academic and careers

How to survive doomsday (Clue: it helps to be a billionaire)

Irish author Mark O'Connell, speaks to people from across the globe who are preparing for the end of the world in a new book, including one who claims a rogue planet will crash into earth.




academic and careers

From the Sahara to Somerset, the birds that bring spring

Tim Dee examines how swallows migrate across Africa to Europe each year, in a new nature book. He begins his travels in the Sahara desert, where the birds are heading northwards.




academic and careers

PICTURE THIS 

In this opulent book, Christian Louboutin details his eclectic sources of inspiration, ranging from Cher to Japanese pipes.




academic and careers

LITERARY FICTION 

Lancashire: a neglected space caught between the twin poles of tourist magnets the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales - two places, incidentally, that are also richly imagined in literature.




academic and careers

SHORT STORIES

The title of this dark, dangerously funny collection comes from the Voyager satellite.




academic and careers

GOTHIC

A strange mutation is sweeping the Victorian world. People don't so much emote as emit: clouds of scented smoke that are brewed in newly evolved glands and reveal true feelings.




academic and careers

CRIME 

This heart-rending story set in one of the poorest parts of rural America is among the most powerful and moving I have read in years.




academic and careers

MUST READS 

Pericles, by Shakespeare, inspires the latest novel by Mark Haddon, author of the award-winning bestseller, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time.




academic and careers

CLASSIC CRIME

A life-class model, a woman of some notoriety as a sexual predator, is found murdered at her place of work, an art school built on high ideals but down on its luck




academic and careers

MUST READS 

Back in 2006, Thomas Harris published Hannibal Rising, the fourth of his Hannibal Lecter novels.




academic and careers

PICTURE THIS 

The swimming pool evokes holiday, exercise, tranquillity and perhaps even fantasy in the current climate




academic and careers

WHAT BOOK would comedian and writer Robert Webb take to a desert island? 

Robert Webb is currently reading Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. The British novelist revealed he would take Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy stories by Douglas Adams to a desert island.




academic and careers

LITERARY FICTION 

Greenwell's exquisitely written debut, What Belongs To You, followed an aspiring poet who moves from Kentucky to Bulgaria




academic and careers

CONTEMPORARY  

I loved Hulse's hilarious, skilful debut The Adults, which was stuffed with believable characters, and this second book is just as witty, warm and brilliantly realised




academic and careers

MUST READS 

With its commanding situation at the top of a hill on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the Dutch House is a glittering prize




academic and careers

PICTURE THIS 

How do you show people that you are a king? Gorgeous architecture, sumptuous feasts and, of course, enviable fashion.




academic and careers

LITERARY FICTION 

Like the titular mammal, this is a curiosity: part 21st-century political satire, part unexpectedly affecting 19th-century love story.




academic and careers

POPULAR 

Eve Chase's novels are about glamorous families with tragic pasts, set in wonderful locations




academic and careers

POETRY 

This collection shows that although a man may abandon his Muse for years, she'll tag along like a faithful wife




academic and careers

THRILLERS 

This widely anticipated debut comes surrounded by a lot of hype, sold to 25 countries, plus a hotly contested auction for TV rights




academic and careers

WHAT BOOK would farmer and writer Amanda Owen take to a desert island? 

Amanda Owen is currently reading The Bolter: Edwardian Heartbreak And High Society Scandal In Kenya by Frances Osborne. The British writer would take Swaledale to a desert island.




academic and careers

PSYCHO THRILLERS 

This book opens with a vivid description of an unnamed woman watching an advertising company's office burning to the ground and a body bag being carried out




academic and careers

HISTORICAL  

Thick fog, a Tiger Moth plane and an emergency landing provide the gripping opening to a terrific World War II novel




academic and careers

LITERARY FICTION 

A library for rejected manuscripts established by a book-loving loner in a sleepy Breton town becomes the talk of literary Paris




academic and careers

PICTURE THIS  

This beauty of a book highlights the best wild swimming locations in the Lake District




academic and careers

MUST READS 

Moggach's 2004 novel, These Foolish Things, which inspired the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, featured a cast of elderly characters




academic and careers

WHAT BOOK would writer Emily Gunnis take to a desert island? 

Emily Gunnis is currently reading Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey. The British writer would take The Wicked Wit Of Winston Churchill to a desert island.




academic and careers

Food for the brain! Fascinating book of 'uncommon knowledge'

Tom Standage reveals a series of fascinating little-known facts in a new book. The UK-based deputy editor of The Economist examines facts and figures, including what causes happiness.




academic and careers

Harrowing account of: Facing death in the desert 

Claire Nelson who shattered her pelvis when she fell 20ft while hiking in California, reveals how she survived in the desert until she was found in a new memoir.




academic and careers

Acclaimed author Jan Morris is 93: One hell of a dame (So why don't they make her one?)

Jan Morris, 93, who lives in the Llyn Peninsula has penned new book, Thinking Again. She would become the first transgender person honoured if made Dame Jan Morris.




academic and careers

When the going gets tough: Just pick up a poem!

John Carey takes the reader on a helter-skelter ride through 4,000 years of an art form central to human life in his book A Little History of Poetry. The book is 80,000 words in Yale's Little History series.




academic and careers

Grief that inspired the Bard

Hamnet is Maggie O'Farrell's first foray into historical fiction, and, as with her contemporary work. It follows Hamnet, the young, day-dreamy son of William Shakespeare.




academic and careers

Agonising search for the lost fallen

Missing by Richard van Emden follows the story of Francis Mond who died on May 15, 1918, aged 23, when his RAF plane was shot from the skies and plummeted into no man's land in Northern France.




academic and careers

Terrifying book reveals how half a billion people live close to active volcanoes

Marine scientist and science communicator Ellen Prager explores hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and also climate change in her book Dangerous Earth.




academic and careers

Keep laughing and read on!  our pick of the most riotously funny stories ever written 

British writer Roger Lewis, rounded up a selection of the funniest stories ever written. Among his picks is the eccentric absurdity of the Starkadders in Cold Comfort Farm.




academic and careers

The one battle he could not win: Soldier turned MP Dan Jarvis

Former paratrooper Dan Jarvis, who is now Labour MP for Barnsley Central, has penned a memoir revealing the horrors of war and the heart-wrenching death of his first wife Caroline.




academic and careers

Classic guide to getting hammered!

American professor of classics Michael Fontaine, has translated Vincent Obsopoeus's Latin poem The Art Of Drinking into English. The poet penned the work in 1536.




academic and careers

Shocking price of man's inhumanity to woman

British foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, chronicles mass-rape in war in a devastating new book, featuring interviews with survivors.




academic and careers

Never let your collapsing husband spoil a dinner party

Clare Hastings reflects on the life of her mother Ann Scott-James in a new memoir. The journalist who read at Oxford, once continued a dinner party although her husband had collapsed.




academic and careers

Blood, guts and junk food! Fascinating new book delves into the lives of fishermen on trawler boats 

Lamorna Ash who took a break from her career in London as a playwright, spent months living with Cornish fishermen for a new book. Almost everyone she met has lost someone to the sea.




academic and careers

Forget Zoom video calls... you can meet some of the world's most fascinating people

Roger Alton picks some of the best biographies ever to be written, including Diana: Her True Story. Pictured Princess Diana, inset, Camilla and Prince Charles.




academic and careers

Misfits floating on a sea of booze: It was the notorious Soho hangout

Darren Coffield has written an oral history of The Colony Room, a shabby and cluttered little space at the top of a dingy staircase in the heart of Soho.




academic and careers

Swimming nose-to-nose with your greatest fear

Georgie Codd has written about her journey to overcome a fear of fish. She travels across the world from London to Thailand for a scuba diving course. She eventually swims with a shark.




academic and careers

The power crazed crook in the Kremlin: The Oligarchs thought he'd last one term

Former Moscow correspondent to the Financial Times Catherine Belton forensically examines Vladimir Putin's rise to power in Russia.




academic and careers

Make them think it was their idea! Marketing expert explores the art of persuasion

Jonah Berger who is a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has advised Apple and Nike. In a new book, he shares advice for changing people's minds.




academic and careers

Why therapy is no match for the true madness of GRIEF

UK-based author Juliet Rosenfeld has penned a memoir detailing the loss of her partner and loss of faith in the power of psychoanalysis to make soothing sense of trauma.




academic and careers

Think you're tough? Try herding a Galloway cow

Patrick Laurie who is a farmer in Galloway, Scotland, has penned a new nature book. He has seen a decline of the curlew and claims Galloway cattle has become a rare breed.




academic and careers

The home lives of the great and good can be just as unruly

New book Lives Of Houses, features a collection of essays and poems on the houses of an eclectic selection of people. Among them is WH Auden's 1950s apartment in New York




academic and careers

Picasso in Grandma's shoe box and the story of one family's love and loss

Hadley Freeman reflects on the life of her paternal grandmother Sara Glass, in a fascinating new biography. Sara who was born in Paris, moved to New York with the imminent threat of war.




academic and careers

Malcolm McLaren's life celebrated in new book by Paul Gorman

A gripping new biography by Paul Gormam, reflects on the life of Malcolm McLaren. The Sex Pistols creator who grew up in North London, was taught by his grandmother 'to be bad is good'.