Abacus

This long-awaited memoir from one of Britain's best-loved celebrities - a writer, broadcaster, activist, comic on stage, screen and radio for nearly forty years, presenter of QI and Great British Bake Off star - is an autobiography with a difference: as only Sandi Toksvig can tell it.

The Riviera Set is the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped and politicked at the Chateau de l'Horizon near Cannes, over the course of forty years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fashionable in the twenties to the death of the playboy Prince Aly Khan in 1960. At the heart of this was the amazing Maxine Elliott, the daughter of a fisherman from Connecticut, who...

"I have learned many words for 'island': isle, atoll, eyot, islet, or skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and always, by definition, I have understood them by their relation to water. But the Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilisation grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better analogue: (dao, 'island') built from the relationship between earth and sky....

London, Paris and New York in the eighteenth century, as today, were places where political authority, commerce and money, art and intellectual life intersected. They straddled an Atlantic world where ships powered by nothing more than wind, currents and human muscle criss-crossed the sea, carrying with them goods, ideas and above all people: men and women, bewigged aristocrats and lawyers, rough-handed cra...

Shantaram is a book of high adventure, great storytelling and moral purpose, based on an extraordinary true story of Gregory David Roberts’ ten years in the Bombay underworld.

A collection of more than fifty stories about witches from around the world. There are tales of banshees, crones and beauties in disguise from China, Siberia, the Caribbean, Armenia, Portugal and Australia. The characters featured include Italy's Witch Bea-Witch, Lilith, Kali, and Twitti Glyn Hec.

'I read it in 24 hours. It's gripping, atmospheric and ultimately deeply satisfying' Val McDermid The gripping new novel from the author of the Sunday Times top ten bestsellers, The Dry and Force of Nature. He had started to remove his clothes as logic had deserted him, and his skin was cracked. Whatever had been going through Cameron's mind when he was alive, he didn't look peaceful in death. Two brot...

This Hostel Life tells the stories of migrant women in a hidden Ireland. From a day in the life of women queuing for basic supplies in an Irish direct provision hostel to a young black woman's depiction of everyday racism in Ireland, Melatu Uche Okorie's nuanced writing shines a light on the injustice of the direct provision system and on the insidious racism experienced by migrant women living in Ireland...

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize "Timely, portentous and powerful, Obioma's second novel confirms his remarkable talent" Independent "Chigozie Obioma truly is the heir to Chinua Achebe" New York Times Book Review Umuahia, Nigeria. Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso jo...

'More than ever, we need books like this' Jessica Seaton, Co-Founder of Toast and author of Gather, Cook, Feast A whole new way of looking at the world - and your life - inspired by centuries-old Japanese wisdom. Wabi sabi ("wah-bi sah-bi") is a captivating concept from Japanese aesthetics, which helps us to see beauty in imperfection, appreciate simplicity and accept the transient nature of all things. W...

The gripping new novel from the author of the Sunday Times top ten bestseller, Waterstones Thriller of the Month, Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year, CWA Gold Dagger Winner and Simon Mayo Radio 2 Book Club Choice, The Dry.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 'Marvellously, endearingly, unexpectedly funny' Gary Shteyngart 'Bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful' New York Times Book Review 'A fast and rocketing read . . . a wonderful, wonderful book!' Karen Joy Fowler Arthur Less is a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the post: it is from an ex-boyfriend of nine years ...

'Sedaris is the premier observer of our world and its weirdnesses' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt 'He's like an American Alan Bennett' Guardian A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 'Entrancing . . . This book allows us to observed not just the nimble-mouthed elf of his previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality . . . The bri...

I was told to come alone. I was not to carry any identification, and would have to leave my cell phone, audio recorder, watch, and purse at my hotel . . .

In Attention All Shipping, Charlie Connelly looks at the Shipping Forecast, which, regularly broadcast on BBC radio, is for many a familiar and reassuring element of the British cultural landscape. Its content could spell the difference between life and death for seafarers, but arguably less so for audiences in the garden shed or suburban living room. Here the author wittily sheds some light on the places b...

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. W...

'There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs Barber stepped into the tub. After that there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echoey plink of drips from the tap...'

Louisa Waugh's passionately written account of her time in a remote Mongolian village. Frustrated by the increasingly bland character of the capital city of Ulan Bator, she yearned for the real Mongolia and recounts here her time in the village of Tsengel.

Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered. When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes s...