Clean by Michele Kirsch

Clean


by Michele Kirsch
WINNER of Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize 2020   When Michele Kirsch’s father is killed in a train crash, her mother gets the vapours and Michele gets extremely nervous. By her mid- teens, she has found salvation in [...]

Two Weeks in November


by Douglas Rogers
B Format Paperback
For 37 years, since independence from British rule, the story of Zimbabwe had been dominated by one man: Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the liberator turned tyrant who won a war for freedom, but then led his country into a ditch. By November 2017, however, the only story in Zimbabwe was of palace intrigue: the game of thrones within the ruling party to succeed the nonagenarian President. Mugabe had never anointed a successor – having rivals fight each other had kept the scale balanced in his favour – but time was running out. He was no spring chicken (he fell asleep in meetings, slurred lines in his speeches), and the party’s congress, at which a new VP, and thus a certain successor, would be chosen, was to take place in early December. National elections loomed in 2018. If you wanted the throne, it was time to make your move. Two factions vied for power, both with names that sounded like a reality TV show. The First Lady’s group was known as Generation 40 – G40 – a reference to the youthful demographics of the country: G40 were the young ones, the under 40s, unencumbered by history. The term was coined by Grace’s Svengali, a tall, slim, University of Southern California- educated professor and master tactician named Jonathan Moyo. A former Information Minister and a brilliant media manipulator, Moyo had fallen out with the Mugabes frequently, yet somehow always found his way back into their good books. Grace also had a charismatic Young Turk named Saviour ‘Tyson’ Kasukuwere in her corner, a former state security agent turned politician with a trombone voice, a pugnacious style and a devoted youth following. They had the ruling party’s Women’s League and the Youth League on their side too, and whatever they lacked in experience, they made up for in energy, commitment and a fanatical devotion to the President. ED’s faction, on the other hand, was known as Lacoste, after the French fashion brand with the crocodile logo – a reference to his nickname. Lacoste represented the old guard, the establishment. The base of ED’s support were the war veterans who had liberated the country from white rule, and who, for so long, had been the enforcers of Mugabe’s power. But the war had ended 37 years previously, the country’s youth had no memory of it and the veterans were dying out. True, he was also said to have the support of the military – he had served as Defence Minister, and was close friends with the Commander of the Defence Forces, General Constantino Chiwenga – but when had the military ever gone against Mugabe, at least publicly? It was unheard of. Even the name Lacoste seemed retro and dated, unlike the crisp, clean Twitter-friendly G40. And so it was that on the first weekend of November, the two factions made their move. One side heckled and booed; the other threatened violent death in the name of God. It was no contest. On Monday, November 6th the President made his choice: he unceremoniously red ED and sided with his wife.

Undressing


by James O’Neill
B Format Hardback
“Every therapist is changed by the people they work with. But just occasionally someone comes along whose determination to find their way through suffering challenges us to rouse our own courage and go beyond the limits of what we perceive to be comfortable, known, or even possible.”

Clean


by Michele Kirsch
Demy Paperback
  When she leaves her home in New York to go to college in Boston in the 1970s, Michele Kirsch – an anxious 19-year-old, with a growing Valium dependency – starts taking on cleaning jobs to help make ends meet. [...]

9 Lessons in Brexit


by Ivan Rogers
Cutdown A Format Paperback
“Remember the words of Ivan Rogers the next time you hear some posh boy in a suit telling you ‘no deal’ wouldn’t hurt at all and might even be a jolly good thing.”  J.K. Rowling Two and a half years [...]

Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets


by Jessica Fox
B Format Paperback
Jessica Fox is living in Hollywood, a 26-year-old filmmaker with a high-stress job at NASA. Working late one night, craving another life, she is seized by a moment of inspiration and types “secondhand bookshop Scotland” into Google… Soon, Jessica finds [...]

A Nazi in the Family


by Derek Niemann
B Format Paperback
WARTIME BERLIN: The Niemann family – Karl, Minna and their four children – live in a quiet, suburban enclave. Every day Karl commutes to work, a business manager travelling around inspecting his “factories”. In the evenings he returns home to [...]

The Imperial Tea Party


by Frances Welch
B Format Paperback
The British and Russian royal families had just three full meetings before the Romanovs tragic end in 1918. In The Imperial Tea Party, Frances Welch draws back the curtain on those fraught encounters, which had far-reaching consequences for 20th-century Europe and beyond.  [...]

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo


by Ileana von Hirsch
B Format Paperback
Cancer is not a laughing matter, as I was told by a cross German lady from Dortmund when I showed her this journal. She had herself had breast cancer and is right of course; there are lots of things that [...]

Breaking Upwards


by Charlotte Friedman
B Format Paperback
  It is comparatively easy to get a legal divorce; getting an emotional one is a whole different story. The break-up of a relationship can be a devastating experience, leaving you with overwhelming feelings of anger and grief.  As Charlotte [...]

Being Adam Golightly


by Adam Golightly
B Format Paperback
  The death of Adam’s wife inspires a new kind of life… The cruel death in her 40s of his beloved wife Helen tears up the script of Adam Golightly’s middle-class, middle-aged being. Now miserably single and outnumbered by his [...]

Velkom to Inklandt


by Sophie Herxheimer
Cloth hardback 173x256mm (narrow Crown Quarto)
The Sunday Times’ Poetry Book of the Year The Observer’s Poetry Book of the Month Velkom to Inklandt is a collection of poems in which Sophie Herxheimer brings vividly to life the voice of her German Jewish Grent Muzzer, Liesel, whose [...]

The Story of Jane Austen


by Gill Hornby
B Format Paperback
Bicentenary Edition: celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen In a country parsonage in the late 18th century, there lived a large family of seven children. They were all bright and clever and noisy, so nobody really noticed when little Jane [...]

The Story of David Livingstone


by Amanda Mitchison
B Format Paperback
At 12 years old David Livingstone was sent to work in a cotton mill. He knew he had to escape. And ten years later he had saved enough money to plan his first adventure. This is the incredible story of [...]

The Story of Queen Victoria


by Kate Hubbard
B Format Paperback
Victoria was just 18 when she was crowned Queen in 1837 – a tiny figure, with a will of iron. Never was there so queenly a queen. She made Britain great and the people loved her for it. But in [...]

The Story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel


by Amanda Mitchison
B Format Paperback
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a man with a brilliant brain for design, and never tired of building new and exciting things – the deepest tunnel, the longest bridge, the fastest train. For Brunel, the average and the ordinary were just not [...]

The Story of Florence Nightingale


by Charlotte Moore
B Format Paperback
Florence knew she did not want a life of fancy clothes and parties, like all the other girls. She was going to do something different – and important. But what…? In 1854, she shocked everyone. Florence set out for the [...]

The Story of Charles Dickens


by Andrew Billen
B Format Paperback
Charles Dickens’s happy childhood came to a sudden end when his father was jailed for debt. At the age of 12, young Charles was sent to work in a factory making shoe polish… But Charles could write stories. And he [...]

A Paris Christmas


by John Baxter
Cutdown B Format PB
An improbable tale of good food and true love. A Paris Christmas is the charming, funny and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread – and didn’t speak a word of French – unexpectedly ended [...]

D-Day: Minute by Minute


by Jonathan Mayo
B Format Paperback
The invasion has begun. In this gripping book, Jonathan Mayo gives a blow by blow account of the events of D-Day, revealing what happened to the people swept up in this crucial moment in history. From soldiers, French villagers and [...]

A Nazi in the Family


by Derek Niemann
Royal Hardback
WARTIME BERLIN: The Niemann family – Karl, Minna and their four children – live in a quiet, suburban enclave. Every day Karl commutes to work, a business manager travelling around inspecting his “factories”. In the evenings he returns home to [...]

Rasputin


by Frances Welch
B Format Paperback
Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant-turned-mystic, was as fascinating as he was unfathomable. He played the role of the simple man, eating with his fingers and boasting, ‘I don’t even know my ABC…’ But, as the only person able to relieve [...]

Rasputin


by Frances Welch
Cutdown B Format Hardback
Grigory Rasputin, Siberian peasant-turned-mystic, was both fascinating and unfathomable. As the only person able to relieve the symptoms of haemophilia in the Tsar’s heir Alexis, he gained almost hallowed status within the Imperial court. Yet he played the role of [...]

Birds in a Cage


by Derek Niemann
B Format Paperback
At Warburg, Germany, in 1941, four British PoWs find an unexpected means of escape from the horrors of internment when they form a birdwatching society, and embark on an obsessive quest behind barbed wire. Through their shared love of birds, [...]

Birds in a Cage


by Derek Niemann
Hardback
Soon after his arrival at Warburg PoW camp, British army officer John Buxton found an unexpected means of escape from the horrors of internment. Passing his days covertly watching birds, he was unaware that he, too, was being watched. Peter Conder, also a passionate ornithologist, had noticed Buxton gazing skywards. He approached him and, with two other prisoners, they founded a secret birdwatching society. This is the untold story of an obsessive quest behind barbed wire.

A Rage for Rock Gardening


by Nicola Shulman
Paperback
Nicola Shulman’s miniature masterpiece about the life of gardener Reginald Farrer.

The Russian Court At Sea


by Frances Welch
Paperback
On 11th April 1919, less than a year after the assassination of the Romanovs, the British battleship HMS Marlborough left Yalta carrying 17 members of the Russian Imperial Family into perpetual exile.

The Romanovs and Mr Gibbes


by Frances Welch
paperback
Frances Welch draws on a wealth of unpublished material to throw new light on the Romanov story, telling it from the English teacher’s point of view.