See larger image Painter of Silence (Paperback) By (author) Georgina Harding List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 2.73 In Stock Used from: 6.14 In Stock

Iasi, Romania, the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of a hospital. Deaf and mute, he is unable to communicate until a young nurse called Safta brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly, memories appear on the page.

The memories are Safta’s also. For the man is Augustin, son of the cook at the manor house which was Safta’s family home. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin’s world remained the same size Safta’s expanded to embrace languages, society – and a fleeting love, one long, hot summer.

But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same.

See larger image Origins of Love (Hardcover) By (author) Kishwar Desai List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 3.80 In Stock Used from: 10.26 In Stock

The Origins of Love, by Kishwar Desai

In Delhi a small baby lies alone and abandoned. The product of IVF and surrogacy, she had been so coveted – until she was born with a fatal illness. No one knows how the infection could have been transferred to the child, but one thing is certain: no one wants her now. Thousands of miles away in London, Kate and Ben are desperate for a baby. But, despite all their efforts, fate seems to be skewed against them. Then, as Kate suffers another miscarriage, she knows something has to change. She has heard of women who are prepared to carry a baby for others, and she knows this might be a way to finally find happiness. But will her desire for a baby stop at nothing…? And between the two, feisty social worker Simran Singh is determined to uncover the truth behind the shadowy facade of the multi-million dollar surrogacy industry. Women and children are being exploited, their lives thrown away like so much dust. Is she is the only person prepared to stand up for what is right…?

• Read an extract

See larger image Skios (Hardcover) By (author) Michael Frayn List Price: 15.99 GBP New From: 8.00 In Stock Used from: 9.15 In Stock

Skios, by Michael Frayn

Good God, thought Oliver, as he saw the smile. She thinks I’m him! And all at once he knew it was so. He was Dr Norman Wilfred.

On the sunlit Greek island of Skios, the Fred Toppler Foundation is preparing for the most important event in its calendar: its annual lecture. This year they have secured a major star: Dr Norman Wilfred, the world-famous authority on the scientific organisation of science. When he arrives he turns out to be surprisingly young and charming – not at all the intimidating figure they had been expecting.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the island, a young woman waits for the notorious chancer she has rashly agreed to go on holiday with and who has only too characteristically failed to turn up. Trapped in the villa with her instead, by an unfortunate chain of misadventure, is a balding old gent called Dr Norman Wilfred, who has lost his whereabouts, his luggage, his temper and increasingly all normal sense of reality …

And as the time draws ever nearer for one or other Dr Wilfred – or possibly both – to give the eagerly-awaited lecture, so Skios – Greece – Europe – career off their appointed track.

See larger image Time Warped (Hardcover) By (author) Claudia Hammond List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 7.00 In Stock Used from: 8.16 In Stock

Time Warped, by Claudia Hammond

Have you ever tried to spend a day without looking at a clock or checking your watch? It’s almost impossible. Time rules our lives, but how much do we understand about it? And is it possible to retrain our brains and improve our relationship with it? Drawing on the latest research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience and biology, and using original research on the way memory shapes our understanding of time, the acclaimed writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond delves into the mysteries of time perception. Along the way, Claudia introduces us to an extraordinary array of characters willing to go to great lengths in the interests of research, such as the French speleologist Michel, who spends two months in an ice cave in complete darkness. We meet one group of volunteers who steer themselves towards the edge of a stairwell, blindfolded, and another who are strapped into a harness and dropped off the edge of tower block. Time Warped shows us how to manage our time more efficiently, speed time up and slow it down at will, plan for the future with more accuracy and, ultimately, use the warping of time to our own advantage.

• Read the extract

See larger image Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Hardcover) By (author) Kate Summerscale List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 9.20 In Stock Used from: 9.00 In Stock Release date April 30, 2012.

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, by Kate Summerscale

On a mild winter’s evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.

Lady Drysdale’s guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. He was ‘fascinating’, she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man’s charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake…

A compelling story of romance and fidelity, insanity, fantasy, and the boundaries of privacy in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace brings vividly to life a complex, frustrated Victorian wife, longing for passion and learning, companionship and love.

• Read the extract

To win, answer two simple questions…

• Question 1: In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, whose party is Isabella attending?
  
• Question 2: Accurate timing is essential for what, in Time Warped?

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See larger image Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues (Paperback) By (author) James Fearnley List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 7.40 In Stock Used from: 7.29 In Stock

October, 1984: Wham!, Culture Club and Status Quo dominate the top ten when The Pogues barrel out from the backstreets of Kings Cross, a furious, pioneering mix of punk energy, traditional melodies and the powerfully poetic song-writing of Shane MacGowan.

Reviled by traditionalists for their frequently fast, often riotous interpretations of Irish folk songs, The Pogues rose from the sweaty chaos of backroom gigs in Camden pubs to world tours with the likes of Elvis Costello, U2 and Bob Dylan, and had huge commercial success with everyone’s favourite Christmas song, Fairytale of New York.

Yet, the exuberance of their live performances coupled with relentless touring spiralled into years of hard drinking and excess which eventually took their toll – most famously on Shane but also on the rest of the band – causing them to part ways seven years later.

Here, their story is told with beauty, lyricism and great candour by James Fearnley, founding member and accordion player. He brings to life the youthful friendships, the bust-ups, the amazing gigs, the terrible gigs, the fantastic highs and dramatic lows in a hugely compelling, humorous, moving and honest account of life in one of our most treasured and original bands.

++++

At the end of last summer, before the final gig of the European festivals we’d been doing – in the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich – I picked up from the Faber offices enough typescripts of my memoir, Here Comes Everybody, to go round the band. I had five months ahead of me in which – among other things I hoped – to take part in the copy-editing and proof reading.

The Pogues had known I had been writing the book. Soon after signing the contract with Faber and Faber in the summer of 2009, I made a phone call to each of the band to let them know. To all of them, it came as no surprise, though when I described the book to Terry Woods, he said, in a dulcet, lispy, vaguely monitory voice, ‘Well, you know, Jamesy, there are things better left not written about.’ When I got Shane MacGowan on the phone and happened to mention Terry’s warning, he said: ‘I don’t give a fuck about that,’ and laughed his chip-frying laugh.

We were all strangers in 1982, when the Pogues started up. We all happened to live, or knew someone who lived, in Hillview Estate, the East End Dwellings Company tenements in the squatters’, drug dealers’ and whores’ hinterland south of Euston Road, Kings Cross. I knew Shane from auditioning as a guitar player for his punk band, the Nipple Erectors a couple of years before; Jem Finer from a bottle of lice treatment by the mattress the night I moved into Shane’s squat on Burton Street while Jem was away in France; Spider Stacy from a shouting argument I was audience to in the kitchen of the same house a few weeks later; Andrew Ranken by reputation as a doyen of Hillview and one of the last occupants of the Huntley Street squat, famously broken up by police and bulldozers in 1978; Cait, the original bass player, from her punching me in the stomach when I first met her; Philip Chevron from the sister record shop to the one Shane worked in; Terry Woods by other means; Darryl Hunt, Cait’s eventual replacement, through everybody else. We fused ourselves in the crucible of rehearsals in a friend’s back bedroom on Hillview Estate and in the Iveco Daily which Darryl drove through the British Isles for our tour supporting Elvis Costello in 1984.

After the gig at the Royal Naval College, I gave a copy of the typescript to those in the band I knew were leaving early the following morning for Dublin. I went to find Shane in his black tent by the side of the stage. He took the package, wrapped in brown paper, and, as he does when he’s confronted with something he’s not sure about, weighed it in his hands, tapping it.

‘It’s not very big,’ he said.
‘It’s printed on both sides,’ I said.
‘Hm,’ he said.

Over the next couple of days I travelled round London and put the rest of the band’s copies into their hands – before going home to Los Angeles and five months off which I couldn’t prevent myself thinking was escaping judgement somehow.

Over the next few months, Jem’s family took turns passing it round. Philip told me he read his copy on the train between Victoria and Chichester. Spider seemed to pick over his copy as if it were a fish full of bones. Andrew told me he stayed up until two in the morning. He cursed me for depriving him of sleep. Shane, not capable of keeping possession of a pair of glasses, had Victoria, his girlfriend of twenty-five years, read it out loud to him over a weekend.

At the beginning of May, Tony Clayton-Lea in the Irish Times marvelled that I had not been quarantined for writing such a warts-and-all tale. He wrote that it ‘says much about the band and the bond formed across thirty fractious years’ that I hadn’t. ‘A band of brothers to the very end,’ he added.

We started out as strangers. Hillview Estate made us neighbours. I remember coming across a guy bowling through Somerstown in the early 80s. He was singing at the top of his voice.

Naybaz, evybody needs gun naybaz!
Wiv a li’w annerstayning
Yewken foin ve perfick blen!
Naybaz…shubby vairfer wananah ver!
Vatswen gun naybaz becahm goof wens!

As in the song, we were there for one another too. It made sense we should become good friends. But thirty years on – whether or not I’m heading for quarantine when I see them again this summer – we became family as well.

See larger image Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Hardcover) By (author) Kate Summerscale List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 9.20 In Stock Used from: 9.00 In Stock Release date April 30, 2012.

On a mild winter’s evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.

Lady Drysdale’s guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. He was ‘fascinating’, she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man’s charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake…

See larger image Origins of Love (Hardcover) By (author) Kishwar Desai List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 3.80 In Stock Used from: 10.26 In Stock

In Delhi a small baby lies alone and abandoned. The product of IVF and surrogacy, she had been so coveted – until she was born with a fatal illness. No one knows how the infection could have been transferred to the child, but one thing is certain: no one wants her now.
Thousands of miles away in London, Kate and Ben are desperate for a baby. But, despite all their efforts, fate seems to be skewed against them. Then, as Kate suffers another miscarriage, she knows something has to change. She has heard of women who are prepared to carry a baby for others, and she knows this might be a way to finally find happiness. But will her desire for a baby stop at nothing…?

And between the two, feisty social worker Simran Singh is determined to uncover the truth behind the shadowy façade of the multi-million dollar surrogacy industry. Women and children are being exploited, their lives thrown away like so much dust.

• Read the extract

See larger image The Wrong Man (Hardcover) By (author) Jason Dean List Price: 19.99 GBP New From: 9.19 In Stock Used from: 15.32 In Stock

Nine hundred and seventy three days.

Thinking. Planning. Waiting for the perfect moment.

Former Marine James Bishop will only have one opportunity to make his prison break. And one chance to prove that he isn’t responsible for the murders that put him inside.

Three years ago Bishop was the leader of an elite close protection team hired to protect a millionaire and his daughter. After being attacked, Bishop regained consciousness to find seven bodies strewn throughout the millionaire’s Long Island mansion – including those of his two charges – and a mountain of evidence guaranteed to send him down for murder.

But to find out who set him up and why, Bishop needs to be free. And now the time has come to make his move.

• Read the extract

See larger image Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Hardcover) By (author) Kate Summerscale List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 9.20 In Stock Used from: 9.00 In Stock Release date April 30, 2012.

On a mild winter’s evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.

Lady Drysdale’s guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. He was ‘fascinating’, she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man’s charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake…

A compelling story of romance and fidelity, insanity, fantasy, and the boundaries of privacy in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace brings vividly to life a complex, frustrated Victorian wife, longing for passion and learning, companionship and love.

See larger image The Beauty in the Beast: Britain's Favourite Creatures and the People Who Love Them (Hardcover) By (author) Hugh Warwick List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 6.83 In Stock Used from: 4.38 In Stock

Meet the water vole-woman from Shropshire, the owl-man from Somerset and Gordon, the dancing toad-fancier. These and many other fabulously engaging characters carry a deep knowledge of their chosen species within a distinctly quirky shell. Other animals making an appearance include otters, bats, dolphins, dragonflies, foxes and adders.

Hugh Warwick, animal enthusiast and hedgehog fanatic, writes a series of affectionate and lively homages to the animals of the British Isles, composed of fieldwork and interviews with the people who love and conserve them.

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See larger image Time Warped (Hardcover) By (author) Claudia Hammond List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 7.00 In Stock Used from: 8.16 In Stock

Drawing on the latest research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience and biology, and using original research on the way memory shapes our understanding of time, the acclaimed writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond delves into the mysteries of time perception. Along the way, Claudia introduces us to an extraordinary array of characters willing to go to great lengths in the interests of research, such as the French speleologist Michel, who spends two months in an ice cave in complete darkness. We meet one group of volunteers who steer themselves towards the edge of a stairwell, blindfolded, and another who are strapped into a harness and dropped off the edge of tower block. Time Warped shows us how to manage our time more efficiently, speed time up and slow it down at will, plan for the future with more accuracy and, ultimately, use the warping of time to our own advantage.

• Read the extract

See larger image The Trapeze Artist (Paperback) By (author) Will Davis List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 6.11 In Stock Used from: 10.25 In Stock

A man will endlessly torture his muscles until they shriek and complain. But he will not give in. He will take a hammer to his ceiling until neighbours begin to watch from the window and journalists knock at the door. He will continue to train and hack away at the house until it is finished and the trapeze is in place. Although his parents thought he was nice and kind-hearted and teachers saw him as a good boy, secretly he hated his drab, ordered world and longed for more. Then, when he was fourteen, a new boy arrived at his school. Edward exuded the coolness of a latter-day Oscar Wilde. Edward listened to Patti Smith, watched Fassbinder films and knew the writings of Gore Vidal, and one evening, would kiss him in the moonlight. Forty years old and fleeing from a life he can no longer handle, he stumbles upon the circus. Not knowing why, only that he must, he gets in his car and follows after it, refusing to listen to the doubts that plague him, determined to build a new home and family.

The Trapeze Artist draws together the past, present and future of one life to create a work of startling dexterity and vision – a haunting and heartbreaking account of a child, a boy, a man, desperate to free himself from the suffocating weight of his desires, his family and his grief. It speaks of what it is to grow up gay in a straight world, to be unable to communicate with those you love, of the sweat, passions and tempers of circus life, and above all, the longing to break free, and to swing higher and higher…