Rousham in Oxfordshire was one of the first landscape gardens created in England and is, still, one of the most influential. Designed by William Kent in the late 1730s for the Cottrell-Dormer family (who are its owners today) it has become a place of pilgrimage for landscape architects and garden designers worldwide as well as garden lovers. Its magical glades and sculptural set-pieces have long intrigued Francis Hamel, who has lived and worked there for 25 years. Since the beginning of 2020 he has composed an extraordinary collection of paintings that capture the gardens and their magic. With essays by Tom Stuart-Smith, Joanna Kavenna and Christopher Woodward, the reader is led down its mysterious pathways; from tree-shaded walks peopled with statues of Pan, Venus and other immortals to sun-dappled meadows carpeted with wild flowers. It is just as Kent left it- a secret garden that is open to all.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche conducts his protagonist through his great journey of life - the quest for meaning, and fulfilment, and for a way to live with the knowledge of death. In this faithful new translation by Michael Hulse, Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendour, as a man who strives to find a way to live - joyfully - in a secular world. Luminous and ecstatic, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a grand celebration of perilous, beautiful, human life by one of the most important philosophers in history.

Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the 'real life' story. Works of art, novels, films, are frequently bolstered by reference to the autobiography of the creator, or to underlying 'fact.' Where does that leave the imagination? And who gets to define the parameters of 'reality' and 'fiction' anyway? Five writers debate the limits of materialism and realism, in art and literature - and offer a passionate defence of the alchemical imagination in a fact-based world.

Self-anointed guru of the Digital Age, Guy Matthias, CEO of Beetle, has become one of the world's most powerful and influential figures. Untaxed and ungoverned, his trans-Atlantic company essentially operates beyond the control of Governments or the law. But trouble is never far away, and for Guy a perfect storm is brewing: his wife wants to leave him, fed up with his serial infidelities; malfunctioning Beetle software has led to some unfortunate deaths which are proving hard to cover up; his longed for deal with China is proving troublingly elusive and, among other things, the mystery hacker, Gogol, is on his trail. With the clock ticking- Guy, his aide Douglas Varley, Britain's flailing female PM, conflicted national security agent Eloise Jayne, depressed journalist David Strachey, and Gogol, whoever that may be - the question is becoming ever more pressing, how do you live in reality when nobody knows anything, and all knowledge, all certainty, is partly or entirely fake?

Woolf's fine character studies of several authors, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who 'seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended'. He is, Woolf adds,so complex, so eccentric, that we 'become dazed in the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge'. He was incapable of adopting requisite social modes, of suppressing his obsessive urge to talk, of pandering to the expectations of others. Woolf tries to capture a 'clear picture' of Coleridge but this metaphor is skewed and what she really reveals is a voice - mad and beautiful - never to be heard again:

Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job - and begins her long fall from modern grace.

From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, an epic novel of childbirth--past, present, and future

The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. In present-day London, Bridget Hughes juggles her young son, husband, and mother as she plans her home birth, unprepared for the trial she is about to endure. Somewhere in 2135, in a world where humans are birthed and raised in breeding farms, Prisoner 730004 is on trial for concealing a pregnancy.

Through three stories spanning centuries, acclaimed novelist Joanna Kavenna explores the most basic plight of women, from the slaughterhouse of primitive medicine to a futurisic vision of technological oppression. Poised at the midpoint is Bridget, whose fervent belief in the wisdom of nature is tested in one of the most gripping accounts of labor to appear in fiction.

Original, powerful, and played out against a vast canvas, "The Birth of Love" is at once a novel about the creation of human life, science and faith, madness and compromise, and the epic journey of motherhood.

A darkly comic novel about a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, set against the backdrop of a London awash with faithless lovers, cutthroat strivers, and so-called friends One day successful young journalist and dedicated urbanite Rosa Lane sends her boss an e-mail that says I quit and then walks out of her job. She can't explain why--not to Liam, who's lived with her for years; not to her friends; not to her anxious, recently widowed father. All Rosa knows is that she needs to find enlightenment, to somehow understand her mother's death and do more than just earn her living. Thus begins the piercingly wise and bitingly funny odyssey of Rosa Lane. Along the way, she is deceived by her lover, evicted by her roommate, threatened by her bank manager, picked over by prospective employers, befuddled by philosophy, and tormented by omnivorous London. Brought very low indeed, Rosa in her desperation makes a final assault on those who have done her wrong, leading to the beginning of her return to normality--whatever that is. In a remarkable fiction debut, Joanna Kavenna displays lacerating wit, a perfect eye for social hypocrisies, and great depths of compassion to create a triumphant modern heroine.

'Smart, strange, coping with death through Light' Margaret Atwood 'Extraordinary, wise, funny, adventurous' A. L. Kennedy 'So utterly startling and inventive, it's almost an act of resistance' Miriam Toews 'I couldn't put it down. A cult following seems certain' Literary Review 'Refreshing as well as disconcerting to read a novel that sets aside convention so resolutely' Guardian 'Opts to push the boundaries of what the novel is' Telegraph 'A comic metaphysical thriller' Scotland on Sunday In this darkly ironic novel - a quest for truth, a satire, an elegy - Joanna Kavenna displays fearless originality and wit in confronting the strangeness of reality and how we contend with the death of those we love. Beautiful, ethereal drawings by Oly Ralfe illustrate this haunting journey through time, space and human understanding.

Cassandra White is a woman on a mission. Her Lakeland farm may be falling apart, but at least she's escaped the madness of modern life. But when her valley is invaded by bankers buying up second homes, she's determined to put up a fight. What begins as a hare-brained scheme with a few unruly locals soon has the whole community taking up arms - and, before she knows it, Cassandra's leading a revolution...