Fiction Memoir

Calming, thought-provoking, poetic and honest, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of writing and musing by documentary-maker, environmentalist and author of Waterlog Roger Deakin. For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks. In them, he wrote his daily thoughts, feelings and observations about and around his Suffolk home, Walnut Tree Farm. Collected here are the very best of these writings, capturing his extraordinary, restless curiosity about nature as well as his impressions of our changing world.

In the 1980s, Nina Stibbe wrote letters home to her sister in Leicester describing her trials and triumphs as a nanny to a London family. There’s a cat nobody likes, a visiting dog called Ted Hughes (Ted for short) and suppertime visits from a local playwright. Not to mention the two boys, their favourite football teams, and rude words, a very broad-minded mother and assorted nice chairs.

Selected from his many books and papers, the Andrew Murray Collection on Prayer serves as a manual for Christians who long to rediscover the joy of a life devoted to serving with Christ to bring love to a hurting world. Murray highlights for us the scarlet thread from Genesis to Revelation which proves how we are a full partner with Christ in his healing work today. Written in simple language, Andrew Murray shares stories applicable to every day, age, and era. Learn how to pray how Jesus prayed, how the Holy Spirit heals our physical bodies, and how we can pray in victory....

Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated letters to bereaved friends and acquaintances, The Dark Interval is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives. Following the format of Letters to a Young Poet, this book arranges Rilke's letters into an uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of the great author's thoughts on death and dying as well as his sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

One of the most acclaimed books of our time - the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. By the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. He died believing that the war had been won.

The Cool Side of My Pillow is a collection of essays. Don’t let that fancy word fool you. I’m not trying to get highbrow or rant myself blue, but there are experiences and observations outside of the entertainment industry that I feel are worth sharing. What’s it about? Mostly, things that matter to me, like putting in the effort, being honest, and not treating the environment like it’s the enemy.

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.

Deborah Levy invites us into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn, the richness of the author’s own. Each moment draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing,.

In the vein of The Bitch in the House, 15 powerful women offer captivating, intimate, and candid explorations about what it’s really like turning 40 - and life beyond.

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Jane Austen at her witty, observant, intelligent, and sympathetic best, in this collection of her letters written to family and friends. Compiled by her niece Fanny Knight’s son Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Baron Brabourne), and edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, this collection includes a preface written by the editor and notes from Lord Brabourne. It was originally published in 1892.

Kennedy steered the nation away from the brink of nuclear war, initiated the first nuclear test ban treaty, created the Peace Corps, and launched American on its mission to the moon and beyond. JFK inspired a nation, particularly the massive generation of baby boomers, injecting hope and revitalizing faith in the American project. 2013 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's untimely death, a milestone to be marked by an avalanche of new books on his life and importance.

To the world, he was Dr. Sacks, the brilliant neurologist behind bestselling books like Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. To professor Susan Barry, he became Dear Oliver—her mentor, friend, and confidant over the course of their ten-year correspondence.

Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure.

Respected physician Paul Offit tells a fascinating story of modern medicine and pays tribute to one of the greatest lifesaving breakthroughs—vaccinations—and the medical hero responsible for developing nine of the big fourteen vaccines which have saved billions of lives worldwide.

How to think clearly, act purposefully, overcome any obstacle, and find peace and happiness along the way. The Meditations is a collection of Marcus' personal journal entries. They were not intended for publication but to remind Marcus himself of his principles and priorities. As a result, they are intimate, direct, and extremely useful. This new edition is rendered in contemporary English, with a foreword by Sam Torode.

Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit.

Unleashing his vengeance coast to coast, Bolan is waging a very personal war on organized crime. Now, with a cadre of Cuban revolutionaries on his side, it's time for a hurricane called the Executioner to blindside Miami. Bolan had planned to fight his way across the country, taking out branches of the syndicate one by one. Then comes a break Bolan never dreamed of: All of his enemies have assembled in the Sunshine State to finalize the elimination of the Executioner.

The extant letters of Pliny, written between AD 97 and 112, give us a unique insight into Imperial Rome under the early Antonine emperors. Organised into 10 books, the letters reflect a wide range of topics, mirroring Pliny’s own public and private interests. Among many other subjects, the letters also include an eye-witness account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, with the final book containing the exchange of letters between the writer (whose career culminated as Governor of Bithynia) and the emperor Trajan.

Contained here is Julius Caesar's own account of his military adventures in Gaul at the head of the Roman army, uniquely presented in Caesar's first-person perspective (rather than as a third-person narrative as in the original Latin). Included are seven sections ("books") of the Gallic War, each encompassing one year of Caesar's battles and intrigues; though there is an eighth book, it is generally accepted to have been written by another general, shortly after Caesar's death in 44 BCE.