Recent successes

Restless, William Boyd

A Richard and Judy's Book Club Choice for 2007.  Winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award 2007.

It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since then Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as the very English wife and mother Sally Gilmartin — but once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment. This time though Eva can’t do it alone: she needs her daughter’s help.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction

From a walled-off enclave of towering plants, smart villas and sparkling swimming pools — a surreal bubble of pure Americana known as the Green Zone — the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, under imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, attempted to rule Iraq in the first twelve months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

My Side of The Story, Will Davis

Winner of the Betty Trask Award

Jaz’s parents have just discovered he’s gay — having somehow failed to notice the shrine to Orlando Bloom in his bedroom. Not only that, but his best (girl)friend Al has outed him on the school bus by mistake. So now he’s being shipped off for therapy, mocked by a gang of delinquent neo-Nazi schoolboys, disapproved of by his whiter-than-white sister (aka The Nun) and worst of all, keeps meeting his geography teacher in the local gay club. There’s masses and masses of hassle to come, but this is pretty much where it all begins.

The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize

At 4pm on a dark, wet winter’s evening in November 1862, a cheap coffin was buried in eerie silence: no lamentations, no panegyrics, for as the British Commissioner in charge of the funeral insisted, ‘No vesting will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.’ This Mughal was Bahadur Shah Zafar II, one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his remarkable dynasty who found himself leader of a violent uprising he knew from the start would lead to irreparable carnage. Zafar’s frantic efforts to unite his forces proved tragically futile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad, and Mughal Delhi was left an empty ruin. The Last Mughal charts the desecration and demise of a man, his dynasty, his city and civilizations mercilessly ravished by fractured forces and vengeful British troops.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

No 1 Bestseller

Poor, uneducated Mariam is terrified and only fifteen years old when she is shipped off to Kabul to marry a troubled man thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, pretty fifteen-year-old Laila finds herself in the same situation when her intellectual parents are killed by a stray Mujahideen bomb. Forced to forget the passionate love of her life, a boy she’s known since childhood, Laila has no choice but to join that same loveless household with shy Mariam and the bitter husband they now share. In time, however, orphaned Laila and childless Mariam form a friendship that makes them both sisters and mother and daughter to one another. When children are born into this household, the situation gets worse and worse — from shootings and bombings on the street, to physical abuse and starvation at home — and the women are put to phenomenal tests of endurance and strength. In scene after suspenseful scene, Hosseini shows us just how a woman’s love for her family can motivate her to overcome the most daunting obstacles, can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice. In the end, we see, it is love — or even love’s memory — that is often the key to survival.

How We Built Britain, David Dimbleby

Primetime BBC TV tie-in

In this meticulously researched and stunningly illustrated book, David Dimbleby tells the dramatic and heroic story of Britain’s architecture — the extraordinary buildings that define a nation and which grew out of the experiences and beliefs of the British people. How did we get from the fortified tower to the grand open mansion and back again to the gated communities of today? When did it become so important how libraries and prisons look? What does the way we arrange our city centres say about us? Can architecture really make a difference to our quality of life? This fascinating and authoritative account of a thousand years of change in Britain’s buildings tackles these questions and many more.

Austerity Britain, David Kynaston

Coursing through Austerity Britain is an astonishing variety of contemporary voices: from Judy Haines, a plucky Chingford housewife, to Henry St John, a pernickety civil servant in Bristol, to more familiar figures such as John Arlott (here making his first radio broadcast, still in police uniform), Glenda Jackson (taking the 11+) and Doris Lessing (newly arrived from Africa, struck by the levelling poverty of postwar Britain) — all vivid, unselfconscious, and unaware of what the future holds.

Into this story David Kynaston deftly weaves a critical, sophisticated narrative of how the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped the political, economic and even social landscape for the next three decades. Deeply researched, often amusing and always intensely readable, the first volume of David Kynaston’s ambitious history offers an entirely fresh perspective on Britain during six momentous years.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling

Harry has been burdened with a dark, dangerous and seemingly impossible task: that of locating and destroying Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes. Never has Harry felt so alone, or faced a future so full of shadows. But Harry must somehow find within himself the strength to complete the task he has been given. He must leave the warmth, safety and companionship of The Burrow and follow without fear or hesitation the inexorable path laid out for him…

In this final, seventh instalment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited. The spellbinding, richly woven narrative, which plunges, twists and turns at a breathtaking pace, confirms the author as a mistress of storytelling, whose books will be read, reread and read again.

www.bloomsbury.com/harrypotter 
and www.bloomsbury.com/swot 

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See

Lisa See has written her best book yet. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination of a real and secret world that has only recently disappeared. It is a story so mesmerizing the pages float away and the story remains clearly before us from beginning to end' Amy Tan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a story of two extraordinary women surviving in a time of strict rules and ancient customs. With the eye of a historian and the vibrancy of a true storyteller, Lisa See has written a truly mesmerising novel filled with colour, fascinating detail and heartfelt drama.

Moondust, Andrew Smith

A Richard and Judy's Book Club Choice for 2006

A powerful, moving and gripping book about the lives of the men who walked on the moon. In 1999, Andrew Smith was interviewing Charlie Duke, astronaut and moon walker, for the Sunday Times. During the course of the interview, which took place at Duke’s Texan home, the telephone rang and Charlie left the room to answer it. When he returned, some twenty minutes later, he seemed visibly upset. It seemed that he’d just heard that, the previous day, one of his fellow moon walkers, the astronaut Pete Conrad, had died. ‘Now there’s only nine of us,’ he said. Only nine. Which meant that, one day not long from now, there would be none, and when that day came, no one on earth would have known the giddy thrill of gazing back at us from the surface of the moon. The thought shocked Andrew Smith, and still does. Moondust is his attempt to understand why.

Empress Orchid, Anchee Min

A Richard and Judy's Book Club Choice for 2006

To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor’s wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. But beneath its immaculate façade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor’s son.

Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man, bribes her way into the royal bed, and seduces the monarch, drawing the attention of dangerous foes. Little does she know that China will collapse around her, and that she will be its last Empress.

Second Honeymoon, Joanna Trollope

Number 1 Bestseller

Ben is, at last, leaving home. At twenty-two, he’s the youngest of the family. His mother Edie, an actress, is distraught. His father Russell, a theatrical agent, is rather hoping to get his wife back, after decades of family life. His brother, Matthew, is wrestling with a relationship in which he achieves and earns less than his girlfriend. His sister Rosa is wrestling with debt, and the end of a turbulent love affair.

Meet the Boyd family and the empty nest, twenty-first-century style.

Among the Dead Cities, A.C. Grayling

In the course of WWII, the air forces of Britain and the United States of America carried out a massive bombing offensive against the cities of Germany and Japan, ending with the destruction of Hamburg and Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was it justified by the necessities of war? Or was it, in fact, a crime against humanity? This is now one of the last great remaining controversies of that time. And it matters, argues A. C. Grayling, 'that history is got right before it distorts into legend'.

Among the Dead Cities is both a lucid and revealing work of modern history and an urgent moral investigation. Grayling asks what are the lessons that we can learn for today about how people should behave in a world of tension and moral confusion, of terriorism and bitter rivalries.

The Good Life, Jay McInerney

Jay McInerney revisits ten years on some of the characters that populated Brightness Falls. Luke McGavock, in the enviable position of having made more money than he can spend, has chosen to take a sabbatical in which he might recover the sense of purpose suddenly lacking in his life. But his wife is more than up to the task of spending and very much a part of Upper East Side society, which affects their daughter in ways that he shudders to think about.

These are only some of the lives transformed by 9/11, in which both McGavock and the Calloways lose a friend, and Luke and Corrine soon find themselves side by side, providing food and drink to workers at the devastated site, while feeling lost anywhere else. This novel is the story of the love that develops between them, people battered by loss and betrayal, by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and shocks, people determined to discover, before it's too late, what the good life truly is.

The Tent, Margaret Atwood

One of the world’s most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books Good Bones and Murder in the Dark, punctuated with wonderful illustrations by the author.

Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these highly imaginative, vintage Atwoodian essays speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision.

Poppy Shakespeare, Clare Allan

Welcome to the Dorothy Fish, a day hospital in North London! N has been a patient here for thirteen years. Day after day she sits smoking in the common room, swapping medication and comparing MAD money rates. Like all the patients at the Dorothy Fish, N’s chief ambition is never to get discharged. Each year when her annual assessment comes round, she is relieved to learn that she hasn’t got any better.

Then in walks Poppy Shakespeare in her six -inch skirt and twelve-inch heels. She is certain she isn’t mentally ill and desperate to return to her life outside. Though baffled by Poppy’s attitude, N agrees to help. Together they plot to gain Poppy’s freedom. But in a world where everything’s upside-down, are they crazy enough to upset the system?

Funny, brilliant and moving, Poppy Shakespeare looks at madness from the inside, questioning our mental health system and the borders we place between sanity and insanity. Written in high-voltage prose, original and troubling, it is a stunning debut.

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

Selected for Richard and Judy’s Summer Reads, 2006, Jim Lynch’s debut novel is a poignant coming-of-age story, a gripping novel of natural wonder.

In a moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley packs up his kayak and goes exploring on the flats of Puget Sound. Miles loves looking for starfish, snails, crabs and clams, but as he forages he comes across a startling sight. His heart pounds as he moves closer to an enormous breathing beast. Then he realises that he is looking at something remarkable: a giant squid.

www.bloomsbury.com/jimlynch

Jpod, Douglas Coupland

Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, JPod throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life.

Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames begin in 'J' are bureaucratically marooned in jPod - a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company.

The six workers daily confront the forces that define our era: global piracy, boneheaded marketing staff, people smuggling, the rise of China, marijuana grow-ops, Jeff Probst, and the ashes of the 1990s financial tech dream. JPod's universe is amoral and shameless. The characters are products of their era even as they're creating it. Everybody in Ethan's life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt.

www.jpod.info

Ancestor Stones, Aminatta Forna

The story of four women, born to the different wives of a wealthy plantation owner in an Africa where change is just beginning to arrive. Asana, lost twin and head-wife’s daughter. Hawa, motherless child and manipulator of her own misfortune. Mary, who sees what lies beyond this world. And Serah, follower of a Western-made dream. Stretching across generations and set against the backdrop of a country’s descent into freefall, Ancestor Stones is a stunning novel about understanding the past; how stories ancient and new shape who we become and a different way of seeing the world we share. It is the story of a nation, a family and four women’s attempts to alter quietly the course of their own destiny.

www.bloomsbury.com/aminattaforna

So Many Ways to Begin, Jon McGregor

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2006, So Many Ways to Begin is about mothers, childhood, secrets, memories, migration and the many different ways there are of telling or not telling a story which needs to be told.

But at its heart, So Many Ways To Begin is the story of a marriage; a study of the separate and shared lives of David Carter and Eleanor Campbell. David is a museum curator whose assumptions about his own history are suddenly shattered and whose search for identity forms the narrative spine of the book. Eleanor escapes from an Aberdeen shipbuilding family and the darkly scornful influence of her mother into a new life for which she slowly loses her nerve. How do these two people connect, learn about each other, make sense of the stories of their lives?

www.bloomsbury.com/jonmcgregor

Restless, William Boyd

A brilliant espionage novel. What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie?

Exploring the devastating consequences of duplicity and betrayal it is a thrilling novel that captures the drama of the Second World War and a remarkable portrait of a female spy. Full of suspense, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its very finest.

www.williamboyd.co.uk

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore

The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming And What We Can Do About It.

In An Inconvenient Truth Gore writes about the urgent need to solve the problems of climate change, presenting comprehensive facts and information on all aspects of global warming in a direct, thoughtful and compelling way, using explanatory diagrams and dramatic photos to clarify and highlight key issues. The documentary film of the same name, based on the book, premiered at this year's Sundance Festival to great acclaim.

www.bloomsbury.com/algore

My Take, Gary Barlow

For the first time, Gary tells his full story from his childhood in Cheshire to life after Take That: the early start at thirteen working in a social club; a career as a teenager working the northern clubs; and the life-changing moment when he met Nigel Martin-Smith, a Manchester modeling agent who wanted to put together a boy-band. Gary will reveal what life on the road with Take That was really like and the truth behind the rumours of their petty feuding. He will also finally settle the speculation around his painfully public fall-out with Robbie.

www.bloomsbury.com/garybarlow

The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford

The new masterpiece from one of America's greatest novelists. Frank Bascombe is back. The protagonist of Richard Ford’s acclaimed novels, Sportswriter and Independence Day, is now in his late middle age. Recovering from cancer, he looks back on his marriages, friendships, children and career. Elegant, melancholic, full of understated irony, The Lay of the Land is a remarkable portrait of a seemingly ordinary man as he assesses the life he has led.

www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple

The Last Mughal charts the desecration and demise of a man, his dynasty, his city and civilizations mercilessly ravished by fractured forces and vengeful British troops.

William Dalrymple unearths groundbreaking new material to create the first English account of the life of the last Emperor, and the first narrative of the Mutiny to contain large quantities of material from the Indian perspective. The Last Mughal rapidly changes our understanding of a pivotal moment in Indian and Imperial history.

www.williamdalrymple.com

The Kite Runner Special edition, Khaled Hosseini: 2006 Orange Reading Group Book of the Year

Publication Date: November 2006

Unfolding against Afghanistan’s destructive history, from the fall of the monarchy to the oppression of the Northern Alliance and the advent of the Taliban, The Kite Runner is a story of fathers and sons, friendship and betrayal, and the casualties of fate.

www.khaledhosseini.com

In Search of Perfection, Heston Blumenthal: Accompanied by a major BBC 2 series

Chef Heston Blumenthal has been described as a culinary alchemist for his innovative style of cuisine. His work researches the molecular compounds of dishes so as to enable a greater understanding of taste and flavour. Perfection is an eight-part prime-time TV series hosted by Heston Blumenthal. The series focuses on eight classic dishes — Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mash, Spag Bol, Risotto, Roast Beef, Steak and Salad, Pizza and Treacle Tart and Ice Cream. Heston will look at the provenance of these dishes, how to source the best ingredients and what to look for, and of course, how to cook them to ‘perfection’.

This tie-in book of the same name contains all Heston’s recipes for the classic dishes and all his hints and tips on how to cook the very best ingredients, as well as fascinating information on the background to these dishes.

www.bloomsbury.com/hestonblumenthal

Hugh Fearlessly Eats it All, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

In this hugely enjoyable collection, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall — the man who brought you placenta canapés and brains on toast — chomps his way through the edible, the delectable, and the plain indigestible. For almost two decades, ‘Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall’ has been writing about food in all its guises. Armed with a broad mind, a quick wit and a ready appetite, Hugh covers almost every area of global food culture.

This is the first of a long publishing programme of books by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to be published by Bloomsbury.

www.bloomsbury.com/hugh