Sharp & blackly humorous, The Death of Rex Nhongo follows five marriages & one gun, which collide on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe. When Patson finds a gun in his taxi, it gives a jolt to a marriage already balancing on the knife-edge of poverty. Shuttling disaffected British expats, avoiding intelligence officers & supporting deluded relatives from the country, Patson weaves a web through a city that can speak of only one thing: General Rex Nhongo, & the rumours surrounding his death. This is a portrait of marriage under pressure; of husband & wife in breakdown, breakup & breakthrough. Portraying racial pride or middle class guilt, government conspiracy or childhood compulsion, C. B. George never softens his grip on the uncomfortable truth. ...

This is an unforgettable recreation of life in wartime, & of the tragic fate of Poland in the twentieth century: a novel about sabotage, betrayal & the terrible sadness of exile. In 1940, during the Phoney War, a French destroyer blows up in the Firth of Clyde. The disaster is witnessed by Jackie, a young girl who, for a time, thinks she caused the explosion by running away that day from school; by her mother Helen, a spirited woman married to a dreary young officer; & by a Polish officer, whose country has just been erased from the map by Hitler & Stalin. Their lives, & the lives of many others, are changed by the death of the Fronsac. This is a story about divided loyalties, treachery & exile; about people in flight from the destinies that seemed to be theirs before the war disrupted the world they knew. ...

It is London in the late 1930s, & into a coterie of rather grand early-middle-aged people the sixteen-year-old orphan Portia is plunged beyond her depth. Disconcertingly vulnerable, Portia is manifestly trying to understand what is going on around her & looking for something that is not there. Evident victim, she is also an inadvertent victimiser
- her impossible lovingness & austere trust being too much for her admirer Eddie, who is himself defensive & uncomfortable in this society which has managed to bring them together. In the midst of the rising tension is set perhaps Elizabeth Bowen`s most brilliant piece of social comedy, when, at a seaside villa full of rollicking young people, Portia experiences at least temporary relief from the misery Eddie seems determined to bring her.
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From a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic comes an impassioned critique of the West`s retreat from reason. ` The Death of Truth is destined to become the defining treatise of our age` David Grann ` The first great book of the Trump administration.. . essential reading` Rolling Stone We live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked & discounted by the US President. Discredited conspiracy theories & ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, & Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research & expertise, & we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases. How did truth become an endangered species? This decline began decades ago, & in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media & literature, television, academia, & political campaigns, Kakutani identifies the trends
- originating on both the right & the left
- that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, & common values. & she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell & Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly & eerily relevant. With remarkable erudition & insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition & presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.

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Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. Around him the lives of the apartment dwellers unfold
- the warring housewives on the first floor, the lovesick teenagers on the second, & the widower, alone & quietly grieving at the top of the building. In a fevered state Vishnu looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini & comedy becomes tragedy as his life draws to a close.
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From Chatterton`s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats` death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood; from Dylan Thomas`s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath`s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman`s leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet
- exemplified by Thomas & made iconic by his death in New York
- has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept & in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed & self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet`s life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security? What is the price of poetry? In this book, two contemporary poets undertake a series of journeys
- across Britain, America & Europe
- to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, honouring inspirational writers, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth. The result is a book that is, in turn, enlightening & provocative, eye-wateringly funny & powerfully moving.



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SS Obersturmfuhrer Paul Meissner arrives in Auschwitz from the Russian front. After being badly wounded he is fit only for administrative duty & his first & most pressing task is to improve flagging camp morale. He sets up a chess club which thrives, as the officers & enlisted men are allowed to gamble on the results of the games. However, when Meissner learns from a chance remark that chess is also played by the prisoners he hears of a Jewish watchmaker who is `unbeatable`. Meissner sets out to discover the truth behind this rumour & what he finds will haunt him to his death... ...

`A book worth reading` Andrew Marr, Sunday Times The Debatable Land was an independent territory which used to exist between Scotland & Engl&. At the height of its notoriety, it was the bloodiest region in Great Britain, fought over by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I & James V. After the Union of the Crowns, most of its population was slaughtered or deported & it became the last part of the country to be brought under the control of the state. Today, its history has been forgotten or ignored. When Graham Robb moved to a lonely house on the very edge of Engl&, he discovered that the river which almost surrounded his new home had once marked the Debatable Land`s southern boundary. Under the powerful spell of curiosity, Robb began a journey
- on foot, by bicycle & into the past
- that would uncover lost towns & roads, reveal the truth about this maligned patch of land & result in more than one discovery of major historical significance. Rich in detail & epic in scope, The Debatable Land takes us from a time when neither England nor Scotland could be imagined to the present day, when contemporary nationalism & political turmoil threaten to unsettle the cross-border community once more. Writing with his customary charm, wit & literary grace, Graham Robb proves the Debatable Land to be a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history.
Includes: a 16-page colour plate section.


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For Winston Churchill the men & women at Bletchley Park were `the geese the laid the golden eggs`, providing important intelligence that led to the Allied victory in the Second World War. At the peak of Bletchley`s success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom more than eight thousand were women. These included a former ballerina who helped to crack the Enigma Code; a debutante working for the Admiralty with a direct line to Churchill; the convent girl who operated the Bombes, the top secret machines that tested Enigma settings; & the German literature student whose codebreaking saved countless lives at D-Day. All these women were essential cogs in a very large machine, yet their stories have been kept secret. In The Debs of Bletchley Park & Other Stories author Michael Smith, trustee of Bletchley Park & chair of the Trust`s Historical Advisory Committee, tells their tale. Through interviews with the women themselves & unique access to the Bletchley Park archives, Smith reveals how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do `their bit` for the war effort, & the part they played in the vital work of ` Station X`. They are an incredible set of women, & this is their story. ...

A seminal work of European literature that has inspired writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare, the ” Penguin Classics” edition of Giovanni Boccaccio`s ” The Decameron” is translated with an introduction by G.H. Mc William. In the summer of 1348, as the ” Black Death” ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside. Taken from the Greek, meaning `ten-day event`, Boccaccio`s Decameron sees his characters amuse themselves by each telling a story a day, for the ten days of their confinement
- a hundred stories of love & adventure, life & death, & surprising twists of fate. Less preoccupied with abstract concepts of morality or religion than earthly values, the tales range from the bawdy Peronella, hiding her lover in a tub, to Ser Cepperallo, who, despite his unholy effrontery, becomes a Saint. The result is a towering monument of European literature & a masterpiece of imaginative narrative. This is the second edition of G.H. Mc William`s acclaimed translation of the ” Decameron”. In his introduction Mc William illuminates the worlds of Boccaccio & of his storytellers, showing Boccaccio as a master of vivid & exciting prose fiction. Boccaccio (1313-75) was an Italian writer of both verse & prose. He wrote ” The Decameron” over a period of ten years, & is also the author of ” Teseide & Filostrato”. If you enjoyed ” The Decameron”, you might like Dante`s ” Inferno”, also available in ” Penguin Classics”. ” Mc William`s finest work, his translation of Boccaccio`s ” Decameron” remains one of the most successful & lauded books in the series”. (” The Times”).
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