What does history look like without 'civilisations'? Josephine Quinn calls for a major reassessment of the West and the concepts that define it.The West, history tells us, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance. In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the true story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept - developed in the Victorian era - of 'civilisations'. Quinn reveals a new narrative: one that traces the relationships that built what is now called the West from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart. She makes the case that it is contact and connections, rather than distinct and isolated civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history - people do.
The stunning third book in the sexy, action-packed Crescent City series, following theglobal bestsellers House of Earth and Blood and House of Sky and Breath.Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she's going to need all her wits about her to get home again. And that's no easy feat when she has no idea who to trust. Hunt Athalar has found himself in some deep holes in his life, but this one might be the deepest of all. After a few brief months with everything he ever wanted, he's in the Asteri's dungeons again, stripped of his freedom and without a clue as to Bryce's fate. He's desperate to help her, but until he can escape the Asteri's leash, his hands are quite literally tied. In this sexy, breathtaking sequel to the #1 bestsellers House of Earth and Blood and House of Sky and Breath, Sarah J. Maas's Crescent City series reaches new heights as Bryce and Hunt's world is brought to the brink of collapse-with its future resting on their shoulders.
'This novel annihilated me. I gasped, laughed, and wept my way through it' KHALED HOSSEINI'Tender and raw and funny, it's a rattling good read'COLUM MCCANN'A wildly charming debut - propulsive, funny, and profound'ELIF BATUMANTbilisi's littered with memories that await me like landmines. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn't even bring toothpaste.Saba is just a child when he flees his home in Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in the UK after Russia's occupation of South Ossetia. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind. When Irakli decides to return to Georgia, pulled back by memories of a lost wife and a decaying but still beautiful homeland, Saba and Sandro wait eagerly for news. But within weeks of his arrival, Irakli disappears, and the final email they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before them: 'My boys, I did something I can't undo. I need to get away from here before those people catch me. Maybe in the mountains I'll be safe. I left a trail I can't erase. Do not follow it.'In a journey that will lead him to the very heart of a conflict that has marred generations and fractured his own family, Saba must retrace his father's footsteps to discover what remains of their homeland and its people. By turns savage and tender, compassionate and harrowing, Hard by a Great Forest is a powerful and ultimately hopeful novel about the individual and collective trauma of war, and the indomitable spirit of a people determined not only to survive, but to remember those who did not.
The #1 Sunday Times bestseller, February 2022, and sequel to the #1 New York Times bestseller. Sarah J. Maas's sexy, groundbreaking CRESCENT CITY series continues with this second instalment.Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar have made a pact. As they process the events of the Spring they will keep things . platonic . until the Solstice. But can they resist when the crackling tension between them is enough to set the whole of Crescent City aflame?And they are not out of danger yet. Dragged into a rebel movement they want no part of, Bryce, Hunt and their friends find themselves pitted against the terrifying Asteri - whose notice they must avoid at all costs. But as they learn more about the rebel cause, they face a choice: stay silent while others are oppressed, or fight. And they've never been very good at staying silent.In this sexy, action-packed sequel to the #1 bestseller House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas weaves a captivating story of a world about to explode - and the people who will do anything to save it.
THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA Guardian, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and Daily Express Book of the Year'Hugely, highly and happily recommended' Stephen Fry'You should read Humankind. You'll learn a lot (I did) and you'll have good reason to feel better about the human race' Tim Harford'The book we need right now' Daily Telegraph'Made me see humanity from a fresh perspective' Yuval Noah HarariIt's a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest.Humankind makes a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. The instinct to cooperate rather than compete, trust rather than distrust, has an evolutionary basis going right back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too.In this major book, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman takes some of the world's most famous studies and events and reframes them, providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history. From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the Blitz, a Siberian fox farm to an infamous New York murder, Stanley Milgram's Yale shock machine to the Stanford prison experiment, Bregman shows how believing in human kindness and altruism can be a new way to think - and act as the foundation for achieving true change in our society.It is time for a new view of human nature.
BLOWS ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS OUT OF THE WATER...A GAME-CHANGER. - Caitlin MoranPOWERFUL BOOK OFFERS STRATEGIES FOR INTERVENTION THAT WOULD SAVE LIVES - The IndependentA woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK. Domestic homicide is a pandemic so pervasive that the soaring figures cause weary resignation rather than alarm. For thirty years, Professor Jane Monckton Smith has been fighting to change this. A former police officer and internationally renowned professor of public protection, she lectures on sexualised and fatal violence; works with families bereaved through homicide: and trains police and other professionals on how to best handle cases involving coercive control, domestic abuse, and stalking. Killers do not snap and lose control Her ground-breaking research led to the creation of the eight-stage homicide timeline, laying out identifiable stages in which coercive relationships can escalate to murder and revolutionising our understanding of them. There are signs, if you know how to see themIn this book, Monckton Smith shares a glimpse into a world of toxic masculinity and coercive control, one in which the tools are shame and fear, helped along by a media and justice system who are far from shedding sexist notions of men and women's roles in society. Drawing on disciplines including psychology, sociology and law, she talks to victims, their families, and killers, putting together pieces to the puzzle of how these relationships can end in murder, and bringing to light the reasons why - for so many of us - there is no such thing as the safety of one's own home.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'A sweeping and brilliant portrait' GUARDIAN'A reportorial tour de force . Heart-rending, appalling and hard to put down' JANE MAYER'Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure . Definitive' AYAD AKHTAREvan Osnos moved to Washington, DC, in 2013 after a decade away from the United States. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments - the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault.In search of an explanation for the crisis, he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America's political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich; in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg; and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them. A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America's psyche, two assaults on the country's sense of itself: the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how it lost the moral confidence to see itself as larger than the sum of its parts.
'A masterpiece' Guardian'I really admire and love this book' Sally Rooney 'An intellectual and emotional rollercoaster' Daily Mail 'I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book' David Sedaris'It moved me to tears' Elizabeth DayTHE ONLY BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR BOTH THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021______________________________________________This is a story about a life lived in two halves. It's about what happens when real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen. It's about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.It's a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.______________________________________________'An utterly distinctive mixture of depth, dazzling linguistic richness, anarchic wit and raw emotional candour' Rowan WilliamsA 2021 Book of the Year: Sunday Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Times, New Statesman, Red, Observer, Independent, Daily Telegraph
A 2022 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR: Sunday Times * Irish Times * Spectator * Financial Times * Telegraph * Aspects of History'The history book you need if you want to understand modern Russia' ANNE APPLEBAUM'A magnificent, magisterial thousand year history of Russia . . . by one of the masters of Russian scholarship' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE'A great historian at the peak of his powers' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'[An] excellent short study' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES'If you really want to understand Putin's Russia today, anchored in its past of myths, then you simply have to read Figes's superb account' ANTONY BEEVOR'A lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation's past have been used to shape its autocratic present' OBSERVER'A valuable, instructive overview' INDEPENDENT -------------------------From the great storyteller of Russia, a spellbinding account of the stories that have shaped the country's past - and how they can inform its present.No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. None has changed its story so often. How the Russians came to tell their story, and to reinvent it as they went along, is a vital aspect of their history, their culture and beliefs. To understand what Russia's future holds - to grasp what Putin's regime means for Russia and the world - we need to unravel the ideas and meanings of that history.In The Story of Russia, Orlando Figes brings into sharp relief the vibrant characters that comprise Russia's rich history, and whose stories remain so important in making sense of the world's largest nation today - from the crowning of sixteen-year-old Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral, to Catherine the Great, riding out in a green uniform to arrest her husband at his palace, to the bitter last days of the Romanovs. Beautifully written and based on a lifetime of scholarship, The Story of Russia is a major and definitive work from the great storyteller of Russian history: sweeping, suspenseful, masterful.-------------------------PRAISE FOR ORLANDO FIGES'An outstanding historian and writer, he brings distant history so close that you could feel its heartbeat'KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD'Figes knows more about Russia than any other historian'MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES
Named a book of the year 2022 by the Sunday Times, The Times, Guardian, Irish Times, New Statesman, BBC and Waterstones'One of the best science fiction short stories to be published in the 21st century so far' SFX Review 'Saunders is funny and kind as ever, and his narrative virtuosity puts him up there with the best' Anne Enright, Guardian 'A triumph of storytelling' i paper'A joy. Effortlessly stylish, funny and smart' Daily Mail____________The first short story collection in ten years from the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the BardoMacArthur genius and Booker Prize-winner George Saunders returns with a collection of short stories that make sense of our increasingly troubled world, his first since the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Tenth of DecemberThe 'best short story writer in English' (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose - wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned - Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. 'Love Letter' is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the not-too-distant future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other. 'Ghoul' is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado, and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his 'reality.' In 'Mother's Day', two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. And in 'Elliott Spencer', our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed - his memory 'scraped' - a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.____________'The only way to experience Saunders's oblique, farcical, tragic world is to dive right in. It will take the top of your head off, but it's worth it' The Times'The world's best short story writer . Liberation Day is great art' Daily Telegraph
FINANCIAL TIMES BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF 2022For centuries, Ferdinand Magellan has been celebrated as a hero: a noble adventurer who circumnavigated the globe in an extraordinary feat of human bravery; a paragon of daring and chivalry. Now historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto draws on extensive and meticulous research to conduct a dazzling investigation into Magellan's life, his character and his ill-fated voyage. He reveals that Magellan did not attempt - much less accomplish - a journey around the globe, and that in his own lifetime, the explorer was abhorred as a traitor, reviled as a tyrant and dismissed as a failure. Fernández-Armesto probes the passions and tensions that drove Magellan to adventure and drew him to disaster: the pride that became arrogance, audacity that became recklessness, determination that became ruthlessness, romanticism that became irresponsibility, and superficial piety that became, in adversity, irrational exaltation. And as the real Magellan emerges, so too do his true ambitions, focused less on circumnavigating the world or cornering the global spice market than on exploiting Filipino gold.Offering up a stranger, darker and even more compelling narrative than the fictional version that has been glorified for half a millennium, Straits untangles the myths that made Magellan a hero.
**Selected for BBC 2 Between the Covers 2022****The BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick****Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022**'In this folksy, magnetic tale, two outsiders seek healing and enlightenment by creating crop formations in a Wiltshire field ... A memorable hymn to beauty' OBSERVER'The pleasures of this bountiful novel are like a glass of cool water on a parched summer day' THE TIMES'A spirited and anarchic novel... a roiling, rollicking crop-circle folk tale' GUARDIANEngland, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men - traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone - set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation - and that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold. Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the destruction of the English countryside, class inequality - and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power.'Brilliantly constructed and steeped in rural atmosphere' FINANCIAL TIMES, Best summer books of 2022
Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson return in the new thriller from international bestsellers Preston and Child. When a pair of skeletons are discovered at the Roswell landing site, the truth will be even stranger than the conspiracy it hides behind.
THE NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'A blockbuster . . . Essential reading' GUARDIAN'Packed with hair-raising revelations' OBSERVERThe definitive behind-the-scenes story of Trump's final year in office, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporters and authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller, A Very Stable GeniusThe true story of what took place in Donald Trump's White House during a disastrous 2020 has never before been told in full. Focused on Trump and the key players around him, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig provide a forensic account of the most devastating year in a presidency like no other. With unparalleled access, they reveal exactly who enabled and who foiled Trump as he sought desperately to cling to power.
'This unique oral history builds to a comprehensive portrait and an important biography' Observer'Reveals a vulnerable side to the man and adds remarkable depth to his onscreen persona' Financial TimesWhen Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, fans around the globe came together to celebrate the life of an inimitable man who had dedicated his life to traveling nearly everywhere (and eating nearly everything), shedding light on the lives and stories of others. His impact was outsized and his legacy has only grown since his death.Now, for the first time, we have been granted a look into Bourdain's life through the stories and recollections of his closest friends and colleagues. Laurie Woolever, Bourdain's longtime assistant and confidante, interviewed nearly a hundred of the people who shared Tony's orbit-from members of his kitchen crews to his writing, publishing, and television partners, to his daughter and his closest friends - in order to piece together a remarkably full, vivid, and nuanced vision of Tony's life and work. From his childhood and teenage days, to his early years in New York, through the genesis of his game-changing memoir Kitchen Confidential to his emergence as a writing and television personality, and in the words of friends and colleagues including Eric Ripert, José Andrés, Nigella Lawson, and W. Kamau Bell, as well as family members including his brother and his late mother, we see the many sides of Tony - his motivations, his ambivalence, his vulnerability, his blind spots, and his brilliance.Unparalleled in scope and deeply intimate in its execution, with a treasure trove of photos from Tony's life, Bourdain: In Stories is a definitive testament to the life of a remarkable man in the words of the people who shared his world.
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