After living in China for five years, and learning the language, Peter Hessler decided to undertake an even more complicated endeavor: he acquired his Chinese driving licence. An eye-opening challenge, it enabled him to embark on an epic journey driving across this most enigmatic of countries. Over seven years, he travelled to places rarely explored by tourists, into the factories exporting their goods to the world and into the homes of their workers. Full of extraordinary encounters and d...

When Peter Hessler went to China in the late 1990s, he expected to spend a couple of peaceful years teaching English in the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River. But what he experienced - the natural beauty, cultural tension, and complex process of understanding that takes place when one is thrust into a radically different society - surpassed anything he could have imagined. Hessler observes firsthand how major events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping, the return of Hong Kong to the mainl...

'Memorable... One of [China's] most astute and sensitive foreign observers' Financial Times'Compassionate... full of warmth' GuardianMore than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their loc...

'Tenacious, revelatory, and humane.' - Paul Theroux'The Buried is the kind of book that you don't want to end and won't forget. With the eye of a great storyteller Peter Hessler weaves together history, reporting, memoir, and above all the lives of ordinary people in a beautiful and haunting portrait of Egypt and its Revolution.' - Ben RhodesWinner of the The Peter Mackenzie Smith Book Prize 2021In 2011, wh...

More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties - members of China's "Reform generation" - and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an i...

A powerful, intimate look at the Chinese experience from the years of the Cultural Revolution to the present day, told through personal stories from one of China’s most acclaimed authors. Framed by ten words and phrases common in the Chinese vernacular, China in Ten Words reveals as never before the world’s most populous yet often misunderstood nation. Characterised by Yu Hua’s trademark wit, insight, and courage, he presents a refreshingly candid vision of the ‘Chinese miracle’ a...

THE NEW INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BIG SHORT AND FLASH BOYS'A gripping account of how two psychologists reshaped the way we think ... What a story it is' Sunday Times'You'll love it ... full of surprises and no small degree of tragedy' Tim HarfordIn 1969 two men met on a university campus. Their names were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They were different in every way. But they were...

In her fantastically disgusting international bestseller, Mary Roach dives into the strange wet miracles of science that operate inside us after every mealSHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY WINTON PRIZE 2014‘Almost every page made me laugh out loud.’ The Sunday Times, Best Science Books of 2013Eating is the most pleasurable, gross, necessary, unspeakable biological process we undertake. But very few of us re...

The bestselling author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals returns with a sharply observed, hilarious account of his adventures in China—a complex, fascinating country with enough dangers and delicacies to keep him, and readers, endlessly entertained.Maarten Troost has charmed legions of readers with his laugh-out-loud tales of wandering the remote islands of the South Pacific. When the travel bug hit again, he decided to go big-time, taking on the world’s most ...

In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home in British Columbia. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes, heartbreak and dreams of a young girl desperate for someone to understand her. Each turn of the page pulls Ruth deeper into the mystery of Nao’s life, and forever changes her in a way neither could foresee.Weaving across continents and decades, A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary nove...

The charming and enthralling story of an idiosyncratic English-language newspaper in Rome and the lives of its staffers as the paper fights for survival in the internet age.'A precise, playful fiction with a deep but lightly worn intelligence' - Times Literary SupplementThe newspaper was founded in Rome in the 1950s, a product of passion and a multi-millionaire's fancy. Over fifty years, its eccentricities earned a place in readers...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan.The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise...