Parks are such a familiar part of everyday life. You might be forgiven for thinking they have always been there - and that they always will. In fact, the roots of even the most humble neighbourhood park lie in age-old battles over land and liberty. From their medieval life as private royal hunting grounds to their modern incarnation as public spaces teeming with activity, theirs is a story of land-grabbing ...

This title was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award. It is longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland's Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion - a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them. The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imag...

Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Swedish word that means a traveller's particular sense of anticipation before a trip? Lost in Translation brings the nuanced beauty of language to life with 50 beautiful ink illustrations. The words and definitions range from the lovely, such as "goya", the Urdu word to describe the ...

This book includes a quirkily illustrated, brilliantly risque, but thoroughly practical, guide to the peculiarities of one of the trickiest languages on earth, for (strictly adult) students of English as a foreign language and native speakers alike.

From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona In Italian Ways, bestselling writer Tim Parks brings us a fresh portrait of Italy today through a wry account of his train journeys around the country.

Winner of the 2015 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Our lives depend on shipping but it is a world which is largely hidden from us. In every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men live extraordinary lives, subject to dangers and difficulties we can only...

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but not with John. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb. Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and d...

Umberto Eco’s modern classic The Name of the Rose”takes place at a truly transcendental time in world history, when mankind was on the verge of ideas and discoveries that would violently throw it into a world more like today's.

"Few writers give me such consistent pleasure". (Zadie Smith). Four siblings meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. But under the idyllic surface lie shattering tensions. Roland has come with his new wife, and his sisters don't like her. Fran has brought her children, who soon uncover an ugly secret in a ruined cottage in the woods. Alice has invited Kasim, an outsider, w...

In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing. Equal parts travelogue, training log, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005...

The Danes are the happiest people in the world, and pay the highest taxes. 'Neutral' Sweden is one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world. Finns have the largest per capita gun ownership after the US and Yemen. 54% of Icelanders believe in elves. Norway is the richest country on earth. 5 % of Danish men have had sex with an animal.

One of Graham Greene’s most popular books, Our Man in Havana has all the usual trademarks of a Greene novel (foreign locale, one man, a higher power and the perversion thereof), except instead of being a taught thriller, Greene’s wit shines through and proves to be as blackly comic as one could imagine.

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Ernest Hemingway's magnificent fable The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. Here, is a perfectly crafted story, a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.

Norwegian Wood stands with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as one of Haruki Muarakami’s best and most popular works. As usual, it deals with the world around us with a sense of melancholy, charm, loss- all weaved through with his irrepressible wit, managing to make the more whimsical aspects of his work seems normal.

One of Graham Greene's most loved novels, Travels With My Aunt is the story of Henry Pulling, an unmarried retired bank manager who has just been made redundant and, with no prospects or hobbies other than tending his dahlias, finds himself agreeably excited by his mother's funeral. It is at this sad event that for the first time in more than half a century, he meets his formidable and irrepressible Aunt Au...

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman and Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in the twilight on the beach and they fall in love. When the villagers' gossip threatens to divide them, Shinki must risk his life to prove his worth.

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 'Outstanding...a stunningly good read' Observer 'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement...Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He kno...

Sunday Times Bestseller. Book of the Week on Radio 4. "A curious and articulate exploration of flying". (Guardian). "One of the most constantly fascinating, but consistently under-appreciated aspects of modern life is the business of flying. Mark Vanhoenacker has written the ideal book on the subject: a description of what it's like to fly by a commercial pilot who is also a master prose stylist and a deepl...

The gripping new conspiracy thriller by the bestselling author of The Name of the Rose. 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. 1992, Milan. Colonna takes a job at a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate. There he learns the paranoid theories of Braggado...

The Sunday Times Bestseller Longlisted For The Man Booker Prize Shortlisted For The Baileys Women's Fiction Prize. 'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times befor...