Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans. Here are the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin’s tortoise Harriet, and in an extraordinary essay, Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to...

Twenty years, a thousand pages, and now a single beautiful edition of Arundhati Roy's complete non-fiction. 'Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time' Naomi Klein 'The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Keep Smiling Through by Dame Vera Lynn, read by Anne Dover and David Thorpe. In the year of her 100th birthday, Dame Vera Lynn's fascinating and life-affirming wartime memoir from the forces' sweetheart's of her adventures entertaining the troops in far-flung Burma. 'I was just twenty-seven years old when I went to Burma....

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 in The Sunday Times, Spectator, Mail on Sunday, Observer and Financial Times 'A landmark biography' The Times, Books of the Year 'One of our generation's greatest biographers' London Review of Books 'Witty, spirited, richly crowded with incident and character - a joy to read' Prospect From the author of the prize-winning Matisse The Master comes...

‘We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed’ Martin Luther King In an era where the liberties we often take for granted are under threat, Letters To Change the World is a collection of inspiring letters offering reminders from history that standing up for and voicing...

Colin Thurbon’s beautiful prose unfolds along the Silk Road, unearthing a richly layered past on his most ambitious journey. On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into...

The First Graphic Adaptation of the Multi-Million Bestseller '12th June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.' In the summer of 1942, fleeing the horrors of the Nazi occupation, Anne Frank and...

'Deep-diving and elegant' Margaret Atwood 'Takes the gothic genre by the scruff of the neck' Bernadine Evaristo ----- 'They say I must be put to death for what happened to Madame, and they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don't believe I've done?' 1826, and all of London is in a frenzy. Crowds gather at...

Winner of the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize 'Majestic, informative and often delightful ... insights on every page' Yanis Varoufakis, Observer The definitive history of the Great Financial Crisis, from the acclaimed author of The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction. In September 2008 the Great Financial Crisis, triggered by the collapse of Lehman brothers, shook the world. A decade later...

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** An inventive biography of one of the most famous ships of all time -recently discovered off the coast of America- Endeavour is an alluring combination of history, adventure and science. From Johnson's Dictionary to campaigns for liberty, the Enlightenment was an age of endeavours. It was also the name given to a commonplace, coal-carrying vessel bought...

The first volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. In 1931, Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party, an event he felt to be second only in importance to his birth in shaping his destiny. Before that point, he lived a tumultuous and varied existence. He was a member of the duelling fraternity at the...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Japan Story written and read by Christopher Harding. This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers...

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written. More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First...

In 1850, China was the 'sick man of Asia'. Now it is set to become the most powerful nation on earth. The Penguin History of Modern China shows how turbulent that journey has been. For 150 years China has endured as victim of oppression, war and famine. This makes its current position as arguably the most important global superpower all...

A combination of verse from Simon Armitage and prose from Jeff Young lends a voice to the chain of events depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. This production chronicles the history surrounding the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the ascension of Duke William of Normandy to the English throne. Harold, Duke of Wessex, takes the English throne, despite Edward...