The lapping of the sea was a lesson in mortality...'Live,' he heard, with each whisper of the water. 'Live; live; live.' Through Lucas Judd, the dead make contact with the living, or so he believes, or professes to believe. He is a man of such penetrating insight and empathy that many have faith in his gift. They confide in him, and findconsolation. Even Joshua, his sceptical young neighbour, seems drawn by his compassionate sophistry. But when Erin, a much younger woman, shadowed by recent grief, moves in with Lucas, the focus of Joshua's fascination begins to shift. Such are the surface ripples of this poignant and precisely attuned novel. Its depths reveal the largest of themes - mortality and love, and the way in which the souls of those with whom we shared our experiences inhabit our memories. Characters appear and recede, to reappear once again as the narrative shifts direction. Living voices merge with the multitudes of the dead, leaving their trace or fading away, for now. Live; Live; Live is a beautiful, deeply resonant work by a novelist at the height of his powers.

Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people’s. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy, and the co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize. 

The best Venice has to offer - in your pocket. Pocket Rough Guide Venice is your essential guide to Europe's most romantic city, with stunning photography, in-depth accounts, and a full-colour, pull-out map. Whether you are staying for the weekend or enjoying a short break, our itineraries help you plan your trip, and the Best of section picks out the highlights you won't want to miss - whether that means hitting the big name sights of the Basilica di San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale, gliding along the canals in a gondala or escaping the crowds in one of the city's off-beat districts. Divided by neighbourhood for easy navigation, the Places section is written in Rough Guide's trademark honest and informative style, with reviews of the must-see sights and our pick of the places to eat, drink and sleep for every budget, from traditional tucked-away trattorias to stylish aperitivo bars, and from staying in a seventeenth-century palazzo to sleeping in a charming, family-run bed and breakfast.

'To see a meadow in bloom is a great delight - it's alive and teeming with life, mysterious, dynamic . . .' So Christopher Lloyd began his much-admired instructive and celebratory account of meadows, first published in 2004. Few people knew more about meadow gardening than Lloyd, who spent much of his long life developing the flowering tapestries in his garden at Great Dixter, creating scenes of great beauty and a place of pilgrimage for lovers of wildflowers and wildlife. In Meadows he imparted that lifetime's learning, exploring the development and management of meadow areas, explaining how to establish a meadow in a garden setting, describing the hundreds of beautiful grasses, bulbs and perennials and annuals that thrive in different meadow conditions and detailing how to grow them. Lloyd's classic text remains at the heart of this new book, which also includes - as well as much stunning new photography - an extensive introduction by Fergus Garrett, Lloyd's head gardener.

Discover Jane Austen's real-life inspiration for Darcy's Pemberley. Follow Alan into Chatsworth's irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains and English eccentrics, and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks. Featuring stunning, specially commissioned photography of the gardens and parkland, alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this vivid companion, crowded with character and colour, is a book to treasure and revisit over and over again.

'Sarah's celebration of healthy eating is all about pleasure and enjoyment. Her love of good food is informed by her background as a doctor and now rooted in an on-going passion for growing and cooking with fruit and vegetables' Yotam Ottolenghi Sarah Raven is not only an inspirational cook, but she was also once a doctor. Here she brings together her unique talents to offer a magnificent canon of recipes, sharing her medical knowledge to explain exactly how and why certain foods help protect your body and give you the best possible chance of a longer, healthier life. The 250 sumptuous and colourful recipes include Coconut sugar marmalade, Spiced aubergine salad with pomegranate raita, Lemon chicken and summer herb salad, Cashew hummus, Black bean burritos, Blood orange sorbet and Basil yoghurt ice cream. Woven through the book are 100 mini 'superfood' biographies, where Sarah draws on her expertise and experience to explain the science behind good-for-you ingredients such as kale, broccoli, salmon, red wine, blueberries, apples and seeds. With luminous photography by Jonathan Buckley, this generous and stylish book offers recipes to make you feel well, look well and live longer - by using the most beneficial ingredients and without ever compromising on sheer deliciousness.

Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us on an intriguing tour of the continent, from Proto-Indo-European (the common ancestor of most European languages) to the rise and rise of English, via the complexities of Welsh plurals and Czech pronunciation. Along the way we learn why Esperanto will never catch on, how the language of William the Conqueror lives on in the Channel Islands and why Finnish is the easiest European language. Surprising, witty and full of extraordinary facts, this book will change the way you think about the languages around you. Polyglot Gaston Dorren might even persuade you that English is like Chinese.

A stunning novel which examines our fears, prejudices and desires, from the author of 'Ghost MacIndoe' and 'Invisible'. On a beach in southern England, a dog returns to its owner with a human hand in its mouth. The hand belongs to a homeless eccentric named Henry, who has been wandering the south-west of England for the last thirty years. As the local policeman and his accomplice piece together Henry's movements prior to his death, talking to those who knew and watched him, they uncover an extraordinary life. And as the story of Henry's life becomes clearer, so the life of the narrator becomes more and more complex, in ways he could never have expected. 'So He Takes the Dog' is a detective story like no other, a novel that further confirms Jonathan Buckley as one of the finest writers at work in this country.

A woman named Naomi arrives at her sister's house, intending, it seems, to say goodbye. She is abandoning her city life for a remote Scottish retreat, which she will share with a man called Bernat, whom she considers some kind of visionary. In a sequence of stories filtered through multiple re-tellings, she illuminates the character of this elusive individual. One story seems of special significance: about Afonso, an Amazon boatman, who could be the last speaker of his mother tongue, a language of apparently unique simplicity and precision. Bernat and Naomi are not, however, the only storytellers here. Naomi's sister, Kate, is herself working on a novel that begins as a ghost story, but ends up as something rather different: The river is the river.

Following in the wake of his highly praised first two books, Jonathan Buckley's 'Ghost MacIndoe' is a bold and ambitious novel that focuses on the life of Alexander MacIndoe, a self-centred man who is characterised only by his physical beauty and a complete lack of will. Jonathan Buckley's third novel opens with Alexander MacIndoe's earliest memory: a February morning in 1944, in the aftermath of the second wave of German air-raids. Set mainly in London and Brighton, Ghost MacIndoe is the story of the next fifty-four years of Alexander's life. We meet his glamorous mother and his father, a pioneering plastic surgeon; a traumatised war veteran called Mr Beckwith with whom Alexander works for several years as a gardener and, most important of all, the orphaned Megan Beckwith, whose relationship with Alexander crystallises into a romance in the 1970s. In the wake of his highly praised first two novels, Jonathan Buckley's third miraculously brings into being one simple life and the last sixty years of English history.

An epistolary novel about a concert pianist and a young man's attempt to write his biography. Thomas Lang was an outstanding concert pianist. He was elusive, arrogant, depressive, mysterious, and a genius. He died mysteriously, probably by his own hand. Bit by bit, in a volley of letters between his would-be biographer and Lang's brother Christopher, his life is pieced together and the real Thomas Lang begins to emerge. Jonathan Buckley's first novel ponders the nature of biography, the question of what a life is and, more particularly, what a life becomes once it is finished, who that life belongs to. Confident, endlessly inventive, often very funny, it is one of the most assured debuts in British fiction for some time.

In a new, practical format - the stunning book celebrating British wild flowers by award-winning garden writer Sarah Raven.

Inspired by childhood excursions with her botanist father, Sarah Raven has travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles to find 500 of our most breathtakingly beautiful wild flowers.

This lavishly illustrated book is divided by habitat, covering woods, downs and dales, lanes and hedgerows, meadows, coast, marshes and streams, moors and mountains, and wasteland. Sarah introduces a wide range of plants, telling you their names and something about them. Discover pulsatillas, fritillaries, bluebells, wild garlic, harebells, forget-me-nots, foxgloves, wood spurge, silverweed,purple cranesbill, deadly nightshade, St John's wort, comfrey, orchids,wood sorrel, snowdrops and more.

There are glorious landscape photographs by Jonathan Buckley throughout, and one of his stunning plant portraits accompanies each of Sarah's authoritative, captivating species descriptions. Informative and lovely, Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers is a botanical marvel.

The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio - as in the wider art world - he has his enemies, and his niece - just arrived from England - is no great admirer either. At the same time a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implicate the artist. But the life and art of Gideon Westfall form just one strand of Nostalgia, a novel that teems with incidents and characters, from religious visionaries to folk heroes. Constantly shifting between the panoramic and the intimate, between the past and the present, Nostalgia is as intricately structured as a symphony, interweaving the narratives of history, legend, architecture - and much more - in a kaleidoscope of facts and invention.

This is a startling breakthough novel from Jonathan Buckley, acclaimed author of Ghost MacIndoe and So He Takes the Dog. It will be up for every prize going: a gripping, utterly compelling book whose themes hit home and hard for the baby boom generation. Dominic Pattison's life is one of level contentment: his marriage has proved happy and durable; his business, too, is successful.And then Sam Williams, a builder and ex-squaddie, enters his life. Sam claims to be his son. Yet is Sam who he says he is? After almost thirty years, Dominic can remember little of the affair with Sam's mother. His instinct is to recoil from this aggressive and volatile stranger, who could, with just a few words, take his life apart. But Sam refuses to be dismissed. With its deft switches of sympathy between menaced 'father' and rebuffed 'son' and its exploration of the intricacies of memory, Contact will resonate long with its readers.

Fill your garden with flowers all-year round with inspiration, planting ideas and expert advice from Sarah Raven.

Colour and scent are the hallmarks of Sarah Raven's style – and they are simple luxuries that everyone can bring into their garden.

A Year Full of Flowers reveals the hundreds of hardworking varieties that make the garden sing each month, together with the practical tasks that ensure everything is planted, staked and pruned at just the right time.

Tracing the year from January to December at her home, Perch Hill, Sarah offers a complete and transporting account of a garden crafted over decades. Sharing the lessons learned from years of plant trials, she explains the methods that have worked for her, and shows you how to achieve a space that's full of life and colour.

Discover long-lasting, divinely scented tulips, roses that keep flowering through winter, the most magnificent dahlias and show-stopping alliums, as well as how to grow sweet peas up a teepee, take cuttings from chrysanthemums and stop mildew in its tracks.

This is passionate, life-enriching gardening; it's also simple, adaptable and can work for you. Sarah has made the garden central to her life – this book shows you how you can too.

A lyrical and beautifully realised novel about a blind man's experiences of the world around him, from the acclaimed author of Ghost MacIndoe. Edward Morton, a blind translator, arrives at the Oak, an ailing spa hotel in the west of England, intending to stay for a few days to visit his family and to work. The manager of the Oak, Malcolm Caldecott, is preparing for the closure of the hotel, and for the visit of Stephanie, the daughter he has not seen for eight years. Eloni Dobra, a chambermaid at the Oak, is striving to establish a life in England, and to free herself of a burden that is crucial to her relationship both with her employer and with Edward Morton. As the nature of that burden becomes clearer, each of these four protagonists and the absent fifth - Morton's lover - move towards a crisis and, like the Oak itself, towards an uncertain future. Spanning the last three weeks of the Oak's existence, Invisible explores multiple voices - voices in conversation, voices in writing, on tape, in memory. It's an investigation of our perception of the world and our place in it, of the pleasures and deceptions of the senses, of the uses of language, of the lure of nostalgia and the difficulties of living in the present. Above all, like Buckley's previous novel, Ghost MacIndoe, it's a lyrical celebration of the transient, and an original study of love.

Daniel Brennan, approaching the premature end of his life, retreats to a room in his brother's suburban house. To divert himself and to entertain Ellen, his carer, he writes the journal that is Telescope, blurring truth, gossip and fiction in vignettes of his own life and the lives of those close to him. Above all he focuses on his siblings: mercurial Celia, whose life as a teacher in Italy seems to have run aground, and kindly Charlie, the entrepreneur of the family. Enriched with remarkable anecdotes and observations on topics ranging from tattoos and Tokyo street fashion to early French photography, Telescope is a startlingly original and moving book, a glimpse of the world through the eyes of a connoisseur of vicarious experience.

This charming insight into what each season and month of the year brings for a cottage garden will capture the imagination and inspire any gardener (expert or novice) to get out and about, grab a spade and get your hands dirty! Written by the BBC's Carol Klein, full of practical advice and tips, and full of stunning photography, this is a book truly to savour... 'Her energy, knowledge and enthusiasm are an inspiration in every month of the year, and this very special book will be a real gem for all garden lovers.' -- Radio Times 'Beautifully designed, this one is too good to miss!' -- Home & Country 'Vibrant, informative, inspirational and personal... Klein's heartfelt love poem to her beautiful garden.' -- Gardens Magazine 'A delight to read' -- ***** Reader review 'A wonderful garden book from a wonderful gardener' -- ***** Reader review 'What can I say? I bought it when it first came out in 2011 and it STILL hasn't made it on to a bookshelf as I am constantly dipping into it' -- ***** Reader review 'A must have for gardeners old and new' -- ***** Reader review 'A wonderful book which I found hard to put down' -- ***** Reader review 'So inspiring!' -- ***** Reader review *********************************************************************************************** In this wonderful gardening journal, the BBC's Carol Klein, with characteristic warmth, eloquence and infectious enthusiasm, tells us the story of a year in her beautiful garden at Glebe Cottage. With superb photography throughout, she takes us on a procession through the seasons, as she plans and plants, sows seeds and nurtures cuttings, tends the borders, and harvests her crops. Her energy, knowledge and passion will be an inspiration to gardeners old and new alike in every month of the year.

This work offers a new approach to planning and planting. It shows how to throw caution to the wind and orchestrate colours, textures, scale and scent to spectacular effect from spring until autumn. The key is colour: intense, strong and voluptuous - deep crimsons combined with acid green and incandescent orange, for example. Integral to Sarak Raven's vision is a feeling for dramatic scale: plants with huge presence, architectural foliage, strong, sculptural shapes. To complete the effect, she includes flowers with silken and velvety textures and describes how to flood the garden with scent. There are schemes for sunny, open beds and borders for shady areas, for damp soils and to clothe walls and fences - many of which include lots of quick-growing annuals and take only a season to achieve.

In the small hours of January 1st, a man begins to write, having watched Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, a film in which a former lover - Imogen - plays a major role. For the next year, he writes something every day.

His journal is a ritual of commemoration and an investigation of the character of Imogen and her relationships - with himself; with her family and friends; with other lovers.

Imogen is an elusive subject, and The Great Concert of the Night is an intricate text, mixing scenes from the writer's memory and the present day, and scenes from Imogen's films, with observations on a range of subjects, from the visions of female saints to the history of medicine and the festivals of ancient Rome. But one subject comes to occupy him above all: what happens when a person becomes a character on the page.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ The Divine Mirror Jonathan Buckley