Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

Impeccably researched and seductively readabletells the story of Sam Sharpes revolution manqué, and the subsequent abolition of slavery in Jamaica, in a way thats acutely relevant to the racial unrest of our own time. Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls Rising

The final uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica started as a peaceful labor strike a few days shy of Christmas in 1831. A harsh crackdown by white militias quickly sparked a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. The rebels lost their daring bid for freedom, but their headline-grabbing defiance triggered a decisive turn against slavery.

Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of these transformative events. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner uses diaries, letters, and colonial records to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and briefly tasted liberty. He brings to life the rebellions enigmatic leader, the preacher Samuel Sharpe, and shows how his fiery resistance turned the tide of opinion in London and hastened the end of slavery in the British Empire.

Zoellners vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a varied gallery of participantsThe revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica, but it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself. Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

Its high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought. Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains

Winner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018.

In a Free State tells the story first of an Indian servant in Washington, who becomes an American citizen but feels he has ceased to be a part of the flow. Then of a disturbed Asian West Indian in London who, in jail for murder, has never really known where he is. Then the central novel moves to Africa, to a fictional country somewhere like Uganda or Rwanda.

The novel's central characters once found Africa liberating, but now it has gone sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make the long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive  the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage  we know everything about the English characters, the African country and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it. This is one of V. S. Naipauls greatest novels, hard but full of pity.

This is a story about displacement, the yearning for the good place in someone elses land and the attendant heartache.

A hugely influential philosophical work of prose poetry, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is an inspirational, allegorical guide to living

First published in the 1920's, The Prophet is perhaps the most famous work of religious fiction of the twentieth century, and has sold millions of copies in more than twenty languages. Gibran's Prophet speaks of many things central to daily life: love, marriage, death, beauty, passion, eating, work and play. The spiritual message he imparts, of finding divinity through love, blends eastern mysticism, religious faith and philosophy with simple advice. The Prophet became the bible of 1960s culture and was credited with founding the New Age movement, yet it still continues to inspire people around the world today. This edition is illustrated with Gibran's famous visionary paintings.

'His work goes on from generation to generation'
Daily Mail

'To read it was to transcend ordinary levels of perception, to become aware ... of a more intense level of being'
Independent

Carol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they have inspired - Paul Muldoon, Vickie Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic works by Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti - the result is a collection of voices that speak to one another across the centuries.

Teasing, subverting, arguing, echoing and - ultimately - illuminating, Answering Back is a vibrant, fascinating and timeless anthology, compiled by one of the nation's favourite poets.

'Intriguing . . . Entertaining and stimulating' Good Book Guide

'A starry game of call and answer across poetic generations' FT Magazine

SHORLISTED FOR THE DIVERSE BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE DIVERSE BOOK AWARDS

'Dazzling' Cosmopolitan
'I deeply admire This One Sky Day - and also, not so secretly, bitterly envy it...' MARLON JAMES
'Gorgeous' Financial Times
'Haunting' Independent
'Wonderfully fearless' New Statesman
'Stunning' KEI MILLER

Dawn breaks across the archipelago of Popisho. The world is stirring awake again, each resident with their own list of things to do:

A wedding feast to conjure and cook
An infidelity to investigate
A lost soul to set free

As the sun rises two star-crossed lovers try to find their way back to one another across this single day. When night falls, all have been given a gift, and many are no longer the same.

The sky is pink, and some wonder if it will ever be blue again.

What readers are saying
'Brimming with and life and love and just absolutely gorgeous writing. a one-of-a-kind novel.'

'I couldn't put it down and I will be recommending it to everyone.'

'A story luxuriously and confidently told, which is sumptuous from sentence to sentence. There is both literal and literary magic here.'

'This book is bursting at the seams with beauty! Magic! Love! Imagination! It is a burst of colour and flame.'

'It's hard to explain, but if you love getting lost in a story, this could be one for you.'

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

RECIPIENT OF THE WOMENS PRIZE OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2009
WINNER OF THE ORANGE YOUTH PANEL AWARD 2009
FINALIST FOR THE HURSTON WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD 2010

'A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic.' Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World . . .

In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people - Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire that is as accessible and readable as it is intelligent and insightful. Blonde Roots brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today.

'A bold and brilliant game of counterfactual history. Evaristo keep[s] her wit and anger at a spicy simmer throughout' Daily Telegraph

'So human and real. Re-imagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence' Guardian

'A brilliant satire whose flashes of comedy make the underlying tragedy all the more poignant' Scotland on Sunday