Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers.

For the 'serious traveller', one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our author's purpose, then, 'is not literary criticism or biography', but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul's own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.

His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

In 1990, V. S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?

In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

'An outstanding debut' CHERIE JONES, author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House

'Vivid and authentic' LEONE ROSS, author of This One Sky Day

'Cacophonic, alive and heartbreaking' KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE, author of The Mercies

As featured on BBC's Cultural Frontline podcast

At eighteen years old, Dinah gave away her baby son to the rich couple she worked for before they left Jamaica. They never returned. She never forgot him.

Eighteen years later, a young man comes from the US to Kingston. From the moment she sees him, Dinah never doubts - this is her son.

What happens next will make everyone question what they know and where they belong.

A powerful story of belonging, identity and inheritance, What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You brings together a blazing chorus of voices to evoke Jamaica's ghetto, dance halls, criminal underworld and corrupt politics, at the beating heart of which is a mother's unshakeable love for her son.

'Delicate but gut-wrenching' JOSIE D'ARBY, broadcaster

'Irresistible' CURDELLA FORBES, author of A Tall History of Sugar

'Arresting' LISA ALLEN-AGOSTINI, author of The Bread the Devil Knead

'Wonderful' JACOB ROSS, author of The Bone Readers

'Exciting' YEWANDE OMOTOSO, author of An Unusual Grief

'Thrilling' CELESTE MOHAMMED, author of Pleasantview

The second book in the trilogy which began with the Booker prize-winning The Famished Road.

'A love story and an account of the conflict between the parties of the Rich and Poor... Okri's voice is all his own' Independent

Having outwitted death, Azaro, the spirit child, remains in the land of the Living. Oppression and violence continue to plague the city, and while political factions battle, bar owner Madame Koto backs the 'Party of the Rich' with magical, bewitching force. But for Azaro, his adventure is tied up with his parents, and so his story takes on yet another heroic adventure to save them both from the forces of the world.

'Ben Okri writes beautifully...a triumph of inspiration over the everyday' The Times

A stolen sister. A daughter determined to uncover the truth.

'I was gripped, moved and utterly in thrall to this deeply emotional and compelling tale' Kate Furnivall

Belle Hatton has embarked upon an exciting new life far from home: a glamorous job as a nightclub singer in 1930s Burma, with a host of sophisticated new friends and admirers. But Belle is haunted by a mystery from the past - a 25 year old newspaper clipping found in her parents' belongings after their death, saying that the Hattons were leaving Rangoon after the disappearance of their baby daughter, Elvira.

Belle is desperate to find out what happened to the sister she never knew she had - but when she starts asking questions, she is confronted with unsettling rumours, malicious gossip, and outright threats. Oliver, an attractive, easy-going American journalist, promises to help her, but an anonymous note tells her not to trust those closest to her. . .

Belle survives riots, intruders, and bomb attacks - but nothing will stop her in her mission to uncover the truth. Can she trust her growing feelings for Oliver? Is her sister really dead? And could there be a chance Belle might find her?

'A moving and complex story, beautifully told' Isabel Wolff

'Dinah Jefferies has a knack of getting under the skin of her exotic locations and this story about loss and love, set in sultry Burma during the troubled 1930s, is no exception' Kate Riordan

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.

In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child Michael Palin