‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ – Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
Shortlisted in the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards for the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place
‘A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was’ – Guardian
The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma’s breathtaking capital. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea…
‘Highly original’ – Irish Times
‘This complex, compelling tale is told with simplicity and grace’ – The Times
A story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the mid-19th century, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for Britain. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs.
From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardship, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, the two became sworn enemies.
Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually travelled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.
A fascinating journey into Islam’s diverse history of ideas, making an argument for an ‘Islamic Enlightenment’ today.
In Reopening Muslim Minds, Turkish scholar and author Mustafa Akyol frankly diagnoses ‘the crisis of Islam’ in the modern world and offers an authentic way forward. Diving deep into Islamic theology and sharing lessons from his own life story, he reveals how Muslims lost the universalism that made them a great civilization in their earlier centuries – and what the cost has been. He highlights how values often associated with Western Enlightenment – freedom, reason, tolerance, and an appreciation of science – had Islamic counterparts, which were tragically cast aside in favour of more dogmatic views. By rereading the Qur’an and revisiting the Sharia, Akyol shows the path to a renewal in Islam.
How do we deal with the aftermath of catastrophe?
It’s ten years since a deadly pandemic swept the globe, and five years since the last new recorded case. Society came close to collapse, but now there’s a vaccine – though not a cure – people are only dying in the usual ways.
Lukas, along with several hundred other infected people, is quarantined in a camp on a mountain of Central Asia. With nothing to do, and no future to speak of, the inmates pass the time drinking, taking drugs, joining a cult, making are or having sex with whoever they can.
Rebecca is a scientist who worked on the vaccine that saved the world. Having lost her partner in the years of chaos, she keeps testing the vaccine against mutations of the virus, because it seems inevitable that there will be a next time.
Quarantine is a thrillingly intelligent novel about how we – as individuals, and as a society – deal with the aftermath of catastrophe.
There is a need to tell a better story about Britain because bad stories are being told. These are ‘bad’ in the sense both of doing the historical facts an injustice, and of causing damaging political effects. One bad story currently dominant is one that portrays Britain as a systemically racist country, whose racism is rooted in its colonial history, which was nothing but a litany of worldwide oppression and exploitation. This bad story has real-time political consequences.
A Better Story About Britain will counter these stories with a better one — more historically honest, more appreciative of the legacy of Britain’s past, and more hopeful about Britain’s future.
‘A page-turner’ The Spectator
‘Harrowing and engrossing’ Nicola Sturgeon
‘Incredible and powerful’ The Herald
‘Utterly heartbreaking’ Telegraph
On 13 March 1996 a man walked into Dunblane Primary School armed with four legally owned handguns, and in less than four minutes fired 105 bullets, killing sixteen children and their Primary One teacher.
The gunman was notorious among local parents, politicians and police: for years he ran a network of popular boys’ clubs and was the subject of multiple complaints and investigations, but, despite considerable evidence of troubling behaviour, he was never charged. His crime shocked the world then changed the nation – but only after an extraordinary political battle.
Based on original archival research, unseen royal correspondence and exclusive interviews with parents, One Morning in March tells – for the first time – of the lead-up to that day but also the incredible and powerful true story of how, in their darkest hour, a band of parents used their grief as fuel in a fight with John Major’s Conservative government to forever ban handguns in Britain. It is a story of how Princess Diana, forbidden to comfort the parents in the immediate aftermath, urged their campaign on; of how Andy Murray, a pupil at the school, ultimately banished the shadow over his hometown by winning Wimbledon; and of how the grieving parents secured the tightest gun laws in the world.
The story behind Notebook starts with a minor crime: the theft of Tom Cox’s rucksack from a Bristol pub in 2018. In that rucksack was a journal containing ten months’ worth of notes, one of the many Tom has used to record his thoughts and observations over the past twelve years. It wasn’t the best he had ever kept – his handwriting was messier than in his previous notebook, his entries more sporadic – but he still grieved for every one of the hundred or so lost pages. This incident made Tom appreciate how much notebook-keeping means to him: the act of putting pen to paper has always led him to write with an unvarnished, spur-of-the-moment honesty that he wouldn’t achieve on-screen.
Here, Tom has assembled his favourite stories, fragments, moments and ideas from those notebooks, ranging from memories of his childhood to the revelation that ‘There are two types of people in the world. People who fucking love maps, and people who don’t.’ The result is a book redolent of the real stuff of life, shot through with Cox’s trademark warmth and wit.
A thrilling historical adventure, inspired by the life of Grace O’Malley, channels the natural beauty and brutality of sixteenth-century Ireland. Seen through the eyes of an unforgettable heroine, the infamous Irish sea captain and folk heroine who risked everything to protect her people against the powerful Elizabethan regime.
Grace O’Malley, ‘the Pirate Queen of Ireland’, was born to be at sea. Raised alongside her brother by their father, chief of the name of clan O’Malley, Grace learns early that her dreams of the open water are not compatible with the life she’s expected to lead as the daughter of a noble family. And when her father marries her to the wrong man, a neighbouring chief named Donhal, Grace’s world shifts for the worse.
Undaunted, Grace raises a family without abandoning her passion, aiding her hot-tempered husband in his campaigns against rival tribes. Eventually ousted from her husband’s land in the wake of his death, Grace returns to her childhood home and begins her career as a pirate in earnest, claiming new territories and finding deeper love, only to see her livelihood threatened by English incursions into Ireland, and her family endangered in an attempt to check her power.
PRAISE FOR ARIEL LAWHON
‘One of our most interesting authors of historical fiction’ People
‘Ariel Lawhon is a masterful storyteller’ Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis
‘Her skill with characterisation is enviable’ 5 Star Reader Review
‘An extremely talented author’ 5 Star Reader Review
Mark the upcoming 100th Snooker World Championship with this gripping journey through the game’s legends, rivalries, and defining triumphs.
‘THE UNDISPUTED NUMBER ONE OF SNOOKER BOOKS’ BARRY HEARN
‘Terrific’ Phil Yates, snooker broadcaster
‘Must-read … Enthralling’ Neal Foulds, former world no.3
‘Perfection!’ Alan McManus, former Masters champion
‘A truly great read’ Hazel Irvine, sports presenter
‘Read this book for the story, which is spectacular; the analysis, which is surprisingly cogent; and for the deep knowledge and love of the game, which are hard to resist’ Spectator
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025
Snooker is a British success story, a working-class game which became a multi-million pound professional sport, exported to the world. A sublime test of skill and nerve, it has fascinated succeeding generations of players and spectators.
In this new history of the sport, David Hendon shows how the fortunes of snooker have mirrored wider changes in British society. Beginning as an upper-class pursuit invented in the British Raj, snooker was taken up in the working men’s clubs of industrial Britain. It nearly ceased to exist as an organised sport in the late 1950s, before reviving and becoming big business in the Thatcher era: 18.5m people watched the famous 1985 World Championship final. Since then, it has become a global sport, most notably in China and the Far East.
Weaving the big picture with the personal stories of snooker’s big characters, from Alex Higgins and Jimmy White to Ronnie O’Sullivan, anyone who has ever wielded a cue or breathlessly watched a marathon safety exchange will love this book.
‘A superb and compelling espionage drama inside the Iran Israel shadow war by the top spy thrillerist of these wild turbulent times’ Simon Sebag Montefiore
‘A great spy writer’ Tim Shipman
What happens when a spy is forced to reckon with the consequences of his deception?
Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm, dreams of starting afresh in California. To finance his new life, he agrees to spy for Mossad in Iran, working with a clandestine unit tasked with sowing chaos and sabotage inside the country. When he’s captured by Iranian security forces, Kamran is compelled to confess his experiences as a spy, in a testimonial dealing not only with the security of nations, but also with revenge, deceit, and the power of love and forgiveness in a world of lies.
Mixing suspense with strikingly cinematic action, David McCloskey takes readers deep into the shadow war between Iran and Israel, delivering propulsive storytelling and riveting tradecraft.
THE FOURTH NOVEL FROM FORMER CIA OFFICER, THE REST IS CLASSIFIED PODCAST CO-HOST AND THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ***THE TIMES THRILLER OF THE YEAR***DAMASCUS STATION (‘One of the best spy thrillers in years’ THE TIMES) AND ***SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR*** MOSCOW X
READER REVIEWS
‘A brilliant gripping read. This is one of his best books’
‘An excellent read from the pen of one who has been there and done it all, especially in light of current events in the Middle East.’
‘This is the best book I have read in years. A superb spy novel.’
‘Couldn’t put it down, this is an amazing book…This is a must read from a great writer!’