'An immersive novel, steeped in the history and folklore of Crete: transporting, historically informative story-telling' Sunday Times 'A moving, superbly written exploration of a family with dark secrets. Crete itself becomes one of the main characters in the story' Irish Times, Best Books 2021 ---------- This was my home. This harbour and sea. These golden alleys. But the town I grew up in has disappeared. Ri is a successful international artist who has worked in London all her life. When her English husband dies she turns to her Greek roots on Crete, island of mass tourism and ancient myth, only to discover they are not what she thought. As Brexit looms in the UK, and Greece grapples with austerity and the refugee crisis, she finds under the surface of her home not only proud memories of resisting foreign occupation but a secret, darker history. As an artist, she has lived by seeing and observing. Now she discovers how much she has not seen, and finds within herself the ghost of someone she never even heard of. Unearthing her parents' stories transforms Ri's relationships to her family and country, her identity and her art. Lyrical, unsettling and evocative, Daughters of the Labyrinth explores the power of buried memory and the grip of the past on the present, and questions how well we can ever know our own family. ---------- 'Daughters of the Labyrinth is a novel about a daughter's passionate quest for the truth about what happened to her parents in Crete during the German occupation. It is also a sumptuous and sensuous evocation of Crete itself, its landscape and culture. Ruth Padel's brings a poet's eye to this world of great physical beauty and gnarled legacy' Colm Toibin

Why is Rosamund so paralyzed by Tyler and his secrets? The whole world was once in love with her. Now, married to the dangerously charismatic Tyler, estranged from her conservationist father, despairing of her teenage son's silences, she feels completely alone. Revisiting the almost forgotten world of her Indian childhood may help, but can her family survive the changes she must make to save herself? Ruth Padel, acclaimed for her brilliant nature writing, has set her captivating debut novel in London, Devon and the jungles of India. But at its heart is a family in crisis. Where the Serpent Lives is a beautifully evocative tale for our times about love, science, renewal, and the place of wild nature in human lives, from one of our finest poets.

'An immersive novel, steeped in the history and folklore of Crete: transporting, historically informative story-telling' Sunday Times 'A moving, superbly written exploration of a family with dark secrets. Crete itself becomes one of the main characters in the story' Irish Times, Best Books 2021 ---------- This was my home. This harbour and sea. These golden alleys. But the town I grew up in has disappeared. Broken by the death of her husband, Ri, a successful international artist living in London, returns to her ancestral home of Crete. The Greek island is known for its ancient myth and mass tourism, but when Ri returns she finds a secret, darker history. As the home she left deals with a looming Brexit, and the home she rediscovered grapples with a refugee crisis, Ri confronts her changing identity. Unearthing stories from her family's past leaves a permanent mark on her understanding of herself, her relationship to her country, and her art. Lyrical, unsettling and evocative, Daughters of the Labyrinth explores the power of buried memory and the grip of the past on the present, and questions how well we can ever know our own family. ---------- 'Daughters of the Labyrinth is a novel about a daughter's passionate quest for the truth about what happened to her parents in Crete during the German occupation. It is also a sumptuous and sensuous evocation of Crete itself, its landscape and culture. Ruth Padel's brings a poet's eye to this world of great physical beauty and gnarled legacy' Colm Toibin

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Ruth Padel's lectures link metaphor to silence and white space on a page. Equating a poem's music with its politics, she explores tone, register and harmony, suggesting that how poems hold our "attention" is through "tension". Finally, she investigates what it means for poems that they are "given to" other people. With her trademark blend of literary analysis, psychological and mythical learning, an intimate knowledge of Greek poetics plus a generous and joyful trust in the energy of today's poetry, Ruth Padel plumbs unheard rhymes, Echo and Narcissus, the silent music of John Cage, and what happens when Paul Durcan plays Seamus Heaney at ping pong. She wears her erudition lightly, paying playful attention to the resonances of many different poems - and to their smaller atoms, words and syllables. A fascinating and groundbreaking book, Silent Letters of the Alphabet is a gift for anyone writing, reading or teaching poetry today.

When Ruth Padel saw an advert for a cheap break to India, she decided to visit what she had always wanted to see: tropical jungle and a wildlife sanctuary. Her impromptu trip was the start of a remarkable two-year journey in search of that most elusive and beautiful animal: the tiger. Armed with her granny's opera glasses and a pair of Tunisian trainers, she sets off across Asia to ask the question: can the tiger be saved from extinction in the wild? Plunging into leech-infested jungles, she tracks tigers by jeep, by elephant and on foot, from Bangladesh to Bhutan, from China to far-east Russia. The result is a unique blend of natural history, travel literature and memoir, and an intimate portrait of an animal we have loved and feared almost to destruction.

When the eminent naturalist Charles Darwin returned from South America on board the HMS "Beagle "in 1836, he brought with him the notes and evidence which would form the basis of his landmark theory of evolution of species by a process of natural selection. This theory, published as "The Origin of Species "in 1859, sparked a fierce scientific, religious, and philosophical debate which continues heatedly today. This seminal work is presented with "The Voyage of the Beagle," a vivid travel memoir as well as a detailed scientific field journal. Ordered by place, covering area from Northern Chile to Australia to Cape Verde Islands, this text contains hints of the theories that were later developed in" The Origin of Species."

The representations of mind in Greek tragedy are central to Western views of inwardness. Tragedy speaks of inwardness as woundable, dark, invaded by destructive passions. In this wide-ranging work Ruth Padel relates ancient tragedy to the biology and daemonology of the time, exploring Greek conceptions of the human interior and the ways in which Greek tragic literature shaped how we speak about our inner selves today. "In and Out of the Mind" reflects the cross-fertilization of the author's classical training with anthropology, history of religion and medicine, gender studies, and psychoanalysis. Arguing that Greek tragic language connects images of consciousness, even male consciousness, with the darkness attributed both to Hades and to women, Padel analyzes tragedy's biological and daemonological metaphors for what is within. Although these images are part of our inherited culture, their use in tragedy reveals attitudes toward feeling that are alien to modern readers. The author provides important background to fascinating aspects of Greek life, such as entrail divination, impurity rituals, and belief in divinity inside and outside human selves, showing how these relate to the Gr

E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread is amongst the greatest twentieth-century literary explorations of vice, virtue and the nature of prejudice, edited with notes by Oliver Stallybrass and an introduction by Ruth Padel in Penguin Classics. On travelling to Italy with her friend Caroline Abbott, the impulsive English widow Lilia Herriton outrages her dead husband's family by meeting and quickly becoming engaged to Gino, a dashing but deeply unsuitable Italian man twelve years her junior. Infuriated, her ex-brother-in-law Philip sets off from England to her new home in the Tuscan town of Monteriano - but, finding himself unable to persuade Lilia to leave her handsome, uncouth new lover, returns to England without her. When Lilia's marriage leads to sudden tragedy, however, Philip and Caroline feel compelled to return once more to Italy, where they are forced to examine their own lives. This edition reproduces the Abinger text, and also includes further reading, notes, a chronology, an introduction by Ruth Padel discussing division and culture clash in the novel and an appendix detailing an exchange about the novel between Forster and the poet R.C. Trevelyan. E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a noted English author and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury group. His first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread appeared in 1905. The Longest Journey appeared in 1907, followed by A Room With A View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. Howards End (1910) was a story that centered on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. Maurice was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. If you enjoyed Where Angels Fear to Tread, you might enjoy Forster's A Room With a View, also available in Penguin Classics.

"Life began with migration." In a magnificent tapestry of life on the move, Ruth Padel weaves poems and prose, science and religion, wild nature and human history, to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.
"We're all from somewhere else," she begins. "Migration builds civilization but also causes displacement." From the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt, the Lost Colony on Roanoke, and the famous photograph 'Migrant Mother', Padel turns to John James Audubon's journey from Haiti and France, heirlooms carried through Ellis Island, Kennedy's "society of immigrants" and Casa del Migrante on the Mexican border.
But she reaches the human story through the millennia-old journeys of cells in our bodies, trees in the Ice Age, Monarch butterflies travelling from Alaska to Mexico. As warblers battle hurricanes over the Caribbean and wildebeest brave a river filled with the largest crocodiles in Africa, she shows that the truest purpose of migration for both humans and animals is survival.

A fascinating poetic journey into the mind and heart of a musical genius, from the author of the best-selling Darwin: A Life in Poems

Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover; the clumsy eccentric making coffee with exactly sixty beans. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood: Her great-grandfather, who studied in Leipzig with a pupil of Beethoven's, became a concert pianist before migrating to Britain; her parents met making music; and Padel grew up playing the viola, Beethoven's instrument as a child. Her book is a poet and string player's intimate connection across the centuries with an artist who, though increasingly isolated, ended even his most harrowing works on a note of hope.

*First published as The Mara Crossing, now with new and updated material* 'A prodigy, a book of wonders. Wonder, pity and terror, the searing section of voices in transit coercing compassion - and beyond that, empathy' Independent Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration - from the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts to Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, braving a river filled with the largest crocodiles in Africa. Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.

Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel is renowned as a guide to understanding today's poetry. Her much-loved 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem introduced the contemporary poetry scene and discussed individual poems. Her new book, invaluable for all who want to write as well as read poems, reveals the journey of thought, language and music within sixty more poems and also shows how poems fortify us on the journey of our lives, in a collection of essays written in elegant, accessible prose.

A family in crisis - and the wider world of wildlife in crisis too. Rosamund, unable to communicate with her philandering husband or teenage son, alienated from her zoologist father, feels cut off also from the jungle world of her Indian childhood. What if she goes back into it? Rustling with animals of which most humans are unaware, set in London, ancient Devon woodland and the endangered forests of India, this is a eye-opening foray into love, terror and the place of wild nature in human lives.

An elegy to a lost mother, Emerald is the moving new collection from prize-winning poet Ruth Padel 'Here in deep earth, the black blossom of mourning still sifting within me I remembered that emerald was my birthstone ...' Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel's heartfelt new collection is a grief observed: an elegy for her mother on her death at the age of ninety-seven. Exploring the riches of emerald lore, Padel follows the glint of green - 'green for awakening / for bringing life back from the dead' - from memories of her mother, a naturalist, to the black honeycomb of a Colombian emerald mine and sunset-pink of the Emerald City, Jaipur. Beneath everything shines the jewel itself, 'the only stone in which the flaws are prized'. Beautifully carved and cadenced, Emerald is a moving chronicle of value and loss, and a celebration of all that is precious in the life that remains.

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.

'Making is our defence against the dark...' Through images of conflict and craftsmanship, Ruth Padel's powerful new poems address the Middle East, tracing a quest for harmony in the midst of destruction. An oud, the central instrument of Middle Eastern music , is made and broken. An ancient synagogue survives attacks, a Palestinian boy in a West Bank refugee camp learns capoeira, and a guide shows us Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during a siege. At the heart of the book are Christ's last words from the Cross. Uniting this moving collection is the common ground shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam: a vision of human life as pilgrimage and struggle but also as music and making. With care and empathy, Ruth Padel suggests how rifts in the Holy Land speak to conflict in our own hearts. 'We identify. Some chasm / through the centre must be in and of us all.'