F****ive tales of time-travel, vampires, Snow White and Odysseus from the legendary Tanith LeeTanith Lee was one of the 20th century’s most influential writers of fantasy, horror and science fiction. She wrote over 90 novels and 300 short stories, as well as children’s books, poems and several episodes of Blake’s 7. Her many accolades include several World Fantasy Awards (including the Lifetime Achievement Award) and she was the first woman to win the Brit...

Six quirky dramas from in and around a northern market stall“If you want owt - go down the market... They sell everything from pins to pearl earrings, from peaches to pig's trotters, from tripe to tiramisu. See the hanging, marbled haunches of beef down Butchers' Row. Smell the flowers, a fragrant dream. Taste the fresh silvery fish motorwayed down from the North Sea.”Some would say the Market is the last authentic part of the city centre. This nor...

Prize-winning author Adam Nicolson tells the story he was born to write – the real story of England. It is the gentry that has made England what it was and, to a degree, still is. In this vivid, lively book, history has never been more readable.We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distr...

Slipless in Settle is a sentimental journey around club cricket in the north of England, a world far removed from the clichéd lengthening-shadows-on-the-village-green image of the summer game. This is hardcore cricket played in former pit villages and mill towns. Winner of the 2011 MCC Cricket Book of the Year, it is about the little clubs that have, down the years, produced some of the greatest players Britain has ever seen, and at one time spent a fortune on importing the biggest names i...

Longlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (now the Bailie Gifford)‘A thrilling and complex book, enlarges our view of Homer … There’s something that hits the mark on every page’ Claire Tomalin, Books of the Year, New StatesmanWhere does Homer come from? And why does Homer matter? His epic poems of war and suffering can still speak to us of the role of destiny in life, of cruelty, of humanity and its frailty, but ...

An intensely moving account of George III’s doomed attempt to create a happy, harmonious family, written with astonishing emotional force from a stunning new history writer.George III came to the throne in 1760 as a man with a mission. He wanted to be a new kind of king, one whose power was rooted in the affection and approval of his people. And he was determined to revolutionise his private life too – to show that a better man would, inevitably, make a better ruler. Above all he w...

In Chaucer's London, betrayal, murder, royal intrigue, mystery, and dangerous politics swirl around the existence of a prophetic book that foretells the deaths of England's kings. Bruce Holsinger's A Burnable Book is an irresistible historical thriller reminiscent of the classics An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Name of the Rose, and The Crimson Petal and the White.London, 1385. Surrounded by ruthless courtiers—including his powerful uncle, John of Gaun...

Do you know why……a mortgage is literally a death pledge? …why guns have girls’ names? …why salt is related to soldier?You’re about to find out…The Etymologicon (e-t?-‘mä-lä-ji-kän) is:*Witty (wi-te\): Full of clever humor*Erudite (er-?-dit): Showing knowledge*Ribald (ri-b?ld): Crude, offensiveThe Etymologicon is a completely unauthorized guide to the strange underpinnings of the English language. It explains: how you get from “gruntled” ...

In the tradition of celebrated wartime storytellers Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, Tan Twan Eng's debut novel casts a powerful spell.For the first time, available as an audiobook -- The recipient of extraordinary acclaim from critics and the bookselling community, Tan Twan Eng's debut novel casts a powerful spell and has garnered comparisons to celebrated wartime storytellers Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Set during the tumult of World War II, on the lus...

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. Following the residents of Pepys Road, Capital features a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.

It’s the 1st of June 1914 and Hugh Stanton, ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer is quite literally the loneliest man on earth. No one he has ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps now they never will be.Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come. He knows this because, for him, that century is already history.Somehow he must change t...

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known.Yet as the years pass, William Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife an...