Joining a cult is dangerous. Escaping a cult can be deadly.

When fifteen-year-old Jules Mathis comes home from school to find a strange girl sitting in her kitchen, her psychiatrist mother reveals that Mae is one of her patients at the hospital and will be staying with their family for a few days. But soon Mae is wearing Jules’s clothes, sleeping in her bedroom, edging her out of her position on the school paper, and flirting with Jules’s crush. And Mae has no intention of leaving.

Then things get weird: Jules discovers that Mae is a survivor of the strange cult that’s embedded in a nearby town.

And the cult will stop at nothing to get Mae back.

‘It is uplifting to see a frontline politician setting out a vision of such scope and ideological coherence … persuasively argued and elegant to read’ Sunday Times

A 2023 Book of the Year in Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph

Contemporary conservatism can easily be seen as a hollowed-out creed. Combining heartless free-market individualism with an unthinking social liberalism – or else simple authoritarian populism – it offers little to those whose sense of meaning is securely rooted in their families, communities and country.

Covenant, Danny Kruger, one of parliament’s leading thinkers, argues that we must restore the sources of virtue and belonging that underpin the good life. Our urgent task is to repair the covenantal relationships of love and partnership that our families, local communities and ultimately our country depend on. We must, he contends, go beyond a politics based purely on individual autonomy, social atomisation and self-worship. By examining the most fundamental questions of love, sex, life and death, ranging from marriage to assisted dying, Kruger charts a course towards a conservatism that can respond humanely and wisely to the social, environmental and economic crises that face us.

This riposte to both liberal orthodoxy and the authoritarian right is unmissable for anyone interested in British politics. It’s a key contribution to the debate on how the Conservative Party can respond to its current crisis.

‘This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius’ – QUESTLOVE

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century.

He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel, an accomplishment on a par with the revolutions wrought by Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play.

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He follows the people who kept Dilla and his ideas alive. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new.

This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and “see” the rhythm of Dilla’s beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla’s music itself.

Financial Times Music Book of the Year 2022

Book three in the My Father’s Dragon trilogy

Elmer is safe and sound at home in Evergreen Park while Boris is heading to Blueland, where he’ll reunite with his family. There’s just one problem: hunters have trapped Boris’ family and plan to capture and sell them to zoos all over the world! When Boris discovers the hunters’ plan, he knows exactly who to go to for help – Elmer Elevator, whose creative plans and schemes always save the day.

With time ticking away and the hunters ready to pounce, will Elmer rescue the dragons of Blueland in time?

For centuries the sailors of the Royal Navy have been famous for their colourful language. Trapped aboard leaky ships and creaking vessels for months, sometimes years, on end, the crews developed a peculiar language all of their own.

Veteran sailor Gerald O’Driscoll celebrated the Royal Navy’s heydey and preserved its unique language in this hilarious and fascinating collection.

Taking the reader from ‘Acting green’ all the way to ‘Water-rat’, A Dictionary of Naval Slang is a treasury of naval argot, jargon, lingo and cant, and a window on the lost world of living on the high seas.

First published in 1943, this modern gift edition comes with a foreword by author and former Royal Navy submariner Richard Humphreys.

Clampy – Nickname for the owner of very large feet.

Gutzkrieg – A pain in the stomach.

Rum-fiend – As the term implies, a man who is a glutton for rum.

Scaly-back – A veteran; one who has been too long in the navy.

Tin-eye – Nickname given to anyone who sports a monocle.

Wall-flower – Scathing reference to any ship which remains moored to a dockyard wall for a long period.

The extraordinary story of the women who took on the Islamic State and won

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women’s rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swathes of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States. In the process, these women would spread their own political vision, determined to make women’s equality a reality by fighting – house by house, street by street, city by city – the men who bought and sold women.

Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, The Daughters of Kobani is the unforgettable story of the women of the Kurdish militia that improbably became part of the world’s best hope for stopping ISIS in Syria. Drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews, bestselling author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon introduces us to the women fighting on the front lines, determined to not only extinguish the terror of ISIS but also prove that women could lead in war and must enjoy equal rights come the peace.

Rigorously reported and powerfully told, The Daughters of Kobani shines a light on a group of women intent on not only defeating the Islamic State on the battlefield but also changing women’s lives in their corner of the Middle East and beyond.

BOOK OF THE YEAR in The Times, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma behind these ideas, from its origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognisable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media pile-ons, as by its assertions, which are all too often taken as read: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As they warn, the unchecked proliferation of these beliefs present a threat to liberal democracy.

While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalised communities it claims to champion.

In the summer of 1998, FBI agent Bob Hilland reluctantly picked up the phone to call the famous psychic John Edward. Bob didn’t expect much from the call, but he was working on an unsolvable cold case and had nowhere else to turn.

What Bob never imagined was that the call would lead to a shattering of all his preconceived notions, a huge break in the cold case and an unlikely crime-solving partnership that spanned twenty-five years.

As Bob and John took on more cases together, they slowly learned how to rely on each other and trust their skills, ultimately finding not only justice for the crimes they solved, but resolution and healing in their own lives.

Centering on the investigation of the gruesome John Smith murders that rocked the nation, Chasing Evil is a heart-stopping story of murder, justice and finding help in unexpected places.

What if the fiasco of the 2022 mini budget was just a rehearsal for something much bigger? It is now costing the British government well over £100 billion a year just to pay the interest on its borrowings – more than it spends on either education or defence and around two thirds of what it spends on health. The government is running a deficit of £150 billion this year – a sum which will be added to the national debt and will require even ore to be spent on debt interest in coming years.

Ross Clark argues that a fiscal crisis will profoundly change the political landscape in Britain. Ideas which might seem unpopular now – such as a small and efficient state – will have to be enacted then. The political prize will fall to whoever, or whichever party, can prepare itself for the coming disaster.

Many worry that Britain is stuck in a doom loop of higher debt and higher taxes. In Can We Be Rich Again?, Jeremy Hunt argues that getting out of Britain’s low growth is a solvable problem, and that we should approach the country’s economic future with optimism.

Hunt asks the key questions: How deliverable are the changes we need by a Labour, Conservative or Reform government? How do we get the economy growing despite dangerous levels of debt? How do we sell long term reforms when our leaders have so little political capital? But countering pessimism needs solutions not just assertions, and they need to be realistic – plans that politicians can actually deliver in a democratic system and the majority of the electorate can get behind.