In search of Berlin, John Kampfner ( paperback August 2024)
£10.99
'Berlin may well be Europe's most enigmatic city and John Kampfner is the ideal guide.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND. From the author of Why the Germans Do It Better.
No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin. Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered. Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists.
He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city. Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background.
In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.
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The Korean Book of Happiness, Barbara J Zitwer ( hardback March 2023)
£14.99
The Korean Book of Happiness : Joy, resilience and the art of giving.
Along the way she regales us with hilarious anecdotes of her cultural faux pas, top travel tips and local recipes as well as magical moments of understanding and connection. The Korean Book of Happiness invites you to explore a beguiling culture and learn how the Korean way can make your life happier and more fulfilled.
Witchcraft in 13 Trials, Marion Gibson ( paperback Sept 2024)
£10.99
We often hear 'witch-hunt' in today's media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar.
Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018. In Witchcraft, Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions.
It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on 'witches' in Africa, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises. Professor Gibson also tells the stories of the 'witches' - mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and 'Witchfinder General' Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them. Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter blurred.
For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial.
(paperback end Sept 2024)
Julia, Sandra Newman ( paperback August 2024)
£9.99
London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It's 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen - cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics.
She knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She's very good at staying alive. But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department - a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith, she comes to realise that she's losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.
Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original
Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff ( paperback Sept 2024)
£9.99
A profound and explosive novel about a spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive. A servant girl escapes from a settlement. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief of everything that her own civilization has taught her.
The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how -and if - we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
Pre-Order Paperback from September 2024.
