Literary Figures

From one of India's finest writers, thinkers and commentators, a memoir of a love affair with cricket. As a fan, player, writer, scholar, controversialist and administrator, Ram Guha has spent a life with cricket. In this book, Guha...

'You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.'Such were the words of the master detective Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson, as he noted how his friend failed to implement Holmes's techniques. In How to Think Like Sherlock you will learn how to...

A stunningly beautiful selection of poetry by W. G. Sebald.'The greatest writer of our time' Peter CareyAcross the Land and the Water brings together poems from throughout W. G. Sebald's life as well as additional works found after his death. Arranged...

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador BooksYou think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending.From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour...

Naomi Mitchison was born towards the end of the nineteenth century and grew into an era of change, political, social and sexual. All of these she embraced and influenced in the course of her long life. She became a major novelist of the 20th century with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780809015481Author Ernest JonesFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Farrar, Straus and GirouxPublisher Farrar, Straus and GirouxWeight(grams)...

In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 - known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' - remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not...

The first comprehensive biography of this undervalued writer, who was considered 'far and away the best living woman poet' in her day.Andrew Motion's Spectator Book of the Year.'One of the many achievements of This Rare Spirit is its rejection of that...

Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Langston Hughes ("The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Let America Be America Again") were collaborators, literary gadflies and close companions. They travelled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through...

In 1983 de Beauvoir published Sartre's letters, maintaining that her own to him had been lost. They were found by de Beauvoir's adopted daughter, and published to a storm of controversy in France. Tracing the emotional and triangular complications of her...

A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Winner of the Rubery Book Award 2020 (Non Fiction) Edith Nesbit is considered the inventor of the children's adventure story and her brilliant children's books influenced bestselling authors including C.S...

In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, which brings the poet to the age of forty, T.S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his American forebears, he was received into the Church of...

An intimate portrait of two pivotal Restoration figures during one of the most dramatic periods of English history Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn are two of the most celebrated English diarists. They were also extraordinary men and close friends. This...

'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs . . .'So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding-school...

Author of the first gothic novel and son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, Horace Walpole had wide-ranging interests that included literature, politics, world affairs, collecting, antiquities, and architecture, and to his numerous...

The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of Master and Margarita - now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature - was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression...

A powerful biography of the internationally renowned writer who created one of the most enduring characters in children's literature, Pippi Longstocking"[An] Insightful, elegantly written biography of the beloved author of the Pippi Longstocking tales, a...

John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion explores the life of one of the most significant figures of the English Renaissance. The book not only provides an overview of Donne's life and work, but connects his writing and thinking to the ideas, institutions...

Between 1990 and 1994, Colm Toibin made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. His journey led him into close contact with people from all walks of life, from priests to politicians, from the intellectually open to the spiritually bigoted. He then...

At the age of seventeen, Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time, and has read it again every five years since, each time interpreting and discovering it anew. In The Road to Middlemarch she writes passionately about her relationship to this...

Down and Out in Paris and London was George Orwell's first published book. It is at once a very personal account, and a vivid expose of hard lives weighed down by poverty in France and England between the wars.Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a...

John Cheever's journals reveal the inner life of this remarkable writer and the contradictions that drove him. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he hated himself for his drinking, but for...

Victor Hugo (1802-85) is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and he was also elected to both houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the...

Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and...

The second volume of Michel Leiris's hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of the...

'A revelation' KATY HESSEL'Brilliant' OBSERVEROver one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Leila Slimani grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude. In a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through...

The story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in Sheerness, Kent in the 1970s. In 1974, a strange man called "Charles" arrived in the small town of Sheerness on the Isle of...

During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780061665431Author Professor Gay TaleseFormat PaperbackPage Count 608Imprint HarperCollins PublishersPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams)...

This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814255193Author David ShieldsFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams)...

At the time of his death Eric Hobsbawm was the most famous historian in the world. He not only wrote history was also witness to it, from the Communist uprising in Europe to revolution in Cuba where he was Che Guevara's interpreter. He was instrumental...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781683967590Author Leonie BischoffFormat HardbackPage Count 200Imprint FantagraphicsPublisher Fantagraphics

On 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fiancee and...

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People's Republic, the Second Polish Republic,...

A beautiful collection of poems to nourish, inspire and change the women who read them.This transformative collection of poems by female poets through the ages sing to us across the centuries. These poems span the worlds of desire, love and friendship,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781800750524Author Rob DoyleFormat HardbackPage Count 256Imprint Swift PressPublisher Swift Press

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsShort-listed for Edgar Award Nominee 2021.Book InformationISBN 9781641292696Author Jacqueline WinspearFormat HardbackPage Count 312Imprint Soho PressPublisher Soho Press

Reinaldo Arenas was born to a poverty-stricken family in rural Cuba. By the time of his death in New York four decades later, he had become one of Cuba's most important poets, an outspoken critic of Castro's regime and one of the leading gay voices of...

From the author of the ever-popular Flashman novels, a collection of film-world reminiscences and trenchant thoughts on Cool Britannia, New Labour and other abominations. George MacDonald Fraser has been a newspaperman, soldier, novelist...