by rain. In 1786 the Northern Lighthouse Trust was establis...

"A moving and fascinating book about sound and what it means to be human" from the Somerset Maugham Award–winning author of The Lighthouse Stevensons ( Financial Times).In this surprising and moving book, award-winning writer Bella Bathurst shares the extraordinary true story of how she lost her hearing and eventually regained it and what she learned from her twelve years of deafness. Diving into a wide-ranging exploration of silence and noise, she...

An "entertaining" historical investigation into the scavengers who have profited off the spoils of maritime disasters ( The Washington Post).Even today, Britain's coastline remains a dangerous place. It is an island soaked by four separate seas, with shifting sand banks to the east, veiled reefs to the west, powerful currents above, and the world's busiest shipping channel below. The country's offshore waters are strewn with shipwrecks—and for villagers sc...

A group of schoolgirls go off with two teachers on a field trip to the English countryside. They soon discover that the nearby town offers alcohol, drugs, and sex, at once tempting and terrifying. In this illicit, raw new world, isolated from the larger society and its familiar rules and repressions, some become more vulnerable, others more vicious. There are the almost casual daily cruelties the girls inflict on one another, the dangerous fault lines of their friendships, their insecuriti...

Bella Bathurst’s epic story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ancestors and the building of the Scottish coastal lighthouses against impossible odds.‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880. ‘When the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father!’Robert Louis Stevenson was the most famous of the Stevensons, ...

From Alan Bennett's Baffled at a Bookcase, to Lucy Mangan's Library Rules, famous writers tell us all about how libraries are used and why they're important. Tom Holland writes about libraries in the ancient world, while Seth Godin describes what a library will look like in the future. Lionel Shriver thinks books are the best investment, Hardeep Singh Kohli makes a confession and Julie Myerson remembers how her career began beside the shelves. Using memoir, history, polemic and some short ...

The Barbary corsairs first appeared to terrorize shipping at the end of the fifteenth century. These Muslim pirates sailed out of the ports of North Africa, primarily Sal?, Rabat, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, a term derived from the name of its Berber inhabitants. Acting as officers of the sprawling Ottoman Empire, these pirates plundered the trading routes of the Mediterranean and sowed horror in the hearts of Christians everywhere.

A "thoroughly enjoyable" account of the English scientist and the French artist, each toiling alone, who invented modern photography ( The Wall Street Journal).During the 1830s, in an atmosphere of intense scientific inquiry fostered by the industrial revolution, two quite different men—one in France, one in England—developed their own dramatically different photographic processes in total ignorance of each other's work. These two lone geniuses—Henry Fox Ta...

In this intimate history of the extraordinary Black Plague pandemic that swept through the British Isles in 1665, Evelyn Lord focuses on the plague’s effects on smaller towns, where every death was a singular blow affecting the entire community. Lord’s fascinating reconstruction of life during plague times presents the personal experiences of a wide range of individuals, from historical notables Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton to common folk who tilled the land and ran the shops. She brings ...

One of the Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century: The great American writer tells his own story.Mark Twain was a figure larger than life: massive in talent, eruptive in temperament, unpredictable in his actions. He crafted stories of heroism, adventure, tragedy, and comedy that reflected the changing America of the time, and he tells his own story with the same flair he brought to his fiction. Writing this autobiography on his deathbed,...

'A highly lucid and readable account.' – Times Literary Supplement'An impressive and absorbing book.' – Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal HollowayIn over 2,000 years of Christianity, there has been only one pope from England: Nicholas Breakspear.Breakspear was elected pope in 1154, but his story started long before that. The son of a local churchman near St Albans,...

Incredible true stories reveal strange new magic in American history in this wondrous first book from the creator of the award-winning podcast The Memory Palace.“Nate DiMeo zooms in on stories of mishap, invention and adventure. . . . These brief historical lessons read like exquisite short stories, each of them revealing something profound about history and humanity.”—The GuardianThe Memory Palace is a collection...