** Winner of the RSL Christopher Bland Prize ** Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents - the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair. For readers who were swept up in Laura Cumming's On Chapel Sands, Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey and Francesca Wade's Square Haunting. A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age, they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House - Julia's grandfather. So begins a life-changing quest to understand the affair, which had profound repercussions for Julia's family, not least her grandmother, Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War II. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, The Shadowy Third opens up a world with complex attitudes to love and sex, duty and ambition, and to writing itself.

Henry Francis Lyte moved to All-Saints Church in Brixham, Devon in 1824, where he became chairman of the schools committee, established the first Sunday school in the Torbay area and created a Sailors' Sunday School. The primary object of both schools was to provide education for children and seamen for whom other schooling was almost impossible. He organised an Annual Treat for the 800-1000 Sunday school children, which included a short religious service followed by tea and sports in the field. Shortly after Lyte's arrival in Brixham, he attracted such large crowds that the church had to be enlarged. Lyte was an expert flute player, spoke Latin, Greek, and French; enjoyed discussing literature; and was knowledgeable about wild flowers. At his Brixham home, Berry Head House, a former military hospital, Lyte created a magnificent library largely of theology and old English poetry, described in his obituary as one of the most extensive and valuable in the West of England. Nevertheless, Lyte was also able to identify with his parish of fishermen, visiting their homes and their ships in harbour, supplying every vessel with a Bible, and compiling songs and a manual of devotions for use at sea. A friend of Samuel Wilberforce, he also opposed slavery, organising an 1833 petition to Parliament requesting it be abolished in Great Britain. In poor health throughout his life, Lyte suffered various respiratory illnesses including asthma and bronchitis, and by the 1840s, he was spending much of his time in the warmer climates of France and Italy. Lyte spent the summer of 1847 at Berry Head, writing his best known hymn, Abide With Me. After one final sermon to his congregation he left again for Italy, and died at Nice on 20 November 1847. Other well-known hymns include Praise, my Soul, the King of Heaven and Pleasant are Thy Courts Above.

Jeoffry was a real cat who lived 250 years ago, confined to an asylum with Christopher Smart, one of the most visionary poets of the age. In exchange for love and companionship, Smart rewarded Jeoffry with the greatest tribute to a feline ever written. Prize-winning biographer Oliver Soden combines meticulous research with passages of dazzling invention to recount the life of the cat praised as 'a mixture of gravity and waggery'. The narrative roams from the theatres and bordellos of Covent Garden to the cell where Smart was imprisoned for mania. At once whimsical and profound, witty and deeply moving, Soden's biography plays with the genre like a cat with a toy. It tells the story of a poet and a poem, while setting Jeoffry's life and adventures against the roaring backdrop of eighteenth-century London.

Dylan Thomas's letters bring the fascinating and tempestuous poet and his times to life in a way that no biography can. The letters begin in the poet's schooldays and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on the work of his contemporaries, from T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden to Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. A lifetime of letters tell a remarkable story, each taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him.

In this memoir Daniel Huws describes the young and still carefree Ted Hughes, his Cambridge friends, his enthusiasms, his coming out as a poet, the arrival on the scene of Sylvia Plath and of their years in London.

Son of Mine is a beautiful, multi-layered account of what it means to be a family. Peter Papathanasiou successfully intertwines two life journeys - his own and his mother's - over the course of nearly a hundred years, to tell the story of an astonishing act of kindness, and an incredible secret kept hidden for two decades. This exceptional memoir sensitively documents the migrant experience, both from the unfamiliar perspective of first-generation migrants and the tension felt by the second-generation trapped between two cultures. At its core, Son of Mine is about the search for identity - for what it means to be who you are when everything is torn down and questioned, and the wisdom we can pass on to the next generation. Son of Mine is a compelling account of unknown heritage, of life gifts and losses, and the reclamations of parenting. It is dramatic, poignant and uplifting. But above all, it is a memoir of shock, discovery and reconciliation, all delivered in exquisite prose.

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A book like no other - the tale of a gripping quest to discover the identity of history's most notorious murderer and a literary high-wire act from the legendary writer and director of Withnail and I. For over a hundred years, 'the mystery of Jack the Ripper' has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists, and endless volumes purporting finally to reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorised Victorian England. But what if there was never really any 'mystery' at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? In THEY ALL LOVE JACK, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is much more than a radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend, and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption. Polemic, forensic investigation, panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, THEY ALL LOVE JACK is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts - the so-called 'Ripperologists' - to make clear, at last, who really did it; and more importantly, how he managed to get away with it for so long.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Last Act of Love, Cathy Rentzenbrink's Dear Reader is the ultimate love letter to reading and to finding the comfort and joy in stories. 'Exquisite' - Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups 'A warm, unpretentious manifesto for why books matter' - Sunday Express Growing up, Cathy Rentzenbrink was rarely seen without her nose in a book and read in secret long after lights out. When tragedy struck, it was books that kept her afloat. Eventually they lit the way to a new path, first as a bookseller and then as a writer. No matter what the future holds, reading will always help. A moving, funny and joyous exploration of how books can change the course of your life, packed with recommendations from one reader to another.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway . . . the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep. In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world. This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.

"An irreplaceable testimony of the struggle for democracy and tolerance in Latin America." "--El Pais
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Hector Abad's "Oblivion "is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written memorial to the author's father, Hector Abad Gomez, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his murder by paramilitaries in 1987. Twenty years in the writing, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life during one of the darkest periods in Latin America's recent history.

Sarah Robinson Scott (1721-1795) was a writer, translator and social reformer, and younger sister of Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1718-1800), the famous Bluestocking patron. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote to her sister reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on 18th-century life. While Scott's letters provide us with a window on to her own experiences and expectations, they must also be interpreted within 18th-century context. This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

"Recounted with the storytelling elan of a master raconteur - by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carre, the legendary author of A Legacy of Spies. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carre is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth; visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carre endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carre gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

With a new introduction by JESMYN WARD 'Zora Neale Hurston was a knockout in her life, a wonderful writer and a fabulous person. Devilishly funny and academically solid: delicious mixture' MAYA ANGELOU First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston's literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life - public and private - of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler and champion of the black experience in America. Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed high: 'I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and a sword in my hands.' 'One of the greatest writers of our time' TONI MORRISON

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with "bad blood" that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.

National Geographic Traveller's the best books on European cities, 2019 In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway was approaching fifty and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. He travelled for the first time to Venice and there, at a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking young Venetian woman just out of finishing school. What followed was a platonic love affair; he continued to visit her in Venice; she in turn came to Cuba while he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. This is the illuminating story of a writer and a muse that intimately examines both the cost to Adriana and the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway in his fifties. 'Hemingway [is] an enduringly fascinating character, one whom di Robilant, with his easy-paced style, has sympathetically brought to life.' Literary Review 'Effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway's final productive years.' New York Journal of Books

Though better known for his literary merits, Shakespeare made money, wrote about money and enabled money-making by countless others in his name. With chapters by leading scholars on the economic, financial and commercial ramifications of his work, this multifaceted volume connects the Bard to both early modern and contemporary economic conditions, revealing Shakespeare to have been a serious economist in his own right.

A retelling of American modernism through the lines of solidarity and division within and among ethnic and religious identities found in poetry. What happens if we approach the reading and writing of poetry not as an individual act, but as a public one? Answering this question challenges common assumptions about modern poetry and requires that we explore the important questions that define genre: Where is this poem situated, and how did it get there? Joshua Logan Wall's Situating Poetry studies five poets of the New York literary scene rarely considered together: James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Hayden. Charting their works and careers from 1910-1940, Wall illustrates how these politically marginalized writers from drastically different religious backgrounds wrestled with their status as American outsiders. These poets produced a secularized version of America in which poetry, rather than God, governed individual obligations to one another across multiethnic barriers. Adopting a multiethnic and pluralist approach, Wall argues that each of these poets-two Black, two Jewish, and one Irish-American anarchist-shares a desire to create more truly democratic communities through art and through the covenantal publics created by their poems despite otherwise sitting uncomfortably, at best, within a more standard literary history. In this unique account of American modernist poetics, religious pluralism creates a lens through which to consider the bounds of solidarity and division within and among ethnic identities and their corresponding literatures.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time-Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez-remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss. 'It enthralled and moved me.' Salman Rushdie In March 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as "Gabo," was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don't think we'll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother's words, Rodrigo wondered, "Is this how the end begins?" To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of Garcia Marquez's final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father's mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity. Both an illuminating memoir and a heartbreaking work of reportage, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes transforms this towering genius from literary creator to protagonist, and paints a rich and revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss. At its centre is a man at his most vulnerable, whose wry humour shines even as his lucidity wanes. Gabo savours affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose-and what is already lost. Throughout his final journey is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and the creative muse who was one of the foremost influences on Gabo's life and his art. Bittersweet and insightful, surprising and powerful, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes celebrates the formidable legacy of Rodrigo's parents, offering an unprecedented look at the private family life of a literary giant. It is at once a gift to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's readers worldwide, and a grand tribute from a writer who knew him well.

A guide to writing fiction by the Booker Prize-winning author of Vernon God Little.Part biography, part reflection and part practical guide, Release the Bats explores the mysteries of why and how we tell stories, and the craft of writing fiction. DBC Pierre reveals everything he learned the hard way.