Summer Reads

A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today.Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world’s oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling...

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower.“A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist“Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the...

Join James Crowden as he embarks on a journey to distil the ancient origins of cider, uncovering a rich culture and philosophy that has united farmer, maker and drinker for millennia. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 ANDRE SIMON FOOD AND DRINK AWARD Cidermaking...

Paul Craddock's Spare Parts offers an original look at the history of medicine itself through the rich, compelling, and delightfully macabre story of transplant surgery from ancient times to the present day.How did an architect help pioneer blood...

"A bold, ambitious and truly wonderful history of the world"—Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of TreesFrom the age of dinosaurs to the first human cities, a groundbreaking new history of the planet that tropical forests made. To many of us,...

This groundbreaking new collection addresses the burning issue of how we interpret history today. What stories are told, and by whom, who should be celebrated, and what rewritten, are questions that have been asked recently not just within the history...

'Neima’s book, impeccably researched and beautifully written, will be an inspiration for anyone looking to an alternative future today.' - Stella Tillyard, author of Aristocrats and The Great Level'Deeply interesting and a pleasure to read, The...

Celebrated military historian James Holland chronicles the experiences in World War II of the legendary tank unit, the Sherwood Rangers In the annals of World War II, certain groups of soldiers stand out, and among the most notable were the Sherwood...

A “smart and surprising” (Booklist) “expansive history” (Publishers Weekly) detailing the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem—including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires—in the bestselling tradition of Yuval...

Ariadna Lerg Illestri Pre Agrigent is no ordinary baby. She’s the princess of an empire, she doesn’t cry at all, and…she was born with memories of her previous life?! Not to mention her father’s trying to kill her! Blessed with a chance to start over but...

(Available after October 30th, 2022)Adriana is cute enough to charm the most austere of men and can even talk and run. And if the lavish party thrown for her first birthday is any indication, life as the daughter of the emperor should be nice, right?...

A young boy strikes an unlikely friendship with an enigmatic, wandering healer in Garner’s gorgeously crafted novel that blends myth and folklore with a moving tale about memory and things that give meaning to life. Shortlisted for The Booker...

"Ingenious witty provocative and formidably intelligent, both a pleasure and a challenge to the reader." — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World   Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a...

“Slender but weighty, thoroughly cerebral. . . . It comes as a welcome corrective to so much American-style realist fiction, which in heavy doses can blur into a kind of sameness. . . what is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always...

Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.   Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's...

Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of...

The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood,...

Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road—only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game...

A New York Times Notable Book   Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began...

Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels...