Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019.Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019.'An extraordinary travelogue, strange and brilliant' - iIn 2013 Guy Stagg walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the pilgrimage after suffering several years of mental illness, h...

Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019.Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, RSL Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019.In 2013 Guy Stagg made a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the journey after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancien...

All my life I have dreamed of retreat. Of letting go each responsibility and cutting every tie. And I know I’m not the only one. But, when I learnt about the creative figures who left their lives behind, I began to ask myself: what is gained and what is lost when we withdraw from the world?To answer this question, Guy Stagg tells the story of three of the twentieth century’s most original minds: the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the poet and painter David Jones, and the...

Brought to you by Penguin.Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored.In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void.Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, Blackness in museums, Blackness in feminist art movements, as well as Blackness in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective...

Brought to you by Penguin.Susan ‘Zuzu’ Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she’s always dreamed of – a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and Agnes has been off for a long time, and she can’t help but wonder ‘what if’.What if she had chosen to live with her father instead of her mother after their divorce? To pursue art over law? And, most importantly, to pursue her feelings for her male best friend from college...

Brought to you by Penguin.It is autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, a family endures the agonizing wait for their son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other pressing concerns to be met at home: the working of the farmland that has been theirs for generations and what to do with their troubled younger son.Catrin’s childhood sweetheart comes back to their small town, giving the boys’ ...

**Brought to you by Penguin.Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote exceptional short stories. Here some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li.**Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence.Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiy...

Brought to you by Penguin.The new book from the Orwell Prize-Winning author of Poverty Safari and The Social Distance Between UsToday, trauma permeates media, from music and television to films and books – my own included. While the increasing openness is welcome, I’ve observed that this rise has been accompanied by a parallel explosion of disinformation and sometimes harmful guidance about how to deal with personal trauma...

Brought to you by Penguin.HEARTSTOPPER MEETS BUFFY IN THIS ROM-COM ABOUT LOVE AND VAMPIREDOMOf course**, Brennan would have to get unexpectedly turned into a vampire.**But if there’s one thing he can do, it’s pretend life’s still fine when it's not.However, being bloodthirsty is complicated: especially after the super-cute librarian, Cole, catches him drinking from a stolen blood bag.To Bren...

'Thought-provoking and beautifully written' Daily Mail 'Strangely compelling' The Times 'Astonishing. If you like Sally Rooney, read this book' Hattie Williams(Look at these two. They have been sure that their fate is in their own hands – they have been desperate to believe this – and now they are learning it is not.The ending is a pivotal moment in their story.)No...

Brought to you by Penguin.Mina Smallman has lived through the unimaginable. On Saturday 6 June 2020, her daughters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were killed in a park by a male stranger as they celebrated Bibaa's birthday.Mina has been fighting for justice ever since - for her daughters, and for the rest of us, by challenging the toxic culture in the Metropolitan Police and calling out the wider institutional misogyny, racism and classism in Britain. No...

From the bestselling author of The History of BeesLongyearbyen, 2110: Far to the North, buried deep in the mountains, is a massive vault filled with seeds from every corner of the Earth. Tommy grows up in the brutal landscape of Spitzbergen alongside his two brothers, for whom he would do anything, and his grandmother, the seed keeper of the vault. Life just to the South of the North Pole is demanding, but their tiny community has found its shape. It has b...