The international bestselling classic from the author of Animal Farm . Winston Smith rewrites history. It''s his job. Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, he helps the Party, and the omnipresent Big Brother, control the people of Oceania. Winston knows what a good citizen of Oceania must do: show his devotion for Big Brother and the Party; abstain from all vices; and, most importantly, possess no critical thoughts of their own. The new notebook he''s begun to write in is definitely against the rules - in fact, the Thought Police could arrest him simply for having it. Yet, as Winston begins to write his own history, a seed of rebellion begins to grow in his heart - one that could have devastating consequences. In George Orwell''s final and most well-known novel, he explores a dystopian future in which a totalitarian government controls the actions, thoughts and even emotions of its citizens, exercising power through control of language and history. Its lasting popularity is testament to Orwell''s powerful prose, and is a passionate political warning for today
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''She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.''
One hot summer''s day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy flowers for the party she is to host in her London home. Over the course of the day, she faces the ghosts of her past, as an unexpected visitor forces her to revisit the memories of her youth. Meanwhile, shell shocked war veteran Septimus Warren-Smith descends into anguish, and Mrs Dalloway is confronted with the fragility of life.
Revolutionary in form, Mrs Dalloway was one of Woolf''s greatest achievements, and a novel that has continued to inspire readers and writers to this day.
Few literary masterpieces cast quite as awesome a shadow as Herman Melville''s Moby Dick. Captain Ahab''s quest for the white whale is a timeless epic - a thrilling tale of vengeance and obsession, and a searing parable about humanity lost in a universe of moral ambiguity.
Inspired by true events, Moby Dick is a work of astonishing psychological depth. It is perhaps the greatest sea story ever told and one of the great classics of literature.
''Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell''s heart I stab at thee; for hate''s sake I spit my last breath at thee...''
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"In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back . . . You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked - those pale chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!"
An English scientist regales his dinner guests with the tale of his travels to the year 802,701, where he discovers that the human race has evolved into two distinct societies. The Eloi, elegant and peaceful, yet lacking spirit, are terrorised by the sinister, light-fearing Morlocks, who live underground, surrounded by industry. And when his time machine mysteriously vanishes, the scientist must descend to the realm of the Morlocks in order to find his only hope of escape . . .
H. G. Wells is considered a founding father of modern science fiction, coining the term 'time machine' and popularising the idea of time travel in literature.
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Brookfield wouldn't be the same without you, and they know it. We all know it. You can stay here till you're a hundred if you feel like it
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indeed, it's our hope that you will.
Sitting in his chair by the fire on a dark autumn afternoon, a beloved schoolmaster reflects on a long life well lived. Now in old age, Mr. Chipping, or 'Chips' as he's affectionately known by his students, has watched the nineteenth century sail into the twentieth, known love, friendship and war, and felt the lasting wounds of heartbreak and loss.
An immediate bestseller upon publication in 1934, James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips is the touching tale of one man's eventful life and the quiet, meaningful ways he shaped the lives of those around him. It has been adapted for film twice, and today continues to be a poignant and comforting classic for readers old and new.
How can you forge your own path in times of war, uncertainty and hardship? Meg longs for marriage; Amy wants to be a painter; Beth is content to stay at home; while Jo wants adventure and a life without limits. Four decidedly different sisters, growing up during the American Civil War, each facing their own unique challenge. Little Women tells the story of the March sisters. Through parties, travel, illness, arguments, dinners, love affairs and ice skating escapades, we follow these unforgettable women as they come of age. First published over 150 years ago, Little Women is a quintessential American classic has become a stage and screen favourite ever since, capturing the hearts of millions of readers across the world.
''A wry, rollicking, and provocative history'' Michael Taylor, author of The Interest
''A thought-provoking analysis of Africa''s relationship with economic imperialism'' Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It''s A Continent
We need to think differently about African economics.
For centuries, Westerners have tried to ''fix'' African economies. From the abolition of slavery onwards, missionaries, philanthropists, development economists and NGOs have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Their experiments have invariably gone awry, to the great surprise of all involved.
In this short, bold story of Western economic thought about Africa, historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided premise: that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa''s own traditions of economic thought, Europeans and Americans assumed a set of universal economic laws that they thought could be applied anywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women''s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting.
The West does not know better than African nations how an economy should be run. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance to African knowledge.
''Cheerfully provocative ... sparkles with some illuminating moments''
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In 1936, George Orwell volunteered as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia, first published just before the outbreak of World War II, Orwell documents the chaos and bloodshed of that moment in history and the voices of those who fought against rising fascism.
His experience of the civil war would spark a significant change in his own political views, which readers today will recognise in much of his later literary work; a rage against the threat of totalitarianism and control.
'Unquestionably one of the greatest literary achievements of the 21st century' Nick Hornby
From the author of Empire of Pain - a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.
One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of this terrible crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades.
In this powerful, scrupulously reported book, Patrick Radden Keefe offers not just a forensic account of a brutal crime but a vivid portrait of the world in which it happened. The tragedy of an entire country is captured in the spellbinding narrative of a handful of characters, presented in lyrical and unforgettable detail.
A poem by Seamus Heaney inspires the title: 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing'. By defying the culture of silence, Keefe illuminates how a close-knit society fractured; how people chose sides in a conflict and turned to violence; and how, when the shooting stopped, some ex-combatants came to look back in horror at the atrocities they had committed, while others continue to advocate violence even today.
Say Nothing deftly weaves the stories of Jean McConville and her family with those of Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA as a front-line soldier, who bombed the Old Bailey when barely out of her teens; Gerry Adams, who helped bring an end to the fighting, but denied his own IRA past; Brendan Hughes, a fearsome IRA commander who turned on Adams after the peace process and broke the IRA's code of silence; and other indelible figures. By capturing the intrigue, the drama and the profound human cost of the Troubles, the book presents a searing chronicle of the lengths that people are willing to go to in pursuit of a political ideal, and the ways in which societies mend - or don't - in the aftermath of a long and bloody conflict.
An electric, searing memoir by the original Riot Grrrl and legendary frontwoman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre Kathleen Hanna''s rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 1980s, ''90s, and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today their gutsy, radical lyrics of anthems like ''Rebel Girl'' and ''Double Dare Ya'' are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?
In Rebel Girl, Hanna''s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home, to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a ''girl band'', especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a band took limitless amounts of grit and bravery.
But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her - including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett - and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own.
Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity.
In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful - and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.
Entitled is the first joint biography of Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson by renowned royal biographer and literary agent, Andrew Lownie.
Packed full of extraordinary revelations, Entitled reveals the extent to which Andrew and Fergie''s lives are still deeply entwined. Drawing on four years of research, numerous FOI requests and interviews with over a hundred people who have never spoken before, Andrew Lownie traces the lives of the late Queen''s second son and his ex-wife through their childhoods, courtship, marriage, divorce, careers and royal and charitable activities.
Investigating the reality of their relationship, it assesses Andrew''s Falklands record, his business dealings and reveals new details of how the couple have been able to financially sustain their extravagant lifestyles. It also delves deeper into links with Jeffrey Epstein, which began earlier, continued longer and were much more frequent than reported.
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My Antonia is Willa Cather's masterpiece about 19th-century Nebraskan pioneers.
My Antonia depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on the tall-grass prairie of the American midwest, with its beautiful yet terrifying landscape, rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans, and communities who share life's joys and sorrows.
Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Shimerda, whose family settle in Nebraska from Bohemia. Together they share childhoods spent in a new world. Jim leaves the prairie for college and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family and productive farm. Her story is that of the land itself, a moving portrait of endurance and strength.
From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale of a father and son''s transformative journey in reading - and reliving - Homer''s epic masterpiece.
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enrol in the undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey that his son Daniel teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician''s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his ''one last chance'' to learn about the great literature he''d neglected in his youth - and, even more, a final opportunity to understand his son. But through the sometimes-uncomfortable months that follow, as the two men explore Homer''s great work together - first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son''s interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus'' legendary voyages - it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: for Jay''s responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last. As this intricately woven memoir builds to its wrenching climax, Mendelsohn''s narrative comes to echo The Odyssey itself, with its timeless themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the pleasures of travel and the meaning of home.
Rich with literary and emotional insight, An Odyssey is a renowned author-scholar''s most revelatory entwining yet of personal narrative and literary exploration.
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' "...Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." '
This selection of Edgar Allan Poe's poetical works includes some of his best-known pieces, including the triumphant, gleeful 'The Bells', the tragic ode 'Annabel Lee' and his famous gothic tour de force, 'The Raven'. Some present powerful, nightmarish images of the macabre and bizarre, while others have at their heart a profound sense of love, beauty and loss. All are linguistic masterpieces that demonstrate Poe's gift for marrying rhythm, form and meaning.
An American writer of primarily prose and literary criticism, Edgar Allen Poe never ceased writing poetry throughout his turbulent life, and is today regarded as a central figure of American literary romanticism. He died in 1849.
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"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. "
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
''Anyone interested in the future of autocracy should buy it'' Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Demoracy '' No Escape is what the world needs to read'' Nathan Law, Nobel Peace Prize nominee A devastating account of China''s genocide of the Uyghurs, by a leading Uyghur activist and Time #100 nominee Nury Turkel was born in a ''re-education'' camp in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He spent the first several months of his life in captivity with his mother, who was beaten and starved while pregnant with him, whilst his father served a penal sentence in an agricultural labour camp. Following this traumatic start - and not without a heavy dose of good fortune - he was later able to travel to the US for his undergraduate studies in 1995 and was granted asylum in the country in 1998 where, as a lawyer, he is now a tireless and renowned activist for the plight of his people.
Part memoir, part call-to-action, No Escape will be the first major book to tell the story of the Chinese government''s terrible oppression of the Uyghur people from the inside, detailing the labour camps, ethnic and religious oppression, forced sterilisation of women and the surveillance tech that have made Xinjiang - in the words of one Uyghur who managed to flee - ''a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known''.
Acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the algorithms developed for computers can be applied from finding your spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing your inbox to understanding the workings of memory. Where you have a dilemma, they have a rule, and each fascinating algorithm turns the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.
The Austen Family descends upon a fashionable Georgian seaside resort in Devonshire for a six-week holiday. Jane''s brother, Frank, is on leave from the Royal Navy, and dearly wishes to unite his sister with his friend Captain Peter Parker. But another holidaymaker, a handsome stranger, catches sight of Jane and is determined to make her acquaintance. This rival to Captain Parker is Samuel Rose: a lawyer, literary man and abolitionist. As the weeks pass, Jane''s relationship with both men brings about unexpected surprises. By the end of the summer, the course of her life will have changed forever.
Set against the backdrop of Austen''s family, the tensions of the war against France, and naval and colonial politics, SIX WEEKS BY THE SEA is the fascinating story of how the most famous romance writer of all time fell in love for the first time.
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION
Jung Chang''s Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation - the story of ''three daughters of China'': Jung, her mother and her grandmother and their lives during a century of revolution. Fly, Wild Swans is, quite simply, what happened next.
Jung Chang arrived in the UK in 1978 aged 26, part of a Chinese scholarship programme for study abroad. Finding herself in the London of punk, political protests and Ziggy Stardust, she felt as if she''d landed on the moon. She and her fellow students had all grown up in complete isolation from the west, living in fear as to what might happen if they broke any of the strict rules imposed upon them by their government. It was an invaluable opportunity but came at a cost of long-term separation from her mother and family in China.
As Jung began to adjust to life in the West, she warmed to the fashion scene, rebelled and thrived. Her studies took off and she became the first person from the People''s Republic of China to be awarded a doctorate from a British university.
Fly, Wild Swans is, in many ways, Jung''s love letter to her mother set against China''s development from the relative freedoms of the late-1970s and untrammelled capitalism of the 1990s to the current authoritarian repressive rule of Xi-Jinping. With vivid flashbacks to her family''s experience in communist China, the book offers an extraordinary account of Jung''s research into the genocidal regime of Mao Tse-Tung, the many fictions she uncovered and the political consequences of publishing her subsequent biography.
As Jung becomes a successful academic and writer in the West, Fly, Wild Swans demonstrates how much she relies on her mother still living in China and the painful years in which politics has prevented them meeting. Through the arc of their respective lives, she gives an immersive, deeply moving and unforgettable account of what it is like to live in a communist dictatorship and the threats modern China poses to the international world order. It is family history at its best.
The long-awaited memoir of legendary Lionel Richie
As a storyteller second to none, Lionel Richie is ready to tell it all. In this intimate, deeply candid memoir, Lionel revisits hilarious and harrowing events to inspire all who doubt themselves or feel their dreams don''t matter. Lionel chronicles lessons learned during his unlikely story of remarkable success-his dramatic transformation from painfully shy, ''tragically'' late bloomer to world-class entertainer and composer of love songs that have played as the soundtrack of our lives.
Funny, warm and riveting, Lionel recalls his childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he grew up on its university campus during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement, raucous adventures as a member of The Commodores, coming-of-age in late 1960s Harlem, culture shock playing gigs on the French Riviera, the big break of being signed to Motown, his meteoric solo career that included an Olympics performance witnessed by two billion around the globe, all the way through to writing and recording ''We Are the World'' and his current multi-generational fame as a judge on American Idol. Even with its turbulence, loss, and near-calamity, Lionel''s journey takes us on a thrill ride and delivers a memoir for the ages-reminding us of the power of love to elevate our own lives and our world.
Lionel Richie''s memoir includes three eight-page photo inserts.
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We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and somehow never can.
John Flory, a white timber merchant in 1920s Burma, has unorthodox views. To him, the Burmese culture and people should be appreciated as things of beauty and worth. To the other white members of the European club of which he is member, these views are dangerous, undermining the foundation of British colonial rule.
Flory is drawn into a deadly rivalry when he befriends Veraswami, an Indian doctor, who is under the scrutiny of a corrupt magistrate. Flory defies the convention of imperial bigotry in Burma by offering to help his new friend, but the consequences to him, and Elizabeth Lackersteen, the woman he loves, will be explosive.
Based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma, Burmese Days was Orwell''s first novel, and sparked controversy for its scathing portrayal of colonial society.
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
Tracking the mind''s fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to the first evolved nervous systems in ancient relatives of jellyfish, he explores the incredible evolutionary journey of the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous molluscs who would later abandon their shells to rise above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so - a journey completely independent from the route that mammals and birds would later take.
But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually ''think for themselves''? By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind - and on our own.
