Can music make the world a better place? Can it really 'belong' to anyone? Can the magic, mystery and incertitude of music - of the human brain meeting or making sound - can it stop wars, rehabilitate the broken, unite, educate or inspire? From Jimi Hendrix playing 'Machine Gun' at The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan under siege in 2015, Ed Vulliamy has lived the music, met the legends, and asked, when words fail, might we turn to music? There's only one way to find out, and that is to listen...

London today is embattled as rarely before. In a city of enormous wealth, poverty is rampant. The burnt-out hulk of Grenfell Tower stands as an appalling reminder that inequality can be so acute as to be murderous. Here, Claire Armitstead has drawn together fiction, reportage and poetry to capture the schisms defining the contemporary city. With nearly 40% of the capital's population born outside the country, Tales of Two Londons eschews what Armitstead labels a "tyranny of tone," emphasising voices rarely heard. Featuring writers such as Ali Smith, Jon Snow, Arifa Akbar and Ruth Padel alongside stories from previously unpublished immigrants and refugees, this is a compelling collection which captures the fabric of the city: its housing, its food, its pubs, its buses, even its graveyards.

With a New Afterword
In 2009, Ed Vulliamy traveled two thousand miles along the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Tijuana to Matamoros, a journey through a kaleidoscopic landscape of corruption and all-out civil war. He describes in revelatory detail the dreaded narco gangs; the smuggling of people, weapons, and illegal drugs; and the interrelated economies of drugs and the ruthless, systematic murder of young women in Ciudad Juarez. "Amexica" takes us far beyond today's headlines. It is a street-level portrait, by turns horrific and sublime, of a place and people in a time of war as much as of the war itself, "an impressively rendered, nightmare-inducing account" ("Kirkus Reviews," Top 25 Books of 2010).

Wars come and go across the headlines and television screens, but for those who survive them, scarred and scattered, they never end. This is a book about post-conflict irresolution, about the lives of those who survived the gulag of concentration camps in north-western Bosnia and about seeking justice for Bosnia today. But justice is not Reckoning. The book finds that the survivors are lost not only geographically, but in history – betrayed in war, and also in peace.

Between the interiors of the USA and Mexico lies a borderland: Amexica. A terrain astride the world's busiest frontier, teeming with migrants, factory workers, narcos, tourists, heroines and heroes, ranchers and rogues. A border both porous and harsh, criss-crossed by a million people every day. A warzone, where a grotesque pastiche of the globalised economy plays out in a tragedy of unfathomable violence as drug cartels and state forces face off. Amexica is a journey through the cartels' reach into the borderland's daily life: through migrant camps, drug-smuggling 'plazas', rehab centres, sweatshop factories and the mass-murder of women. Updated with new material ten years on it paints an essential portrait of a country under siege - and testament to people who carry on regardless. 'Previously, to understand the ruthlessness, ambition and impact of today's global criminals, you needed to read Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah and Misha Glenny's McMafia. Now, you also need to read Vulliamy's Amexica' The Sunday Times