Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox’s loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties the ancient kind and the everyday variety as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Emerging from this focus on the detail are themes that are broader and bigger and more important than ever.
Tom’s writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it’s bewitched by fresh air and big skies, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless and prone to a few detours, but it always reaches its destination in the end.
Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji’s voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it’s a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible.
1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.
As featured on BBC Radio 4
‘Funny and touching’ Sunday Times
‘Extraordinary’ Observer
‘Full of both wisdom and humour’ Julia Samuel
‘Funny, moving, brave’ Jeremy Bowen
‘I had the privilege to conduct Simon’s last broadcast interview – knowing his wise words on the page could live on afterwards’ Emma Barnett
*****READER REVIEWS
‘Simon’s cheerful voice comes through every page’
‘An absolute gift of a book … This book has the potential to change your life’
‘Stunning’
It isn’t quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’. But it’s close to ‘Don’t start any long books’.
In his mid-40s, Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer – it had been caught too late, and spread around his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live – optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritising what really matters in life.
In A Beginner’s Guide to Dying Simon considers and collates the things that have given him such a great sense of peace and contentment, and why dying at 46 really isn’t so bad. And for that reason it’s also only partly about ‘dying’. It is mostly a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life, and why giving death a place can help all of us make even more of it.
Behind You Is the Sea is a compelling debut that fearlessly challenges stereotypes surrounding Palestinian culture.
‘Intergenerational differences … are explored from both sides with keen-eyed humanity and understanding’ Marie Claire
‘Funny and beautifully written’ Stylist Magazine
‘A rich panoply of a community’ Crack Magazine Book of the Month
‘Wonderful … A novel about ordinary people fighting for what they believe to be right’ Irish Independent
‘A poignant reminder of our shared humanity … brimming with hope and empathy’ Irish Times
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families – the Baladis, the Salamehs and the Ammars – Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America. Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode, as their lives intersect across divides of class, generation and religion.
From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into how mental health overdiagnosis is harming, not helping, children
‘A pacy, no-holds barred attack on mental health professionals and parenting experts … thought-provoking‘ Financial Times
‘A message that parents, teachers, mental health professionals and policymakers need to hear’ New Statesman
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. What’s gone wrong?
In Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids – it’s the mental-health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers and young people themselves, she reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits: for instance, talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression; while ‘gentle parenting’ can encourage emotional turbulence in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult to be in charge. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to support our kids have backfired.
‘An absolutely wonderful book’ – Deborah Moggach
In a London street at the turn of the twenty-first century, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children.
Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered. Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona’s extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with?
At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common.
If you want to ‘change lives, change organisations, change the world,’ the Stanford business school’s motto, you need power.
Is power the last dirty secret or the secret to success? Both. While power carries some negative connotations, power is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Don’t blame the tool for how some people used it.
Rooted firmly in social science research, Pfeffer’s 7 rules provide a manual for increasing your ability to get things done, including increasing the positive effects of your job performance.
With 7 Rules of Power, you’ll learn, through both numerous examples as well as research evidence, how to accomplish change in your organisation, your life, the lives of others, and the world.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Millie Partridge desperately needs a party. So, when her (handsome and charming) ex-colleague Nick invites her to a Hebridean Island for New Year’s Eve, she books her ticket North.
But things go wrong the moment the ferry drops her off. The stately home is more down at heel than Downton Abbey. Nick hasn’t arrived yet. And the other revellers? Politely, they aren’t exactly who she would have pictured Nick would be friends with.
Worse still, an old acquaintance from Millie’s past has been invited, too. Penny Maybury. Millie and Nick’s old colleague. Somebody Millie would rather have forgotten about. Somebody, in fact, that Millie has been trying very hard to forget.
Waking up on New Year’s Eve, Penny is missing. A tragic accident? Or something more sinister? With a storm washing in from the Atlantic, nobody will be able reach the group before they find out.
One thing is for sure – they’re going to see in the new year with a bang.
Tense, moody and claustrophobic, Auld Acquaintance is the unputdownable debut by Sofia Slater.
‘A heartfelt and packed-with-stats plea to the Left to abandon victimhood indulgence and instead celebrate the varied and extraordinary triumphs of different ethnic minority groups and individuals’ Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of the Michaela School
Beyond Grievance highlights the growing tensions between the liberal cosmopolitanism which defines much of the British political Left, and the patriotic faith-based conservatism that runs deep in many of Britain’s ethnic-minority communities. Instead, Rakib Ehsan presents the much-needed case for an inclusive ‘social-justice traditionalism’ rooted in family, security, and equality of opportunity.
‘Rakib Ehsan’s insightful book busts the many myths that the liberal Left likes to tell about Britain’s diversity and shows that there is strength in the traditional values of our ethnic-minority communities’ Lord Maurice Glasman, author of Blue Labour
A No. 1 international bestseller, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem is a dazzling novel of mothers and daughters, stories told and untold, and the ties that bind four generations of women.
Gabriela’s mother Luna is the most beautiful woman in all of Jerusalem, though her famed beauty and charm seem to be reserved for everyone but her daughter. Ever since Gabriela can remember, she and Luna have struggled to connect. But when tragedy strikes, Gabriela senses there’s more to her mother than painted nails and lips.
Desperate to understand their relationship, Gabriela pieces together the stories of her family’s previous generations – from Great-Grandmother Mercada the renowned healer, to Grandma Rosa who cleaned houses for the English, to Luna who had the nicest legs in Jerusalem. But Gabriela must face a past and present far more complex than she ever imagined.
Spanning decades, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem follows generations of unforgettable women as they forge their own paths through times of dramatic change, and paints a dazzling portrait of a family and a young nation as they struggle to find their way even as others try to carve it out for them.