Edith Bowman’s Great British music festivals by Edith Bowman
Edith Bowman packs her wellies and braves the unpredictable weather to explore some of the UK’s best and lesser-known music festivals. From muddy fields in the Black Mountains of South Wales, to the warmer climes of the Isle of Wight, Edith travels throughout the UK in her search for the ultimate festival experience.
The Establishment and how they get away with it by Owen Jones
Behind our democracy lurks a powerful but unaccountable network of people who wield massive power and reap huge profits in the process. The heart of our establishment is exposed, from the lobbies of Westminster to the newsrooms, boardrooms and trading rooms of Fleet Street and the City.
The last word by Hanif Kureishi
Mamoon is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England – but now, in his early 70s, his reputation is fading, sales have dried up, and his new wife has expensive taste. Harry, a young writer, is commissioned to write a biography to revitalise both Mamoon’s career and his bank balance. Harry greatly admires Mamoon’s work and wants to uncover the truth of the artist’s life. Harry’s publisher seeks a more naked truth, a salacious tale of sex and scandal that will generate headlines. Meanwhile Mamoon himself is mining a different vein of truth altogether. Harry and Mamoon find themselves in a battle of wills, but which of them will have the last word?
A girl is a half-formed thing by Eimear McBride
Debut novel telling the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother after a tumour leaves him severely brain-damaged. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and sensual urges of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist.
Wild and free by Wendy Holden
Wild & Free is the festival du jour. Everyone piles through its gates – and Cupid lies in wait to sprinkle a little midsummer madness on them all.
The humans by Matt Haig
Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University solves the world’s greatest mathematical riddle. Then he disappears. When he is found walking naked along the motorway, Professor Martin seems different. Besides the lack of clothes, he now finds normal life pointless. His loving wife and teenage son seem repulsive to him. In fact, he hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton. And he’s a dog. Can a bit of Debussy and Emily Dickinson keep him from murder?
Ten years in an open necked shirt by John Cooper Clarke
Wondrous word play and imagery from the original ‘punk poet’.
Do no harm by Henry Marsh
Memoirs of one of the country’s top neurosurgeons.
Walking away: further travels with a troubadour on the South West Coast Path by Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain’s south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finish. Available to download as an eBook.
Sane new world: taming the mind by Ruby Wax
Comedian, writer and mental health campaigner shows us why and how our minds can send us mad and how we can rewire our thinking through easily learned techniques to calm ourselves in a frenetic world.